A project by: Marcus Lancashire
We would like to raise £600 to help fund a day long Postgraduate Symposium on March 11th. Your donations would help fund Poster and abstract book printing, lunch for the attendees and prizes for the best presentations.
Hello my name is Marcus and I’m the Postgraduate Mentor at Grey. I’m working with Peter Swift and Tom Allen to bring a full day Postgraduate Symposium.
Currently, Grey MCR and the wider postgraduate community run a postgraduate seminar in the evening at least once a term so students can give a 15-minute presentation on their work or a topic that interests them. These give postgrads the chance to practice their public speaking skills, an important skill when applying for jobs and one that is often overlooked in education. It also gives people the opportunity to find out more about their peers’ work and interests and ask them questions. The purpose of this campaign is to raise money to run a day-long postgraduate symposium on Saturday the 11th of March. This will make the event more professional, giving more people the opportunity to present and allowing students to give poster presentations. In order to make this event more enjoyable for the participants and audience, we would like to raise some money to print posters and abstract books for the event, provide lunch for the attendees, and award prizes for the best presentations. Your contributions will help make this event as rewarding as possible for those taking part.
Me and Peter Swift decided to run this campaign to help fund this Symposium and provide the best experience for those taking part that we can. In particular, we want to offer students the chance to present posters in addition to giving normal presentations, as a lot of postgraduate degrees and future careers in research require you to present posters and this is good practice for when students will have to present them in a more formal setting. However, posters are expensive to print and it would be great if we could cover the cost of printing these, we could encourage more people to present posters. In addition, providing abstract books and lunch would make the event more professional and convince more livers out to attend the event, a common problem we have encountered when running the evening seminars. Finally, giving prizes for the best presentations will help to encourage people to present and give the best presenters a reward for all of the hard work they have put in to making their presentations. While we could still run the event without the funding, we may be unable to cover the printing costs for posters and abstract books, and be unable to provide lunch and prizes, which would diminish the value of the event to those attending or taking part.
Why is a day long seminar better?
By running a day long seminar, we can have a wider range of presenters and topics. We will also have the time to run poster presentations, something we don’t normally run at the evening seminars. It will also provide a more professional environment for the speakers.
What happens if you raise over £600?
If we exceed our goal, extra money will be used to fund additional prizes and posters, or be put towards running a similar event next year.
What will the topics of the symposium be?
Presentations are always on a wide range of topics, including a mixture of students’ research and topics that interest them. A few examples of previous presentation topics are: dark matter, the evolution of distance running in humans, fluorine chemistry, the relationship between chairs and comfort, weird fiction and prehistoric carnivores.
Please contribute towards the Grey Postgraduate Symposium and help to make it as great an event as we can possibly run. Through your donations, we can run a fantastic event that will benefit the lives of our postgraduate students for years to come. If you can’t donate, please share this project with everyone you can to help spread the word. Thank you for any help you can provide!