Group sessions

Am doing fairly regular ‘Careers Education’ sessions with PhD’s. I will have done 5 half day sessions in February. 1 on writing skills, 2 on assertiveness, 1 on PDP (personal development planning) 1 on Career planning.

At the moment about half the people who sign up, show up. and average atttendance is about 10. They seem to like the content mainly – there are always one or two who do not – and occasionally someone absolutely takes against it.

 

My method is to start with an icebreeaker introductions thing – nothing ‘creative’ just who they are and why are they here -  a sort of informal agenda setting. Then a bit of a lecture from me. I am moving more towards power point as its a good way of assembling diverse material and ensuring the structure is coherent and consistent for when I do repeat sessions.

At some point i will do soemthing practical – it may be a group exercises or presentatation of some kind – just to mix it up, stop them falling asleep and—– I guess I should say —- providing something for the kinetic learners.

There is sometimes an issue about integrating Humanities and Science students – though I think it is a good thing to do. One problem is that the Humanities people often come single and are outnumbered by the scientists. So getting the material right across disciplines  is a challenge.

I had this idea of getting careers colleagues involved so that they could have a go at delivering at least part of these sessions – but the staffing of this is difficult to achieve. And anyway, as soon as I identify likely colleagues they get moved on to different allocations in different colleges.

I would be keen to do more groups doing what we might call ‘Employability’ work. However I still do quite a lot of Guidance: 1-1 stuff. The trend here has been increased numbers of staff – postdocs, research assistants and administrators who come to see me.

RMA Research Student’s Conference

Kate and I did our talks to a group of about 30 Music PhDs. We followed up 3 King’s alumni who were taking different tracks: one a successful freelance composer, one an Arts Adminstrator for a small midlands music group and one a music academic.

I also attended a presentation on getting published with Vicki Cooper form Cambridge University Press on the history side, Sally Groves from Schott who published scores ( the ‘dots’ as she described it) and Christopher Wintle who had got invlolved in various publishing enterprises including setting up his own journal.

You realised that in all academic areas there are small specialist presses producing small runs of books for specialist markets. The new ‘print-on-demand’ technology meand that nothing now need never be out of print.

Vicki Cooper gave interesting advice on how to submit to a publisher like hers: A letter with an outline -possibly one paragraph per chapter; a chapter; the links to other books on the Publisher’s list. An assessment of the competition and an indication of how your work is differentiated from existing titles.  Vicki was interesting on the ‘products’. These are prodcuts that no-one needs – it would not matter if there were no more books on Mahler – nevertheless there is a steady and reliable demand for new works on composers- you just need to make the case about what is different about this book.