There’s no “I” in TEAM

This week, PGRs from across the University are participating in the Postgraduate Enterprise Summer School (PESS).

Participants will work together in small teams to solve a real life strategy challenge being faced by an influential local organisation.

PESS is designed to develop PGRs’ enterprise and transferable skills, and in particular to give PGRs the invaluable opportunity to develop team working skills.  You will often be required to work in teams in careers both in and outside academia.

Teams are formed when a group of people get together with a shared goal.  One feature of effective teams is each member of the group/team understanding their own strengths and weaknesses, and appreciating the strengths and weaknesses of other members of the team.  One of the most common models used for this is the Belbin Team Roles.  Belbin’s original research demonstrated that successful teams had a balance between eight (later nine) “team roles” (or clusters of behaviour in a team).

Write often!

This week, it’s the University Graduate School Writing Summer School.  There are a lot of exciting workshops planned, covering wide-ranging topics on writing from mapping academic writing, writing for publication, reviewing the literature and doctoral writing groups to editing and proof-reading.  For full details, enrol on the Canvas module.

Writing for research is such a huge topic that it can’t be covered in its entirety in a 2-day summer school, so a blog post is definitely not up to the job.  But in the spirit of the writing summer school, I wanted to share with you my “top tip” for writing.  It’s not particularly original, and has been encapsulated in a thousand clichés, but here it is:

Write often.

Mentoring: what does it add?

Mentoring uses a conversational approach to help an individual clarify their goals and/or improve their self-awareness, skills or knowledge.

From May to July this year, Vitae has a “Focus on” mentoring and coaching for researchers.  They say:

Interviews with research and academic leaders revealed having a mentor to be one of the most important forms of support to prepare early career researchers for the challenges of research independence and leadership.