Should Cindarella apply for research funding?

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Over on her excellent blog, patter, Pat Thomson shares what she’s learned about applying for research funding from her last five years directing a research development centre for the Arts and Social Sciences.  She gives a great summary of the right and wrong ways to respond to a call for bids.

For researchers who already work on this agenda, this kind of call is a god send… The funding shoe fits.

[…]

The problem comes when a researcher or research team sees the call and decides to try to make their research fit into it… – they simply try to shoehorn themselves and their work into the call.

Read the whole post: beware the shoehorn – #researchfunding

What are your experiences of responding to a call for bids?  Have you been successful in obtaining funding?  Share your thoughts below.

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.

Welcome

Welcome to the University of Birmingham Postgraduate Researcher Development blog.  Catchy title, right?!

Unsurprisingly, then, the purpose of this blog is to look at topics related to personal and professional development for postgraduate researchers at the University of Birmingham.  Topics will cover the full range contained within Vitae‘s Researcher Development Framework, and each post will hopefully get you thinking about the topic and point you in the direction of further resources to support your development.