Officially Unconferenced

It's been exceedingly busy at my increasingly be-post-it-noted desk recently, which is my poor excuse for not posting much on here lately. However, there was a particularly unusual event in my schedule last Friday which took me, if not far from my desk, certainly far from my own little world of adverbs and trees.

In my library trainee days, I was intrigued by the range of events held within the profession to promote the sharing of ideas and networking in general. As well as traditional-style conferences with plenary speakers and open competition for speakers through abstract submission, the UK library world was also big on TeachMeets and Unconferences. In Unconferences, the agenda is set by the participants on the day, who bring along ideas of topics to discuss and sessions to run. This means that the topics discussed are those which the participants on the day really care about - so it seemed like a good way to get people with similar interests in the same place, talking and leading the conversation in the directions most interesting and important to the people involved.

So, as a result of a GSA forum and a proposal made over mince pies and mulled wine, I found myself along with Glyn (a compsci), Dima and Lucinda (both linguists) organising an Unconference for PhD students at York last Friday (7th June). You wouldn't think that such an event would require much organising, but after several meetings and plannings and a successful mini dry-run, we met up at the Berrick Saul hoping that other PhD students would come.

And come some did! Around 25 people turned up in the morning, with some leaving and some joining us after lunch, representing 12 departments and 14 nationalities*. This turned out to be a good sized group which generated conversation and debate whilst maintaining a safe and supportive environment.

As you'd imagine, the first task of the day was to create a programme. Lots of people provided lots of ideas, with the occasional overlap pointing us towards topics of common interest.

A fairly neon-bright programme

We started out with two parallel sessions on the supervisor-supervisee relationship and stress in academic life. A theme started which continued throughout the day - many of us saw the day as an opportunity to check that our experience was, if not 'normal', then at least tallying with others. This was certainly the case in the stress session, in which concerns about time management, deadlines, and new experience were seen to be shared across the departments. In contrast, we found that supervisor-supervisee meetings ranged from once a week to a couple of hours a term, with joint supervisors, external supervisors and supervisors across departments all featuring. Fortunately, in this session we were joined by Russ from the Research Development Team (RDT), who could help us out with his superior knowledge of the university regulations, not to mention years of working in universities and dealing with academics!

After refuelling with coffee and cake, Russ talked to the whole group about how the university supports researchers - however, it was fascinating to see how the focus of the session twisted and turned with the interests of the group. The discussion turned from supporting us as research students to support for postgraduates who teach (PGWTs), particularly with reference to all the different cultures that occur in universities. A discussion about whether PGWTs should be trained in and encouraged to teach in the 'British' style was countered with the view that we could all learn from different teaching cultures - unsurprisingly, given the multinational nature of the participant pool, the latter view was somewhat more popular! Along the same lines, it was noted that the undergraduate body that we teach is a diverse group, and it is important to be aware of different cultures when teaching - the example of the wide variation in essay writing styles between different language cultures was brought up (for more, see my post from April here). And what was considered to be a good way to become more sensitive to cultural differences? Taking every opportunity to spend time in universities abroad, either through the ERASMUS scheme, WUN network or university- and funding-specific openings was pushed and promoted by many, not only for cultural reasons but also to develop language skills and to take the chance to present and work with academics overseas.

What a productive Unconference looks like (note the coffee and cake at the side - crucial!)

Lunch gave us chance to chat (even) more informally, before a session of experience-sharing. On the topic of the confirmation process, most of the stories were, fortunately, pretty positive, so if we put in the work, we should get the results out. In theory. The thought of different stages in a PhD led us to thinking about how long we're expected to take to finish, how we plan to fund this time and whether part-time PhDs are a viable option once you're already started. Some useful ideas for funding, in particular looking to small societies and charities, were mooted, as well as the reassurance (?!) that only 1 in 20 students at York (5%!) finish their PhD within the 'normal' 3 years, with another 70% taking the next three months to submit. The pressure from HEFCE to finish within 3 years is apparently heavy on the university, though a few more months could well result in a stronger PhD. As a friend working at UniversitiesUK pointed out to me, a push for 4 year funding is currently on, which would ensure that more people are in the financial position to take more time both to enhance their research and their CVs in other ways through teaching, research assistantships and publishing more widely. We all agreed that we hope this comes into force for researchers coming after us.

Our final session tackled a thorny issue which we'd been skirting around, and frankly talking about anything else to avoid...the sequipedalian topic of procrastination. Funnily enough we all do it, in a manner of different ways, and our main concern was learning how to stop! Glyn came up with a particularly good solution - rather than writing a long to-do list of jobs without any times, attach a certain amount of time to each task, even if's only 5 minutes. That way, you're on a winner if you get a flash of inspiration and spend an hour on something, and if not, you've at least done 5 minutes on something you needed to attend to. Cashback. We then got very productive in tackling a specific question from Carolyn, a PhD student in History. She basically wanted to know where she could look for documents about couriering in the 18th century other than in government records, which she said weren't informative enough about day-to-day trading (which I can fully believe!) There were many forthcoming ideas from students both in the Arts and Humanities and in other disciplines, which hopefully will bear fruit for Carolyn in the future. Suggestions included the Merchant Adventurers Guilds and the archives of large longstanding companies, in case you were having a similar problem, dear reader!

And so, in a blaze of cake and coffee, the first York PhD Unconference was over. The feedback so far suggests that the participants enjoyed themselves and did get something out of the day - and enough people said that they would be interested in hearing about future events that we might hold to suggest there many be more Unconferences or Unconference-style sessions in York's future! If you're interested, keep an eye out on the brand-spanking-new York PhD Network web page - and as far as this one went, thanks so much to the PhD Network, the GSA Community Fund and the RDT for supporting us, not to mention all the people who actually took part.

I'm massively relieved that the day went well and really pleased to have been part of the event, not to mention having had the opportunity to work with 3 cracking co-organisers and a lot of lovely participants. If you're interested, you can find live-tweeting of the day under the hashtag #phdunconf from @Nufanglenesse, @CarolynInYork and a certain @DiscipulaEbor. Let us know what you think!


*As far I can remember, we welcomed students from English Literature, Psychology, History, Electronics, History of Art, Physics, Biology, Linguistics, Women's Studies, Social Policy, Computer Science and Law, representing Taiwan, Sweden, Hong Kong, South Africa, Singapore, Oman, Jordan, USA, Nigeria, Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and the UK. Sorry if I've missed anyone out!