February 22, 2022, by Lisa Chin
Building an inclusive, supportive postgraduate research environment
Our town hall
Our town hall events are proving to be a highly valued forum to discuss how we work together to grow and develop our plans and strategies amidst the ongoing pandemic.
The way forward
It was a good start to our event calendar this year with a town hall featuring positive updates and significant milestones in our evolving role beyond supporting postgraduate research training and development. Almost 50 of our postgraduate students joined us through both online platform and face-to-face delivery on campus.
In this town hall, held on Friday 18 February 2022, we gave an update bringing together a number of new developments following on our structural change and administrative reform. With this reform, we are elevating our role with the aim to better support the postgraduate research progression, administration and management. We are also improving the foundations for our performance, with ambitious endeavours in place to deliver our renewed commitment and realising our full potential as a community for all our postgraduates and researchers.
In our effort to be even more explicit and relevant in our communications and responses, we also gave an update on the findings and targeted actions of our previous survey in understanding the issues affecting postgraduate research progression.
“We are now moving into a new era of postgraduate research community at the University,” said Professor Andy Chan, Interim Vice-Provost for Research and Knowledge Exchange. “We conducted a review of the Graduate School last year and the postgraduate research activities will now be gradually centralised under the purview of the Graduate School. The ultimate aim is to build a strong postgraduate research community with a solid representation of postgraduate voice across the communal and institutional levels.”
“We want to build, develop and nurture the postgraduate research community. And make it into a vibrant one-stop centre for our postgraduate students which supports interdisciplinary research and collaboration with strong rapport and mutual support,” said Dr Maniam Kaliannan, Associate Dean of the Graduate School.
In addition, we invited Manoharan Aaruththiran Thambippillai (fondly known as Mano) who gave a brief introduction about the Science and Engineering Postgraduate Student Council (SEPSC). SEPSC serves as the intermediary between postgraduate students and the Faculty of Science and Engineering (FOSE). The council primarily deals with progression and welfare matters of postgraduate research students at FOSE.
Apart from the key details of all-you-need-to-know about our new role and provision, the town hall also included a substantial agenda highlighting our upcoming training and development activities.
A stimulating town hall and your constructive responses
Our sincere thanks to all who supported our latest town hall where we were able to share with you our renewed commitment and strategy for postgraduate research excellence and held a Q&A to discuss issues and ideas. Questions and feedback were varied and stimulating. These input allowed us to create a substantial resource to draw upon as we plan ahead.
We are delighted the town hall was well attended and underlined our commitment to engage with you in delivering our strategy and building a vibrant and inclusive postgraduate research culture.
For those unable to attend, recording is accessible here.
For any queries or more information, contact us via email to graduateschool@nottingham.edu.my.
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