Category: Access and engagement

Three Minute Thesis Training sessions

The BGRS is pleased to announce the 2023 Birkbeck 3 Minute Thesis Competition, which will take place on Thursday 25 May from 6pm. Please mark this date in your diaries!

Birkbeck 3MT: Thursday 25 May 2023

Join a selection of Birkbeck PhD students as they compete to communicate their compelling thesis topics in just three minutes. This event is a fantastic opportunity to share and celebrate the interests and successes of PhD researchers from across the College and we invite all current Birkbeck PhD students to take part. The winner of the Birkbeck competition will be chosen by an expert panel of judges who will award:

  • £500 to the overall winner
  • £250 to the runner up
  • The audience will also have their say by picking a people’s choice winner who’ll win a special prize.

Training Sessions

As part of our support for the competition, a free programme of training sessions has been arranged. All potential 3MT competitors should attend these sessions. However, any or all of them are open to any doctoral researcher at Birkbeck who would like to gain skills in these areas:

What is it like to take part in 3MT?

Some of last year’s contenders have kindly shared what they gained from partaking.

Marie Houghton said that it ‘helped me to clarify exactly what I think the main message of my PhD is’ and that she ‘would definitely recommend taking part in the 3MT to any other PhD students.’

Hannah Reeves also said that the competition allowed her to ‘think about what matters most about my research – what do I care about, what do the community I’m working with care about, and what will this audience care about.’ She also described herself as nervous about the experience of being on stage but ‘the training helped to develop a mutually supportive atmosphere.’

Doyin Olorunfemi described how ‘the exercise of delivering a concise speech gives you clarity of mind as a researcher and clarifies your contribution.’ She would ‘highly recommend the competition.’

2023 Birkbeck 3-minute Thesis competition: Join the audience on Thursday 25 May

On Thursday 25 May, an expert panel of judges will decide which Birkbeck student has presented the most compelling, convincing, and concise summary of their thesis. There’s a lot at stake: not only the prestige of winning and the confidence that goes with it, but also –

  • £500 to the overall winner
  • £250 to the runner-up
The seven finalists from the 2022 3-minute thesis competition.

This is the headline BGRS event of the year

This is an event for all doctoral researchers and also for anyone interested in studying for a PhD. The event will be followed by a drinks reception and a chance to view entries to the BGRS Poster Competition.

During the reception prizes will be awarded to the 3 Minute Thesis Competition and the Poster Competition winners.

Register to attend

You can be part of the audience for this year’s Three Minute Thesis Competition.

Registration is now open for this event

As part of the audience you will have a vote to decide who is the People’s Choice. You can also join the Birkbeck postgraduate community in celebrating the diversity of research interests undertaken here, and raise a glass to that with a drinks reception after the winners have been announced.

If you would like to participate in this year’s competition please see this post for more information.

2022 Gwynne-Vaughan Medal

Deadline for entries extended to midday 14 October

The Birkbeck Graduate Research School (BGRS) aims to highlight the activities and successes of our research student community. We are pleased to announce the 2022 Gwynne-Vaughan Medal which is awarded to Birkbeck Doctoral students able to demonstrate the most notable contribution to their field while undertaking their research degree. The winners will be awarded a £250 prize, a formal certificate and a distinctive medal.

Eligibility

There are two categories for entry:

Current doctoral students

  • This category is open to all current part time and full time doctoral students enrolled at Birkbeck in academic year 2021/22
  • Any achievements you include must have taken place while you were registered as a Birkbeck Doctoral student up to 31 July 2022

Doctoral awardees

  • This category is open to any student who was enrolled in academic year 2019/20, 2020/21 and who has already been awarded their doctorate.
  • Any achievements you include must have taken place before your doctorate was awarded.

How to enter

Applicants must complete the following Gwynne-Vaughan Prize form which includes a statement from the student and a supporting statement from the supervisor.

Gwynne-Vaughan-prize-entry-form-and-guidanceDownload

Your completed form should be sent by email to graduateresearchschool@bbk.ac.uk

Deadline for entries

Friday 14 October, midday

Consideration of entries

All entries will be considered by the Research Student Sub-Committee (RSSC). The winners will be announced at the end of the Autumn term at a BGRS event that will be open to all research students at Birkbeck.

Birkbeck Open Research Symposium – call for lightning talks: Tuesday 1 November 1-5pm

Birkbeck Library is pleased to announce its first Birkbeck Open Research Symposium which this year is themed “Open for Climate Justice”, in line with International Open Access Week

The event features a keynote from Dr Caroline Edwards, and an afternoon of speakers and lightning talks, aimed at discussing the crossovers between open access and climate justice. This will be a hybrid event, with attendees both online and in person.

Themes could include but are not restricted to: open access, climate change, environmental and climate justice, environmental issues, climate activism, open climate data, international inequalities in climate action.

  • Talks will last 10 minutes each, with 5 minutes for questions to follow.  
  • Talks should include at least one slide as there may not be a camera for online participants to view the speaker. 
  • Talks can be delivered online (MS Teams) or in-person.

To participate, please submit a brief lightning talk outline with title and all author affiliation(s) and indicate your preference for an in-person or virtual format via the lightning talk submission form. The deadline is Friday 23 September. 

If you have any questions please contact David McElroy, d.mcelroy@bbk.ac.uk  

Submissions will be reviewed by a non-expert panel.  Submission form: Birkbeck Open Research Symposium – lightning talks submission form

This call is open to Birkbeck staff and postgraduate students, and non-Birkbeck colleagues in relevant areas.​​​​​​​

Three Minute Thesis Competition 2022

On Thursday 16 June, Birkbeck doctoral students took part in the 2022 Three Minute Thesis Competition. Meiyun Meng was the overall winner and received a £500 prize.
From left to right: Hannah Reeves (people’s choice); Carlo Palombo; Meiyun Meng (overall winner); Tom Nealon; Marie Houghton; Doyin Olorunfemi (runner up); Fengzhi Zhao.

2022 3MT Competition

On Thursday 16 June around 60 people attended the Birkbeck Three Minute Thesis Competition in the Clore Lecture Theatre. This was the fourth time the competition has been run at Birkbeck and the first time since 2019. The seven contestants displayed excellent presentational skills to convey their research in a concise and engaging manner, all managing to conclude with just a few seconds to spare. As always at Birkbeck, there was a wide range of subjects from how cross-sectional data can help cure cancer to the experience of flat sharing among the over-30s.

Winner: Meiyun Meng

After the judges had watched the candidates make their presentations, Meiyun Meng (Department of Geography) was chosen as the overall winner for her lively and engaging talk ‘Individualising life courses: Home-making of highly educated women in Shenzhen, China’. Meiyun is in her third year as a doctoral researcher in Geography.

Runner up: Doyin Olorunfemi

In addition to the overall winner, the judges awarded a £250 runner up prize to Doyin Olorunfemi (Department of Management) for her talk on ‘From Selling to Venturing’.

People’s Prize Winner

The overall winner and runner up were chosen by a panel of 3 Birkbeck experts but the audience also played a key role and were asked to use their votes to select a People’s Choice winner. This prize was awarded to Hannah Reeves (Department of Psychosocial Studies) for her talk ‘Crossbones Graveyard: remembering the dead, or breathing with them?‘

2022 3MT Talks

A list of all the competitors and their talks is provided below.

Doyin Olorunfemi ‘From Selling to Venturing’
Marie Houghton ‘Can home and happiness be found living in a house share after the age of 30?’
Hannah Reeves ‘Crossbones Graveyard: remembering the dead, or breathing with them?’
Meiyun Meng ‘Individualising life courses: Home-making of highly educated women in Shenzhen, China’
Fengzhi Zhao ‘A Tale of Two Cosmopolitan Shanghai(s)’
Tom Nealon ‘Inferring Time Varying Processes from Cross-Sectional Data’
Carlo Palombo ‘On the prohibition of nudity’

Two opportunities from The Gardens Trust

ENTRIES ARE INVITED FOR THE
17th ANNUAL MAVIS BATEY ESSAY PRIZE
Closing date for submissions 2nd Oct 2022

Our annual essay competition is intended to encourage vibrant, scholarly writing and new research, especially by those who have not yet had their work published. It is open to any student, worldwide, registered in a bona-fide university or institute of higher education, or who has recently graduated from such an institution. Submissions must be 5,000 to 6,000 words and the only
restriction on subject matter is that it must be of relevance to some aspect of garden history which could include explorations of little known gardens, or an aspect of botany, ecology, horticulture, archaeology, social history, architecture, design, art history or sculpture.


The prize includes an award of £500, free membership of The Gardens Trust for a year and consideration for publication in our peer-reviewed, scholarly journal Garden History. All previous winners have been accepted for publication, and often the best of the non-winning entries are invited to submit to the journal as well.


Submissions or any further enquiries should be sent to essayprize@thegardenstrust.org by 6pm
Sunday 2nd October 2022
For further details and entry forms see :http://thegardenstrust.org/research/prize/

12th New Research Symposium
Saturday 26th November 2022 – Call for papers

The New Research Symposium is an important feature of the Gardens Trust’s programme. It is open to all researchers and scholars, regardless of whether or not they are attached to an academic institution. Launched in 2011, the eleven previous symposia have hosted papers from fifty researchers. Many of these are members of County Gardens Trusts and a third are scholars from
overseas, all of whom we warmly welcome.

Researchers in all fields of activity are encouraged to submit a 200-word proposal for a paper whose subject is as yet unpublished. Any topic relating to Garden History will be considered, for example: explorations of little known gardens, or aspects of botany, ecology, horticulture, archaeology, social history, architecture, design, art history and sculpture.
The paper will be no longer than 20 minutes (approximately 2,000 to 2,500 words) and illustrated with a PowerPoint (or similar) slide presentation. The symposium will be held on-line via zoom.
We’d be happy to answer any questions and even happier to receive proposals via
newresearchsymposium@thegardenstrust.org
closing date 6 pm, Sunday, 2nd October 2022

Flow n Flux

Monthly Newsletter

By Kim Caris-Roberts
Flow n Flux
“BIG BROTHER HOUSE, THIS IS DAVINA, YOU ARE LIVE ON
CHANNEL 4, PLEASE DO NOT SWEAR!”
This month there really was only one place to begin. Each and every one of us at Flow n Flux wanted to acknowledge how scary the world seems right now, in the wake of the war in the Ukraine; watching war unfold can make us feel powerless and the range of emotions can be complex. We needed to acknowledge that.
Were there any ‘right words’ for the current climate? We concluded not.
We expressed and shared our concerns and we are thankful we have a safe space to do this.


We then began to explore March’s theme: Reality TV. Big Brother seemed to have been the most common first experience of the genre, mentioned a number of times in our individual offerings from the free-writing activity, which enabled interesting free association using 9 words to gently guide us in our flow.
“It’s always been my guilty pleasure”, a statement many of us identified with. Why guilty? We discussed the topics of ‘contestant’ exploitation, whether the burgeoning genre which shows no signs of slowing offers opportunities once unheard of to generations, we questioned does Reality TV alleviate any need for talent?, what constitutes reality TV? Perhaps one unexpected answer: Football.


Referring to The White Pube Podcast: The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, we
continued to explore our oft’ complicated relationship with this genre of TV. After much discussion one member proudly proclaimed “I am dropping my shame around
Reality TV: I love it!”.


Our last task was to create a Dragon’s Den-esque pitch for a new Reality TV show which embedded Feminist thought…Cue one group who pitched a plethora of misogyny offenders fighting it out for the opportunity to repent for their harms to cries of “In the pit! In the Pit!” that will forever echo in my ears every time I watch The Hunger Games.


For April we consider the questions of difference which have been
central to the way that the feminist movement articulates itself.
Specifically, we will explore difference among women, in particular,
along the lines of race, class and sexuality, as well as national and
geopolitical location. We will consider feminism, using Black feminism
as our centre, in order to look critically at the current cultural landscape.

Little Extras
April 1st-31st- Autism Awareness Month
April 1st-31st Stress Awareness Month
April 7th – World Health Day
April 25th-29th National Stalking Awareness Week
April 25th-1st May Lesbian Visibility Week

If you want to join FnF mailing list, please email:
flownflux@gmail.com

Three Minute Thesis Training sessions

The BGRS is pleased to announce the 2022 Birkbeck 3 Minute Thesis Competition, which will take place on Thursday 16 June from 6pm. Please mark this date in your diaries! This will be the first competition to have taken place in person since 2019.

Birkbeck 3MT: Thursday 16 June 2022

Join a selection of Birkbeck PhD students as they compete to communicate their compelling thesis topics in just three minutes. This event is a fantastic opportunity to share and celebrate the interests and successes of PhD researchers from across the College and we invite all current Birkbeck PhD students to take part. The winner of the Birkbeck competition will be chosen by an expert panel of judges who will award:

  • £500 to the overall winner
  • £250 to the runner up
  • The audience will also have their say by picking a people’s choice winner who’ll win a special prize.

Training Sessions

As part of our support for the competition, a free programme of training sessions has been arranged. All potential 3MT competitors should attend these sessions. However, any or all of them are open to any doctoral researcher at Birkbeck who would like to gain skills in these areas:

What is it like to take part in 3MT?

You can read more about what it was like to take part in the 2018 and 2019 3MT competitions in the following BGRS blog posts: 

This is an international event and the Birkbeck winner will have the opportunity to continue on to the UK semi-finals later in the year.