Hej!
Below is my cleaned up notes from the doctoral meeting, which I just named spring doctoral meeting… please have a look if you have time. If no one objects during the first couple of days next week I will forward these points to Anna and
the rest of the steering board on Wednesday.
For those not present at the meeting, please feel free to ask me for clarification of things in the notes if needed.
For the rest of you, thank you for your time at the meeting, it was great seeing you!
Med vänliga hälsningar
Zanna
Zanna will put together a description of the position and make sure each department will compensate it. We would like to circulate the responsibility yearly. Interested parties, not from Uppsala, can contact Zanna and will take it from
there this year. In the future, we will ask the doctoral students at the department that is up to decide amongst themselves who will be the representative.
Zanna will check if it would be possible for one PhD student at each location to get compensation for pulling together some information about possible resources to use to finance and plan a desk exchange.
In general, it is brilliant to see other people’s work, different subjects, and progression levels. It is also so nice to get to see people in person. Somehow, even though it was still a lunch-to-lunch, it did not feel
as packed as last year.
However, we would still like to suggest a longer workshop of 2 days. To allow for:
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Two, rather than three or four session. We would really like to be able to attend more of the others’ session, both to discuss their work and because the feedback others get can be very informative for our own
work as well.
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An extension of the doctoral meeting, which we would like to make permanent part of the program, to 1.5 h. We would also like to, collaboratively among us PhD students, set an agenda for the meeting in advance.
We are aware that some senior researcher already are not attending for both days and we discussed the pros and cons of having one day just for PhD students. We also discussed the idea of bringing back PhD commentators
on texts but we want to emphasize that we want to keep the opportunity to get feedback from senior researchers.
Additionally there was feedback on some things that could be more clearly communicated next time:
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That it is good to read other PhD students’ texts
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Length of texts, format, cover paper etc.
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Communicating changes in the schedule and time table more clearly
Finally, in regards to the workshop we discussed ways to make it easier for us to have a good text for the seminar ready for the deadline. Mainly not leaving the announcement of the deadline too late and maybe even having
a set deadline that is more or less the same every year even if the workshop itself is not on exactly the same dates.
Possibly, it would be more useful if the sessions allowed for more discussion and was more focused on keeping up with each other than just being an opportunity to sit and write. This could be done by 1) making the break
in-between sessions longer 2) having shorter writing sessions and more breaks or 3) adding an “open office hour” before or after the whole thing for those who would just like to check in and talk to others about what they are working on at the moment.