[Academic] RDP Grant Writing Course

[Neil Hunt]

Dear All,

As those of you supervising 1st or 2nd year PhD students (not CDT students) will know, starting from last year all of our new PGR students have to complete the PGCert associated with the Researcher Development Programme (RDP). This RDP programme runs parallel with the SUPA Grad School and is frankly a bit of a burden, however, in general, we've done pretty well at using the SUPA Grad School and our own internal processes to minimise the impact on our cohort.

As a department, we have now gone through a whole year of RDP with last year's intake and we are in a better position to make a firm recommendation to the students as to what is required to effectively and efficiently fulfil the RDP requirements.  I therefore  plan to communicate a 'dept approved' approach to dealing with RDP to reduce the confusion among the students. I'm happy to describe this in more detail if you have the interest time or inclination!!!

However, there is one strand of RDP that we haven't been able to deal with and for which appropriate courses don't seem to exist. This is 10 credits of 'Research Governance' which basically comes down to grant writing. To solve this issue in the most efficient manner, I have prepared a slightly modified version of David Birch's Research Skills class (thanks David!) for use as an online learning course. The idea is to allow our PGRs to do this course in their own time, as part of small groups for peer-to-peer support/learning, with the output being basically a mini grant proposal. We are not forcing them to do this but the alternative to this is that each student takes 10 individual 1 credit classes put on by RDP in areas not relevant to Physics so I hope you can see the benefit in this. The reason for this email is to alert you to the fact that some of you will have students taking this class in due course and that, for reasons of efficiency, we will be asking each supervisor to mark the proposal produced by their students in addition to holding one or two informal discussions with the student to provide general support as they progress through the online material. This should not be an onerous task. We have a lot of students who we need to put through this course so spreading the effort is the only way to go about this.

I'm beginning a test run of  the course with a small group (4) of our new first year to find the 'bugs' and then I will make it available to the rest of our first and second year 'PhD Physics' students.

I'm more than happy to discuss this should anyone have any thoughts. I will be notifying the students of the 'dept approved' RDP plan shortly.

Thanks,
Neil

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