Wonderful.
OK, so let's start off.
Let's do some introductions of the staff here from the
University of Warwick and the University of Coventry.
So my name is David Lambert.
I'm a professor of history and I'm one of the two site
directors for Midlands4cities at the University of Warwick, so
Ross.
I'm Ross Forman.
I teach on the English program at Warwick and I'm the other
site director for the University of Warwick.
Thank you.
Uh, good morning.
Vicky.
Thank you.
Good morning.
I'm Victoria thoms.
I'm from the university, from Coventry University, not the
University of Coventry, Coventry University.
I'm an associate professor at the Center for Dance Research
and I am here as one of the site directors for Coventry
University.
Sharron.
Hi, my name Sharron Wilson.
I'm the doctoral training manager for M4C at University of
Warwick.
Ellie.
Hello, I'm Ellie Smith and I'm supporting Sharron with the
doctoral training program at Warwick.
and Sofia
Hello, I'm Sofia Antonopoulou from Coventry University.
And I'm supporting from the administration side, Victoria
Thoms with the site director.
Thanks everyone.
Basically, there are four of these writing workshops
organized by each pair of the two universities.
So Warwick and Coventry, we're the two Coventry universities.
Of course, these workshops are open to anybody who's applying
to Midlands4Cities.
You don't have to be applying to Warwick or to the University of,
Coventry University and some of you may have already attended
some previous workshops, in which case you may find this
some overlap with material that you've already heard.
So basically, the day, the morning is split into three
parts, we're gonna start with Ross, Vicky and I talking
through, introducing Midlands4Cities to you.
Talking about what
the doctoral training partnership is, there's a whole
lot of acronyms that you might be starting to become familiar
with,
hopefully you would be very familiar with
by the end, we'll explain what M4C is trying to do,
we'll talk about the nature of the offer that's available in
terms of to support postgraduate research and some of the
opportunities that are available once you've started your
funding.
So we'll talk through that.
And we're gonna show you some slides and then we will take a
short break between about 10:45.
We reconvene at 11:00 o'clock when we will have split you into
three breakout groups, which will be led by Ross, myself and
Vicky.
And we've done that,
we can't be completely exactly,
We've tried to make the groups roughly about the same size
based on people who signed up.
Of course, some people might not actually turn up now, but also
based on your academic area of interest.
So for example, people who are like interested in history, or
things like ancient history, philosophy, are gonna be in my
group, people who are working in literature, languages are going
to be with Ross's group and people working, including
creative practice, but also the collaborative PhD's, and some
other other areas are going to be with Vicki.
So the very rough division of you based on what you told is
your area of interest was and there will be an opportunity in
those breakout groups to to interact, although it's not
gonna be great because they are probably potentially very large,
but we will be at that point be able to hopefully interact with
you, get you looking actually at some past applications, trying
to identify particular strengths or weaknesses of them.
Until that point, though, could we ask you to turn your cameras
and microphones off just for the presentation part at the
beginning?
Thank you.
OK.
So, Vicky Ross, anything else you wanna talk about or should
we?
Should we started?
Uh, Shalimar Muhammed could you turn your microphone off,
please.
Yes.
OK.
Thank you.
OK, so I'm gonna share.
Uh, show you some slides.
These have been produced by Midlands4Cities, by the the
central team there and they give you a sense of what
Midlands4Cities is all about, which is crucial background
information
if you're going to apply to them for funding, so let me just
share my screen.
OK.
So Sharron is there those slide showing.
Can anyone confirm that they can see the slides?
Yes, we can see the slides.
Thank you, Ross.
We can see the slides.
Perfect.
Thank you.
OK, so Midlands4cities.
Uh, so the this is am a briefing about the application process
for entry for starting a doctoral study, a
PhD 2024. The further information is available from
the website. The process of applying for doctoral funding
through M4C is time consuming and is not something that you
should just be dashing off in the hope that you might get some
funding on the off chance, you are not going to get funded that
way and in fact, unfortunately because of the competitive
nature of the system, many good applications, many indeed, some
excellent applications aren't going to get funded.
So if you are going to pursue this path, if you do want to
apply for funding through M4C, you need to take advantage of
all the information that's out there.
As I say, this is not something you can just stick an
application in on the hope that you will get funding,
you will not.
So you need to,
I would strongly encourage you, not only to, and it's great
you've attending this workshop, but I'd strongly encourage you
to look at the further information that's available
from
Midlands4cities, that explain very clearly what they're
looking for, how you're assessed and explain the different parts
of the form that you need to complete.
So this is what I'll be talking about in this briefing.
What I'll explain to you,
for those of you who are perhaps unaware, what Midlands4cities
are and tell you a little bit about the the kind of, the
purpose of this, body, this partnership and what this
partnership is trying to do in terms of its its priorities.
We'll talk about the different awards that are available,
there's main awards and there's something else we'll put on the
table as well.
We'll talk through the application process and how your
applications are assessed and then we'll provide you some
contact details at the end. I should say that when we've
reconvened later on this morning, after the breakout
groups, there will be an opportunity to do a kind of
Q&A with with all of us.
So we'd ask you to save any questions you have until that
point, rather than to raise them right now.
OK, So what is Midlands4cities?
So Midlands4cities is a doctoral training partnership.
It's funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council,
which is part of the UKRI.
Essentially, this is the funding Council that covers, that
funds research in the disciplines, broadly defined as
arts and humanities.
It includes some elements of, I suppose you'd say, some of the
softer social sciences, as we'll explain later on, it also
includes
a kind of practice orientated creative.
areas of research. And it doesn't include biochemistry,
So if the person who is here to do a PhD in biochemistry, I'm
afraid you are not gonna get arts and humanities research
funding for that one.
The DTP, doctoral training partnership, is made up of eight
institutions across four cities, so there's Coventry University
and Warwick who are the two Coventry universities.
There's Birmingham and Birmingham City, Nottingham and
Nottingham Trent and then Leicester and de Montfort, which
are both in Leicester and each of the institutions has two site
directors who act as a kind of a liaison between the Central
Midlands4Cities team, and each of the different partner
institutions.
So as you can see on this list here, Ross and I are the two for
Warwick and then Vicki and her colleague Mel, who unfortunately
can't join us today, are the two site directors for the
University, for Coventry University.
So the idea of this doctoral training partnership is that,
uh, the 8 institutions bring together the different strengths
we have, and we all have slightly different orientations
of which disciplines we cover as universities, but we all work,
seeking to kind of pull our expertise, pool our strengths to
support the development of cohorts of postgraduate
researchers.
That's our core aim.
And as I said and that's the kind of crucial thing, like if
someone asks, what is Midlands4cities, it is a source
of funding, that's true,
but fundamentally, what it is, it is a community of
postgraduate research students, people undertaking doctoral
research,
and producing, you know, new forms of knowledge, new forms of
understanding, and that is the key goal, to foster a thriving
community of PGR students.
By being a partnership across four cities across 8
institutions, we also try to encourage forms of collaboration
between students at different institutions, perhaps
facilitated by forms of joint supervision.
We also engage the variety of regional and wider partners in
the creative culture and heritage sectors and we deliver
forms of professional development and research
training which we can do because we are a partnership of eight
institutions, and then support the development of student led
activity.
So when students of different institutions within
Midlands4cities identify areas where they think there are
training needs or where there are opportunities for a
professional or other forms of development, we also are able to
facilitate that. And also once you've been through
Midlands4Cities once, hopefully you've successfully completed
your doctoral research
we continue to provide an alumni networks.
You can stay in touch with us,
you can continue,
we can foster those regional links across the East, West
Midlands and beyond.
So and as I said, we have these, the core of the the partnership,
these eight higher education institutions, 8 universities.
But there are a whole series of other partners.
Some of these are national organizations that you will have
heard of, very famous ones, globally famous things like the
British Library, English Heritage, perhaps, but also some
ones that are more specific to the Midlands.
So the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare Birthplace
Trust, for example, and the whole series of other
organizations, museums and galleries of various different
scales.
And there's a full list of who these partners are available
from the Midlands4Cities website,
the address I shared at the beginning and it's something to
think about if there are opportunities in the course of
your doctoral research to work with or to take advantage of the
connections that we have with these kind of partner
organizations in the form, for example, of placements, which is
something we'll come back to, that's something worth thinking
about.
Now, if you can demonstrate that it's not, you're not just coming
to us because we have money, but you want to come and work at one
of our institutions because we have regional and National and
International partnerships, which could benefit your
research,
that's all to the good.
OK, so now we're getting to the, I guess the the really important
stuff,
why people are here. What are the funding schemes that we have
available?
So basically there are two main competitions.
There is the open competition and there is the collaborative
doctoral award competition.
Umm, the open competition will provide doctoral funding for up
to 70 successful applicants, and that's essentially that's a
responsive mode of funding.
In other words, you come up with, you put together your own
project, you develop your own research questions, your own
methodologies,
you identify whatever forms of sources, or corpus of text, or
whatever, that you
need to work with,
you situate that research project in relation to the
particular discipline, or disciplines, or
interdisciplinary area that is relevant to your research.
You explain how your research will advanced understanding and
make a contribution to knowledge, and that's entirely
driven by your own interests, or primarily driven by your own
interests.
This is clearly something that if you are applying for the open
competition, which I imagine the majority of you are, this has to
be something you would want to be having conversations with
potential supervisors or hopefully already. This isn't
something you can just sort of like pull out of the ether
at the last minute, and just try and find someone who's prepared
to supervise you. You know, we'd strongly
encourage you to kind of, co-produce
your application, so to produce good research proposals
that gives you a best chance of gaining the funding.
Umm.
In addition to the open competition, there are also
Collaborative doctoral awards.
There are sixteen of them, and essentially there are two at
each university and these are
funding that's attached to a particular project, a named
project with a particular, usually an external partner,
who's a non university external partner, and you would apply for
that studentship to work with a kind of existing supervisory
team and that in a sense the broad outlines of the project
would already be defined, although you could then take it
in your own direction. Some of the people who are interested in
collaborative doctoral awards are going to be in Vicki's Group
and Vicki can have much more things to say about a lot later
on.
Now in terms of the distribution of the awards and I'm sorry the,
the Stuart Hall Foundation studentships is something new.
Ross is gonna umm, I think Ross will come back to talk about
that in a little bit.
David, can I just interrupt for a second just to say with
Please, Vicky, of course.
collaborative doctoral awards, and that I will we'll be talking
about later in my in my breakout group, that they are far less
competition than the open doctoral awards.
So that is something to consider. Thanks.
Yes, thank you Vicki. Umm.
So in terms of the distribution of awards, and there is no, each
of the 8 institutions, we don't get a set quota, nor does any
particular disciplinary area get a set quota.
So you just essentially, if you're going to apply to the
open competition, you just want to identify the institution that
you think has the strongest. it can provide the strongest
supervisory support for your project, you can have and you
have to have at least two supervisors, and they can be at
different institutions.
So, you know, taking advantage of, you know, I'll work with
this person in English here, but there's also someone in French
studies at another M4C institution and together that
would provide the perfect supervisory team.
That's the sort of thing that M4C would strongly encourage.
You can apply for a full time award which will fund you for 3
1/2 years.
Part time,
you're essentially,
you undertake the projects at half the pace and you get half
the funding.
So if you're trying to balance doing doctoral research with
other responsibilities, and we'll come back to some of the
kind of levels of awards.
So in terms of what the awards specifically does, it provides,
it covers your tuition fees to do a PhD and then also provides
a standard stipend at the UKRI rate.
And it is possible to as an international, so a non UK
resident person, to apply for this and at University of
Warwick we would then cover all the additional cost of the
international fees.
And Vicki, is that the same at Coventry? International students
just sort of dealt with, yes?
Yeah. Yeah.
Absolutely yes.
So essentially, from your perspective, if you are an
international student, you can just apply,
you're not gonna get less money,
There isn't gonna be or there isn't gonna be an additional
costs associated with the tuition.
That's all
just is going to be covered.
Um, David.
Can I just say that there's there's a 30%?
Please close.
Umm, umm, it's a 30% cut off in in the allocation of awards.
Yeah.
So what Vicki is referring to there is that although I said
there is no allocation of studentships to institutions or
subject areas, there is a maximum that 30% of all
studentships we hand out can go to international students, no
more than 30.
So what's that?
21 of the 70 awards no more than those could go to international
students.
The rest would be reserved for the UK students.
OK, so I'm gonna hand over to to Ross.
OK, next slide please.
So what are M4C's priorities?
So as you can see, they're pretty straightforward and a lot
of
Gobbledygook
that institutions speak, I guess, would be the best way to
put it.
So to fund and support outstanding research, to enhance
opportunities for postgraduate research, collaboration between
partner institutions.
So this is part of the way in which it structured.
Some students will choose to have supervisors across 2
institutions, so you will choose from,
you'll have one supervisor one place, some or sometimes people
have three supervisors.
It entirely depends.
Once you'll be based at one university where you'll have a
supervisor, but you might also choose have a supervisor at one
of the other institutions involved in the consortium and
you'll be receiving, you know, kind of the benefits of enjoying
the research, culture and expertise of people at both
institutions.
We have quite a lot of people who do choose to have the cross
institutional supervision.
However, the research tells us that whether you choose to have
two supervisors at
Warwick, Coventry or another institution or whether you
choose to do cross institutional supervision doesn't really
affect your chances of getting the award, but just to emphasize
that you need to have two supervisors minimum.
So you cannot really apply for the M4C award unless you have
identified and spoken with both of your supervisors and they are
supporting you.
And those supervisors have to be named on the form.
So you must name both of your supervisors.
or if you have three, all the supervisors on the form, so do
not put one supervisor down and leave the rest blank, because
then your your application will will probably be eliminated.
M4C is trying to promote researcher engagement with non
university organizations.
David showed a a kind of slide that had some, a list of some of
those, but there's a big emphasis on impact and public
engagement and you may feel, okay you don't know what that
would be now, but there are lots of opportunities once you join
to to figure out and get support with working with public
engagement and impact and dissemination activities.
However, if you have, a thing that you can identify I have to
point of application.
You should definitely do so, so if you can think about putting
your work in a wider context, think about how it might talk to
people outside of academia,
for example, you should definitely put this in your
application.
Remember that your application is aimed at an audience that is
an academic audience.
But yeah, it should be general.
So when you're writing your application, don't make it too
field specific.
Don't make an application that only someone in your field could
understand.
Make an application that an educated academic, uh, working
in the arts and humanities could understand.
That's very important. M4C also works to provide placement and
training opportunities for funded researchers.
These are really quite wonderful opportunities and some of them
are quite generous, for example,
an opportunity to spend a week with the, in Rome with the
British school in Rome, various placement opportunities with
government agencies, et cetera, placements that you can build
yourself that might be related to your own topic.
So for example, we had one student who was doing a
placement in a shopping mall where they had these very famous
murals of, the person was working on a particular artist,
and the murals of this artist were in the shopping mall and
the shopping mall was about to turn 50 years old.
And so they designed a placement to celebrate this 50th
anniversary of the shopping mall and to do research into the
history of the murals and the history of the artist.
Umm, one thing to know about the placements is that the
placements uh will be, you know, added on to your funding
package.
So if you are doing an open award and you have a 3 1/2 year
funding package, you can get up to another six months for a
placement.
If you're doing a CDA, you will already have four years.
Unfortunately, we will not fund you beyond four years.
That does not include things like sick leave, however, and
one of the good things about M4C, for example, is that sick
leave and maternity leave and so on, are are paid.
Umm, so you should identify research and training and
potential training needs of potential placements that you
know of now,
at the point of application, that might strengthen your
application.
However, that is no bar to, you know, looking at the placement
opportunities and taking up the placement opportunities that you
don't know about yet or that come along once you have joined
M4C at a later point.
Next slide, please.
So these are the subject areas covered by the arts and
Humanities Research Council.
As you can see there, archaeology classics, cultural
and museum studies, dance design, et cetera.
And then there are, is an overlap between the Arts and
Humanities Research Council and the ESRC, which is the Social
Science Council, and you can see what those are on the right.
So would strongly encourage you, if you're working in one of
those overlap subjects, to to have a good chat with your
supervisors.
Umm, your perspective supervisors I should say.
And you know, to identify whether you really should apply
to M4C or to the respective ESRC funding at your institution.
So if you're choosing Warwick, that would be the Midlands
Graduate School and you should also look into what
opportunities they have and what we're kinds of briefings they
have for their application process.
Each consortium has quite a different application process,
and those of you who are looking at other AHRC consortia in the
UK will see that also that the Midlands4cities process is
probably gonna look quite different from some of the other
other doctoral training partnerships across the country.
Umm, there's a link there if you want to look at the whole guide
for what the AHRC coverage is.
Umm.
And yes, I think we can go to the next slide.
So this is the indicative rate for awards for 2023-24 academic
year.
So obviously, if the government changes the rate or if UKRI
changes the rate this could, this could go up based on
inflation.
But at the moment you get your fees covered by by your home
institution.
Again, most of the M4C institutions cover international
the difference between what what M4C pays and what international
tuition looks like.
Certainly Warwick and
Coventry do.
And then you'll be getting a maintenance grant, which at the
moment is £18,622 per year.
So part time students will get a maintenance, a smaller
maintenance grant.
And as you can see, the fees are are cut in half because
obviously they're part time. Just for those of you who are
applying to Warwick, you should know that part time is
considered 60% at Warwick.
Some other institutions consider part time to be 50%, so you'll
have a slightly shorter award time than it will not be double
what it would be.
You know it won't be six years.
It'll be slightly shorter than that or seven years.
3.5 * 2 is 7.
It'll be slightly shorter than that.
There is all kinds of wonderful additional funding to support
research activity during your PhD
and also to build cohort and some some of this funding is
targeted at bringing in students who are not funded by, directly
by, M4C as well.
And we'll talk more about that later.
So what is the duration of the award?
The Open Competition Award provides 3.5 years of baseline
funding, but in your application or at during your first mid year
review, and that's the first kind of checkpoint in your first
year of study, you can make it a case for extending this for up
to six months.
Umm.
And the thing to note here again is that to you, if you do extend
it by six months because you need to visit an archive or you
need to learn a language, or there's some other major
training need.
For example, we've had students who have who are working with
uh, with supervisors and they say, well, you really need to
know about this country and the archives in this country.
And you didn't think about that in your application, that wasn't
part of your application because you weren't working with those
specialists.
You might be wanting to make a case at your mid year review to
add the six months, but do keep in mind that if you add that six
months and you do a placement or some of the other activities,
you will not get funding beyond the four years.
So that is important to know that if you wanna do a
placement, you might end up having to fund that yourself.
If you've already take the the case that you need to extend
your funding for six months, the collaborative doctoral award
already starts at 4 years.
That's because there's already a kind of built-in placement and
collaboration element to it.
As Vicki noted, the collaborative doctoral awards
are much less competitive than the Open Awards.
So if you see a project that appeals to you that you think
you can fit with your research interests, we do encourage you
to think about applying for that. Next slide please.
So, uh, what kinds of additional funding are offered once you
would start your PhD
with M4C? So we have the Research Development Fund which
is designed to support, as it says here on the slide, primary
research activities for individual students.
So that would include participation and conferences
and by participation in conferences, M4C means that you
must be presenting or doing some other major role in the
conference.
You can't apply for funding just to attend the conference.
Umm, this would be also for primary research or archive or
fieldwork visits.
Many projects, that's one of the beauties of M4C, is that it does
really support archival projects that might be difficult to carry
out with other kinds of funding.
It's quite generous.
There is no limit for the Research Development Fund and
the Engagement Fund.
So you can apply as many times as you need to.
You can't necessarily make repeat visits to the same
collections unless you're making a compelling case for why you
would have to go back, and this might include steady visits in
the UK and overseas.
The engagement fund is slightly different and this is for
students who are undertaking placements or other activities
who are engaged with professional development to
access additional funds to support them.
So that might be summer schools, for example, language learning,
various kinds of professionalization, activities
that might occur.
Some of the professionalization, writing workshops, and other
things that M4C itself sponsors, that you would receive funding
for, and so on.
There are, of course, certain limits on that, but probably not
necessary for you to know about the details of that just yet.
We also have the Cohort Development Fund and the Cohort
Development Fund is the one of the areas in which non M4C
students get brought in just kind of develop the whole cohort
at your institution.
So this is devised and led by a minimum of two doctoral
researchers from two or more M4C institutions.
Generally these work best when
there's a kind of steering committee from a number of
institutions of people who are who want to really propose
something interesting and exciting and who really want to
work together on this.
So this could be a conference, a workshop, a retreat, skills
training, et cetera.
I think we had the sex in contemporary media at Warwick
recently was one example of this.
There's a research training network with development
activities, that might be part of your Cohort Development Fund
and obviously innovative training for language resources.
Obviously, if you have an idea for a cohort Development Fund,
you would discuss it with the site directors at Warwick,
Coventry wherever else you were and we would encourage you and
and help you build the case for that. Next slide please.
So what is the application process for 2024 entry?
So as you can see here, the application deadline for M4C is
the 10th of January at noon Greenwich Mean Time, and you
should definitely be aware of the fact that you need to have
applied already to your home institution by that date and we
would encourage you to apply well in advance of that date to
your home institution.
So do not sort of, you know, put in both applications the morning
of January 10th.
UK time.
We really encourage you to sort of, do that leg work, leg work,
talk to the supervisors at your prospective institution, talk to
the director of graduate studies or equivalent if necessary at
your institution and get your home application in earlier.
You will also be asked for the ID number that you put in your
application to your home institution on the M4C
application.
So in some cases, certainly at Warwick, that could take 24
hours or more to come to you.
So, uh, you definitely want to apply further in advance.
I would also encourage you not to apply to M4C on the 10th of
January, because if you have IT or other problems, late
applications will not be accepted.
In addition, you need to know that if you apply, but you have
to apply by the 10th of January, but your referees also have to
put their references in by the 10th of January.
If you're referees are late, your application will be
eliminated, so make sure when you start your application you
can trigger the function for the referees to write their
very short reference for M4C, but they need to have enough
time to do that, so don't don't leave this to the last minute.
So, uh, when you start to apply, you're going to be choosing
between the open doctoral competition and the
collaborative doctoral awards.
And you can apply to both if you wish to.
It's a lot of work.
You're doing completely separate applications for that, but some
students do do that, especially if they, if they're, what tends
to happen is students are very keen on their own individual
project, but they also see a collaborative doctoral award
that catches their eye and that they're also interested in.
And so they want to, understandably, you all want to
increase the the potential of getting funding for your PhD.
So in both cases, you're going to, uh, talk to people in
advance.
That's absolutely crucial that you talk to people in advance,
that you don't just apply and put people's names down.
So for the open competition, that means identifying potential
supervisors.
Most institutions, certainly at Warwick, are going to interview
you for your admissions application.
That's a good time to get to know the supervisors that you
might be working with and to ask any questions you have about
preparing the M4C application as well.
With the CDA, you're going to select the project and you're
going to contact the lead supervisor in advance.
You should, you know, expect to have a kind of chat with that
person before you apply, so that you have an idea of what's
expected, what kinds of things might strengthen your
application, whether you're experience aligns with what this
particular CDA is looking for and so on.
OK, next slide please.
This is the, it's very hard to see, but you I think most of you
will be able to enlarge this on your own screen, but this is the
list of the collaborative doctoral awards that are being
offered for this year's competition.
And as you see there is also a link at the top to find the
project that you might like and as you'll see as well, you can
see on on the right hand side the name of the lead supervisor
and their email as well.
So umm, since most of these, all of these, are involving non
higher education institution partners, we've also listed here
the the those partners and their addresses as well.
But you should be getting in touch with the lead academic
supervisor when you are, you know, thinking about making an
application for these.
OK, that's my bit.
And over to Vicki.
Thank you.
Could I have the next slide show?
Thank you.
Or David.
Thank you guys.
So application process for the 2024 entry.
In some cases, we've already covered this.
You are to choose between the open doctoral call or the
collaborative doctoral award.
And then you apply for your place at a chosen M4C
institution, and I would urge you to consult your home
university PhD
application pages. all of the universities have devoted
M4C/their institution pages where you can access this
information and it takes you through a very clear process
that sometimes is kind of murky.
But these are there to help you.
So contact your own institution.
The thing that you need to keep a a mind to is that you will
need 2 academic references and you can't actually process the
application,
the application, you can't submit the application without
those having been done already.
You need to,
I would urge you, these references are not
insubstantial, they are,
they carry weight during the the moderation process.
So you want to be as professional as possible when
you pursue these, contact your referees prior to the, prior to
actually submitting the reference to them and ask them
if they would want to do this and then help them through the
process as much as possible.
They will receive the direct email from the M4C and they will
then take it forward
the way they see fit. I would definitely also make them aware
of the kinds of processes that each individual institution will
have for that, because some application processes like
Coventry will require a separate reference process that can be
simply replicated from the M4C process, but nevertheless
necessitates
several different types of interfaces.
Uh, I think I'm on to the next slide.
Thank you.
Right then you apply for your M4C funding.
This is actually quite a straightforward form that you
access via the via the website.
the M4C website I would strongly advise that you have a clear,
a deep,
look at the guidance.
The guidance is excellent.
Uh, it gives you some very strong, clear information and if
you are at all unclear about that, then I would, you know,
pursue questions with your institution, your designated
institution.
Look at the different
supervisors available to you and to make your team up.
Also consult with your
supervisors at the institutions that you are applying to. You
will need an applicant ID number to actually begin the process
with the M4C, which means that you will have to start at
application with your chosen institution to get that
applicant number.
Uh, you will then expect to have an interview with your home
institution with the institution that you're applying through
once the
applications are in and you are shortlisted.
You can expect to have an interview.
Do not take this interview lightly.
It is a very strong indicator to the institution that you're
applying to to take you forward because they then have to go
through a process that recommends you to the M4C and
the more you can impress at this interview, the better.
You will be made aware at the end of April what the outcome of
the competition was.
Thank you very much.
Next slide.
So.
What is quite exciting about the M4C over the last couple of
years is that we have developed a relationship with the Stuart
Hall Foundation and these are excellent opportunities for, you
know, Black, Asian minority ethnic applicants to undertake
an extra.
an extra professional,
professional and career development through the through
the Stuart Hall Foundation.
Uh you.
To be eligible, you need to be considered as having, as being a
home student, so there's no, there's no international
availability there.
Home student and identify as belonging to a minoritized and
under represented ethnic group.
I think if you are interested in applying to these, I would
strongly suggest you talk to your your your potential
supervisory teams or the supervisors that are supporting
your application. Again,
designating your
desire to be considered for the for this, distinction goes
through the M4C award and you will be led through the form to
the, through the specific, the needed fields.
And again, that's actually a quite a clear process with the
M4C, if you would want more details, I would recommend you
go to the M4C website and put in Stuart Hall into the search
function in that that should be very straightforward to find.
Next slide please.
You will need to consider as you process your application either
to the open doctoral awards or the collaborative doctoral
awards
the criterias that the M4C are asking you to meet, this is not
simply about the project.
The M4C is interested in cultivating a a rounded sense
of,
a rounded sense of a postgraduate researcher that
includes the project, that includes a development of your
abilities, at specific experiences that that are useful
to the experience, and also importantly where this is
happening.
So you need to be thinking very clearly in terms of the project.
This is, you know, this is where you make your clear focused
presentation of the research, clear, focused relevant
methodologies, what the impact of your research is.
Then you need to also consider your, the person that you are.
What are your unique,
what are your unique characteristics that make you
the person to be doing this,
this research? Are you prepared?
What kinds of experiences present themselves to the the
funder that that ensure them that you will 'A' complete and
'B' be successful in, in the kind of research that you're
doing?
And then again also the 4th one, the final one, plays what kind
of fit do you have for the department and across the
supervisors, if you have cross consortium supervisors, why them
and not others and why does that have a have a really strong
supportive relationship to the project that you want to do?
Next slide please.
Uh, so just very quickly, this is again for your referee, quite
a long list, but but generally really take time with your
referee.
These are important things, you know?
Read the guidance notes.
Check that your referee has received the information from
the M4C.
Sometimes they don't, sometimes it just disappears.
Make sure that you complete those
reference details early, so the referee has as much time as
possible.
Don't do this
in January, just before the deadline, do this right now. In
most cases,
Yeah.
Yes, you know use the admissions office for your, your
university.
I think all the admissions offices are are very useful in
doing this.
Yeah, I think that that's that's clear.
Yeah, make sure you have the right email address and and you
cannot submit the application without the references being
being completed.
I think that's the last slide or yeah, just the the yes, please.
Can I come in one second?
Just wanted to say that for Warwick at least, you should if
you at all possible, you should not use a Gmail address either
for yourself or for a referee, because there's a function on
Gmail where a lot of this get rejected or goes straight to
spam.
So you or your referee
may never
see the important communications, so please don't
use Gmail.
And I guess that's another indication that you should keep
in contact with your referee through the process.
So you don't just assume they've received something.
Yes.
So just the contact details, you know the institution that you're
applying to, I would write now, just very quickly note down the
the email that you could use to
contact the relevant institutions. And I think that's
it for me.
Thank you very much.
OK.
Thanks, Ross.
Thanks, Vicky.
So a lot of information there and we've, obviously what Ross,
Vicki and I have talked through, is we've tried to highlight some
of the key information that the M4C have in turn highlighted.
But as Vicki said, and I just really want to emphasize this,
there was a lot of information on the M4C website, the, the
application forms that you have to complete comes with guidance
in the form.
There's also accompanying documents if you wanna give
yourself a decent chance of getting funding, you have to do
the diligence on all that material.
This is not,
this is not something you can just like quickly knock up.
It's, you're literally, you're wasting your time.
You're wasting your referees time.
You're wasting everybody's time.
So, you know, you wanna put,
I won't say that as much effort, but you wanna put a lot of
effort into just understanding the process as well as actually
thinking about the academic ideas,
because if you can't, you don't, express your potential project
in a way that's gonna get the funding.
Then that's gonna,
it's gonna work against you.
And just to add, David, it it's not simply the proposal.
Of course
It's also you presenting yourself as the person to be
doing this research in the best place possible and having the
best narrative around your preparedness.
Yeah.
And also just to add that some of you may be familiar with
academic systems in other parts of the world.
The UK PhD
doesn't have any coursework attached to it normally, so you
should be coming in ready to write your project and we would
normally expect that you have an MA or other equivalent degree as
a pre qualification for applying for M4C funding.
Right.
OK.
So Ross thickness is anything else to add that's this stage.
So you, you muted, Ross.
There's a question in the chat.
I think, if I may,
can we save everything till the end?
The reason I say it, because we might deal with some of the
things in the breakout groups anyway.
Is that OK?
And what I'd like to suggest is if we can take a, say, a 10
minute break now, we convene at 11 and then we'll put you
straight into breakout groups.
We'll talk through some successful applications from
last year.
Well, at least part of the applications, we will explain to
you that we're actually only showing you one element of the
applications.
We will get you to do some work with them, sort of identify what
you see as the strength and weaknesses and so forth and then
we'll come back together and then if that's alright, we'll do
some Q&A hopefully by that point we will have answered most
of your questions anyway.
But at that point we would pick up everything in one big go.
I think I think we could answer one question.
OK, sure.
It's not the question the chat necessarily, but I think we
should emphasize that for those of you who have already started
your PhD
and are in your first year of your PhD
obviously you won't be applying,
you know, for admission.
You all have that already done.
You'll have your applicant ID number, it will be your student
ID number that you have for your university and you know M4C does
welcome applications from people who are unfunded, who are in
their, in their first year of their PhD.
OK, right.
In that case, what I suggest is, uh, we can stop the recording,
take a break,
re-caffeinate and then can, everybody,
feel welcome to,
if you wanna stay on the chat,
that's absolutely fine.
Stay on the in the call, but basically at 11:00 o'clock we'll
break out into into small groups.
So we'll see you then.
OK.