HetSys provides a supportive and exciting environment for our students to carry out their research. Our interdisciplinary student community is made up of several cohorts, all at different stages of their PhD projects.

Cohort-based doctoral training is very different to a standard PhD: All our students take part in cohort-wide training modules as part of a structured Post-Graduate Diploma which not only helps them acquire academic knowledge but builds a supportive environment with plenty of opportunities for collaboration, especially through the PX915 Group Project module.

Congratulations therefore to HetSys Cohort 3 members who gained distinctions in their Post-Graduate Diploma and were awarded their certificates by Julie Staunton and James Kermode at an informal lunch last week.

I've decided to try and launch the HetSys Coding Challenge, which will (as the name suggests) be a series of coding problems released near the start of each term. These challenges are intended to pose an interesting problem that is fairly different from our normal day-to-day research.

Though all of the challenges can be completed at your own pace, some will also have a competitive element. Competitive challenges will have a deadline for code submissions at the end of the term the challenge is released, and the submissions will then be benchmarked, and winners announced. Despite these competitive elements, collaboration is strongly encouraged in all challenges.

The first challenge, which is not competitive, can be found here:

https://github.com/HetSys/HetSysCodeChallengeEnigma

To gain access to the repository, I'll need to add you to the HetsysCodeChallenge Team on the HetSys GitHub organisation - email me (thomas.rocke@warwick.ac.uk) or send me a message on Slack, and I can send you an invite.

I hope you enjoy the challenge!

Tom Rocke (HetSys Cohort 3)

With the increasing influx of students from diverse backgrounds joining the ever-popular field, this short guide aims to help students navigate through the various computational techniques that they are likely to encounter during their studies. This fantastic initiative of HetSys CDT, Maths and Diamond CDT UoW students is now online (arXiv.org) and published in the European Physical Journal Plus- well done to Idil Ismail, Shayantan Chaudhuri, Dylan Morgan, Christopher D. Woodgate, Ziad Fakhoury, James M. Targett, Charlie Pilgrim and Carlo Maino. Eat, Sleep, Code, Repeat: Tips for Early-Career Researchers in Computational Science.