Prof. Lee Griffin

Good morning, everybody. Hello and welcome to Warwick. I'm Lee Griffin and I'm the academic director for postgraduate taught and I'll be talking for a little bit this morning and then passing over to my colleague Dan here. And then Vash, who's hiding in the corner, but she'll be centre stage very shortly.

And what does that mean? My role? Well, I kind of look after the postgraduate taught students, and there are a lot of you. So Welcome to Warwick. I hope you have a wonderful time with while you're here.

I do need to start with a little bit of a warning though. This week is going to be quite hectic. You're gonna have lots and lots of information thrown at you. You will be given hundreds of opportunities to do all sorts of things.

Sign up for as many as you think you can cope with, because that's a good thing to do, but it could be a bit overwhelming, so please, don't panic. We are here to look after you and support you.

And that information overload kind of starts now, so buckle up, everybody. Here we go. Most of the people in this room are only going to be with us for one year.

And that is going to disappear. So just last week I was finishing up with one of my project students from last year. So she's been with us a year, handed her dissertation in, and she did really well, which is good. And she couldn't believe the time had just disappeared. It just, it really does disappear. And you find this as you get older.

In fact, inside every old person, like myself, is a young person wondering what on Earth happened. So as you at the time would just disappear on you. Please don't squander it. It's really quite fast and intensive.

So there's some important stuff coming up this morning. This is being recorded, so feel free to go back and watch it if you want to. The thing from my point of view is though, I want you to have the best time that you can, while you're at Warwick.

What does that even mean? Well, what is Student Experience? What do we mean by the best experience that you can have?

Well, it means something different to everybody and just have a quick look around the room now. Apologies to this row, we've got a really bright light in their face, that's a bit unfortunate. So have a look around the room now, you'll be able to see faces from all over the world and that's a fantastic opportunity for you.

Make some friends, push your boundaries out, learn different things about different people.

And all of you probably want something a little bit different. There'll be some students who want to get in, get a qualification, get out. There'll be some students who want to be here to make contacts, to broaden their things. They might be thinking about further study. There'll be some who are really here to have an amazingly good time. And if they can, squeeze a bit of studying in.

So whatever it is.that you are trying to do, that's the thing that that you need to do. All of those approaches are correct, as long as they work for you, that's fine.

And right now you could be feeling all sorts of things. You could be a bit apprehensive; you could be excited. You could be tired. You could be worried. I mean, I'm a little bit scared. Speaking to a room of 300 strangers here, but that's OK. Embrace the fear and do it anyway. In a suitably safe manner.

We don't want lawsuits and things for people doing really foolish stuff, but try something new. Have a bit of an experiment with things.

We can't really provide you with the student experience. It actually needs you to go out and actively shape it. So over the course of this week and as your studies start, think about what it is that you want to do. What do you want your experience to be, and how can you make that happen? Come and chat with us, we will do our best to help you as we go through, but your role is fundamentally important in it.

So as I said a few suggestions, my first one is be brave, be bold, try something new. Have a go at something new, make new friends. You will make friends and contacts here which will last you a lifetime. Have a think about some simple things that you would like to do while you're here and head towards them. Now I’m gonna hand over quickly to Dan here who's going to talk about the postgraduate research which is the other side of postgrad.

So Dan, it's all yours.

Prof Dan Branch

OK. Thank you. Thanks, Lee. So my name's Dan Branch and I'm Lee's counterpart for postgraduate research. So my official title is Academic Director of the Doctoral College. So what that means in practice is I'm responsible for the two and a half thousand or so PhD ,M Phil, M Res. DBA, EngD…I think that's the full list…students across the university. So there's probably a few of you in this room, probably less of you than the students that are doing the postgraduate taught degrees.

Now what I want to say first of all is Welcome. OK, there are few days like this in the calendar. It's one of those days where I think the likes of myself and Lee realise just how lucky we are to stand here in a room, you can feel the sort of nervousness. You can feel the excitement. This is the beginning of an adventure.

And we are here to help you. As Lee said, we want you to be bold. We want you to be courageous and we want to put in place the support that you need in able to do that, so just I would reiterate that message.

Now, postgraduate research students are a particularly diverse group of students you come from across the world. You're at different ages. You're at different stages of careers, and you're studying an unbelievable range of subjects. You're also at the heart of what this university does. You are going to be doing some of the cutting edge research for which Warwick is renowned, many of you who are postgraduate research students will at one time or another teach other students. So you're a key part of our education programme as well.

And most importantly, you're a fundamentally important part of the University community. Those of you that are doing postgraduate research degrees will be here for three or four years, and you'll be here for much of the year. While other students go away for vacations and term ends and so on. So you are part of the kind of vital lifeblood of this university. So it's great to be able to welcome you here.

Now, because of that diversity of the student body of the postgraduate researchers, those two and a half thousand coming from all sorts of different backgrounds, it becomes vital that we try and support you properly as individual researchers, and I'm very lucky to work with a group of colleagues in the Doctoral College, which is the Central University Service, which is there to support postgraduate researchers. We work alongside your supervisors and your departments, your centres of doctoral training, wherever you're located, in order to try and make sure that you have the best possible experience at Warwick.

If you feel that that experience is not what you expected, tell us. Engage with us. Talk to your supervisors, talk to your departments. Come to us in the doctoral college and we will do our very, very best to try and make sure that what we're providing to you in terms of support is as good as it could possibly be. That's what we aspire to here at Warwick.

Now over the next couple of weeks or so, many of you will be in departmental induction meetings. You'll be in faculty induction meetings. You'll be in centres, doctoral training induction meetings. So I'm not gonna cram much more into this talk than than beyond saying welcome. But there's one message that I really want to emphasise.

Find a community, find a group of people that you study with that you research with, that you work with, that you live with, that you party with, whatever it is. Find that group. They are going to be the vital part of your life as a student here at Warwick. Whether you're here for one year or three years, whether or not you're doing a a masters or a PhD.

That is the key, I think to success as a student. It's often whether, again, regardless of study, it can sometimes feel a slightly lonely experience when you're in the library at 11:00 PM at night trying to finish a piece of work.

OK, so it's therefore vital you find that group of people that you can share that, your experiences with. That is, I think, the fundamental sort of key to success. Now one of the key ways you can do that is engaging with the SU. So in a seamless link, I will now pass over to Vash.

Vaishnavi Ravi

Hi everyone. My name is Vash, short for Vaishnavi. So I'm your VP postgraduate from the Students Union. I'm just here to talk to you about how the Students Union can help and support you throughout your time here at university.

So one of the things about the students union is that it's here to represent all students, including postgraduates, of course.

So there are seven of us full time officers, so we will take a year out of our degree to get to work in the Students Union represent you and we also have 10 part-time officer roles, which you can do alongside your degree. So you're able to run for any of these roles. Well, actually sorry, no, you're able to run for any full time officer roles, but if you've only got one year at Warwick, you can't run for the part-time officer rule as you're doing that alongside your degree.

So on the topic of elections, we've also got a course Rep, department Rep, and some faculty Rep positions opening up too. So with these positions, you can represent your courses and try and make the experience a bit better for everyone.

So we have over 700 Rep positions and the nominations are open now and they close in the 6th of October and voting for this begins on the 9th of October. So you've still got time to get your nominations in.

A lot more information on everything I've said so far will be available on the Students Union website.

So something else I wanted to talk to you about was the advice centre. So we have a professional, confidential and non judgmental service and they can help you with things like housing, financial problems and personal issues as well. So if you can submit an inquiry form, if you ever need them, they'll usually get back to you within two days and they do they offer a really great service.

OK. And we also do other things like we've got food, so we've got many SU outlets such as Curiositea, the Bread Oven, which has now been changed to the Food Station. So we've had a we've had a lot of work done in the SU atrium recently, so hopefully you're all going to like that.

We've also got The Dirty duck and we run events like karaoke, bingo and quizzes throughout the year in some of our venues, so hopefully that's something you'll check out as well.

And another key part of student experience at Warwick would be sports and societies. So you can find out more about this by coming by to our sports and society fairs, which are happening this week. Information on this is also on the Students Union website.

But it's a great way to meet new friends and get involved with the Students Union and the University as well.

So another thing we do is that we've got campaigns, so that's one of our roles as a full time and part-time officers. We try and campaign for things that affect students.

So currently one of our focuses would be cost of living because that's what's impacting students the most. So we're going to try and get things on like free breakfasts, hopefully, in the future. And if you've ever got any campaign ideas you can reach out to us and we'd be happy to support you on that.

So some current active campaigns we have also are in period poverty, we get consent, party smart and reshaping sport and there's more information about this on our website.

Another thing we do, is we do a lot of partying, so we've got, we run our own nightclub, which is called the Copper Rooms, which you'll find out more about.

And we've got events such as POP, Juicy and Reflektor, and all of these you can get tickets on our website for, and we also organise non drinking events and at end of the year ball and award ceremonies, this is like for people involved with societies as well. So yeah, if you want to get involved with any of this, it'll be on our website.

And we will also be sending out weekly newsletters, giving you more information about the events we're running.

So I'll pass it back to Lee and if you've got any questions, feel free to e-mail to reach out.

Prof. Lee Griffin

Sorry. Right, thanks, Vash. A couple of things that came through, which is something all of us are trying to say is try and find yourself a sense of community, particularly for people who have come from overseas, possibly for the first time, for an extended amount of time, you need your support network around you. We're here to help. We really are here to help. So if you are concerned or worried, you will be given a personal tutor, who's someone you can just go to for general queries.

If you don't fancy speaking to them in certain circumstances, you'll have a supervisor. They'll be a senior tutor, and as Vash said, there is the well-being service as well that that, that are here to help you. But build the community around you. That's that's the key thing. You need that support network. It's not just study.

And you guys are now part of the Warwick community. So welcome. Roughly speaking, there are about 10,000 postgraduate students who are joining us over the course of this week and next week, 10,000. Just for context, there's about 18,000 undergraduates.

So meet these people. This is a huge opportunity, really go and meet these people. Years ago, I was lucky enough to actually live overseas. I've lived in Bermuda for a while, I used to work for KPMG. And when I first arrived, what I wanted to do was hang out with all of the Brits because we had shared cultural references. We knew we sort of knew each other, and it came a bit to be like London in the sun.

And I realised after a few months of this, this is why, I'm wasting my time. Really what I should be doing is going out and meeting the Canadians, the Americans, the Bermudians and the Portuguese and the Spanish and the Chinese and everybody else who happened to be there. And it really widened my perspective on life, so I would encourage you to go and meet people from different courses, different cultures, different countries, you will learn from them. They will learn from you and you will have friends that will last you a lifetime.

Remember, please treat everybody with respect. We will always treat you with respect. Please treat everybody with respect, and if that's not happening, shout. It's not acceptable. So come and speak to a personal tutor or somebody similar if you're being disrespected in some way, please. Now I keep mentioning this, I don't have any numbers for this year, but the university is a bit like United Nations, so you will be able to find all sorts of interesting people here. The world is here. Bond with it. Seriously, speak to people. Make some friends. You will keep them for life.

And even if you make some friends and you don't keep them for life, they could be good for a cheap holiday in the future, so it's worthwhile meeting people from from from other countries. There is plenty of support available. We've gone through quite a bit of it and I appreciate it's a huge torrent of information.

The place to start really is going to be with your personal tutor once they've been assigned to you because they will know the answer or they will know who will know the answer.

So that's the place to start. You're not alone while you're here. Apart from these people around you, most of the staff here have had some similar life experience to this. We've all gone through the the the university procedure at some point. You are not alone, you are not unsupported. So if you are feeling lost or bewildered, please reach out.

We are here to help and take care of yourself. Don't forget to eat and sleep and all the things that you need to do, please make sure that you are taking care of yourself, you also need to go through a bit of a transition. So as you progress through your educational career, it gets tougher and tougher and tougher and tougher, so roughly speaking when you were at school, you would repeat back to the teacher what the teacher told you, and then at the end of the year, you'd dump your brain out on a piece of paper and you'd pass an exam.

When you did your undergrad, your tutors would have told you half or 2/3 of the story and expected you to go away and do the rest. You're now at postgrad. We are looking for you to tell us things that we do not know.

That's a big step up. It really is a big step up and the chances are that when you're doing your first assignments, you will feel uncomfortable, and that's probably a good thing. It means that you have got to that point of creation, of synthesis, that you're doing something new.

So again, engage with tutors to make sure you understand, but it's a big step going up into into postgraduate study.

As I mentioned earlier, there's no one way to do this. There really is no one way to do this. However, you want to get through this year and have the best experience you can do it. We will try and support you doing it. We would not try and put a one size fits all onto people.

And particularly at the beginning here, it's going to be a bit difficult. It's the nature of change. A lot of you in a foreign country, you won't know anybody yet, you'll get to know some people. And so it's going to be difficult to begin with. Please make sure that you're you're feeling OK and if you do get worried, just come and speak to us, I know we're saying that quite a bit. If you do have worries that you can't get out of your mind please make sure you speak to the wellbeing services. They're really friendly people. As I said, they'll get back to you really quite quickly.

And there is a community of university staff that stand behind you as well. You are going to hear a lot about these services over the next few days. Do your best to listen, but we do appreciate there is an overwhelming amount of information that you get here. Go and speak to the Students Union. They're a friendly bunch. They're literally just down the road just 200 yards or so down that way. Please don't struggle if you are struggling. Please don't do it in silence. We can help you through all of this. Sounds like a bit of a downer. It's not really what are meant to be. It's we are here to help. That's all I'm trying to say. And all of that really comes down to get involved.

Tell us what you want and need. We can help you out with that sort of thing.

There are formal processes by which this happens as well, so most departments have a thing called a staff Student, Liaison Committee, or SSLC. You will get used to everything at Warwick being dropped down to a random collection of letters, and you'll understand it eventually. It's looked after by the Union and it's a really good pivot point between the student body and faculty. So if you're interested in helping drive change within your course or your departments, get yourself into the SSLC. If you're not, it's fine, speak to people there about larger concerns, and they'll take it up to the staff.

Now each and everyone of you in this room is clearly a brilliant person. We wouldn't have let you in through the doors if that wasn't the case. So congratulations on being here. I hope you have a wonderful year whilst you're with us or however long you're with us for. And good luck, I think is probably all I have to say. So thank you very much.