Yearly Archives: 2015

Postgrad Funding Pop-Up events

Your chance to find out more about Kent’s funding opportunities for graduates and alumni.

Kent has some great schemes including the £10,000 bursaries, the £1000 Graduate School Scholarship and the 10% Loyalty Discount as well as the Templeman Scholarship for Master’s students and the Alumni Research Scholarship.  And don’t forget the location specific funding for our specialist postgraduate centres in Brussels, Paris, Rome and Athens. To find out more meet one of our advisors between 12 and 2pm at a location to suit you at the Canterbury or Medway campus.

  • Pilkington on 10.03.15
  • Darwin Foyer on 10.03.15
  • Dockyard on 12.03.15
  • Eliot Foyer on 12.03.15
  • Keynes Foyer on 17.03.15
  • Rutherford Foyer on 19.03.15
  • Sports Centre Foyer on 24.03.15
  • Marlowe Foyer on 26.03.15

Business workshops

Date and time Topic Description Location
Wednesday 4 March, 14.00-15.00 Relationship in communication This session tackles the aspect of communication. A harmonic relationship will have a positive impact on the exchange at a rational level. Inversely, negative feelings like aggression or distrust disturb rational communication. Efforts to convince somebody of a new idea will remain unsuccessful when communicating negative emotions. Gillingham Building G2-04
Thursday 12 March, 11.00-12.00 Managing and calculating risk Sometimes technical skills alone are not decisive in mapping up strategies and calculated risk taking. Participants are encouraged to enter into serious business decisions that will spark up personal entrepreneurial qualities, commitment to work contract, opportunity seeking, goal setting, systematic planning and self-confidence Gillingham Building G2-04
Thursday 19 March, 14.00-15.00 Great ideas, great possibilities, great businesses It is amazing how many ideas can be generated within a short period of time. This session brings out the experience in practice that everyone has many more ideas and creativity potential than they imagined. Gillingham Building G4-03

Facilitator: Mabel Darkwaah Ayisi

Mabel is a University of Kent Medway Community Scholar with seven years’ experience providing advisory services for SMEs, conducting value chain analysis and crating market linkages.

She has championed the use of local resources for economic development and has conducted over 120 business development, and business management skills sessions.

Ms Ayisi possesses an extensive background in facilitation of business plan preparation and evaluation for local entrepreneurs and associations. She is currently pursuing an MSC in Value Chain Management.

To book email mda24@kent.ac.uk or turn up to the session.

Reflect, Plan, Develop: refreshed booklet and website now available

HR is pleased to announce that a refreshed RPD booklet and website is now available.

Thank you to everyone who has taken part in the review of the RPD framework over the last year; your comments have been extremely valuable and have helped to shape the new RPD framework, as well as provide areas of focus as this framework evolves. An overview of the changes are available on the News pages of the RPD website.

Both the RPD website and booklet can be accessed through the HR homepage by clicking on the link to Reflect, Plan, Develop.

Please make sure that you book on to one of the available RPD training sessions that are running throughout 2015 if you feel it will be valuable to you. For more information on the content of these sessions, please go to the RPD section of the Learning and Development website or complete the online booking form.

Sessions will begin on 19 March 2015 and will be available at both Canterbury and Medway campuses.

Help develop University of Kent People Strategy

This is an invitation to provide input to the University of Kent People Strategy for 2015 – 2020.

We will be holding a series of focus groups in March 2015. At each focus group session, we will provide a brief overview of recent survey findings that highlight themes that have arisen to date. We will then work through a set of questions with you to obtain your further thinking on topics that staff have indicated are of particular interest and where we would welcome additional input. Time will also be allocated within the session to raise anything that you believe is important that we may have missed.

A set of dates, times and locations for the focus groups are available on the website here along with instructions on how to sign up. A number of targeted sessions will also be offered later in March.

Please do consider signing up for a focus group session if you would like the opportunity to provide input into our People Strategy development.

If you have questions about the focus groups or the People Strategy development, please get in touch with Cindy Vallance at c.d.vallance@kent.ac.uk

Background on the surveys: We recently conducted two brief staff surveys; one to new staff who have been at Kent less than 18 months and a second random sample of staff who have been at Kent for more than 18 months. We are using the results of these surveys to consider and identify priorities for the next five years in relation to our staff practices and processes. Consideration of these priorities will lead to the creation of our University of Kent People Strategy for 2015 – 2020.

National Careers Week, 2-6 March

We have the following Careers and Employability events for you to attend.

To book your place email medwaycareers@kent.ac.uk

Monday 2 March

  • CV bootcamp for beginners, 1-2pm, PK017

Tuesday 3 March

  • Social media and networking for career success, 12-1pm, PK017
  • Getting the most out of the Employability & Volunteering Toolkit, 1-2pm, PK017

Wednesday 4 March

  • Searching for part-time work (please bring your CVs along), 12-1pm, PK017

Thursday 5 March

  • GradsKent drop-in, 12-1pm, Pilkington Building, ground floor
  • GradsKent: make yourself stand out, 1-2pm, PK017

Friday 6 March

  • Developing your career, 12-1pm, Blake Building, B028
  • Teaching – a focus on the PGCE and School Direct, 1-2pm, PK017

Further information on these events.

Turkey and Cyprus peace and stability conference

Dr Neophytos Loizides and Professor Feargal Cochrane of the School of Politics and International Relations have assisted in the organisation of and will be taking part in the ‘Turkey and Cyprus Regional Peace & Stability Conference’.

The conference will be held at USAK House in Ankara, Turkey on Saturday 28 February 2015.

It will map the current situation in Cyprus, address the threats from the on-going conflict escalation in the region and identify alternative routes towards a solution.

The keynote speakers of the event are two eminent statesmen, Former Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou and Former Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hikmet Çetin.

The event has been organised by Cyprus Academic Dialogue and has been co-sponsored by several organisations including the Diplomacy@Kent Beacon project, International Strategic Research Organisation (USAK), the Australian High Commission Nicosia, the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA), the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the Australian Embassies in Ankara and Nicosia.

Kent receives double accolade for payment processing

Payment processing at the University and staff involved received a double accolade at the WPM Annual User Conference Awards 2015.

WPM are the process specialists and payment experts within the higher and further education sectors. The annual awards recognise the success of institutions and individuals who are achieving success with the WPM Payment Platform, and are developing payment acceptance best practice in the sector.

At the ceremony in Manchester, Neil Oliver, Assistant Director of Finance at the University, received an award to acknowledge his contribution over the years in engaging with other WPM users and hosting visitors wishing to learn about the University’s systems.

Holger Bollmann, Director at WPM said: ‘With so many fantastic examples of efficient and effective online payment acceptance in the HE and FE sector, it was extremely hard to recognise just a few standout individuals and institutions this year. I would like to wish warm congratulations to Neil for winning this award.’

The University also received an HE award nomination along with the Universities of the Arts London, Liverpool and Sheffield under the category of Payments Champion, which recognises institutions from the HE and the FE Sector making best use of their WPM systems and benefiting from their efficiencies.

Further information on WPM is available on their webpages: http://www.wpmeducation.com/

Professor Nuria Triana Toribio inaugural lecture

Professor Nuria Triana-Toribio from the Hispanic Studies Department will give her KIASH Inaugural lecture , ‘Spanish Film Cultures’ on Friday 13 March at 6pm in Grimond lecture Theatre 2.

No film comes about without a film culture to sustain it. Film cultures are the institutions, legislation, working practices and cultural actors that encourage some kinds of film and prove fallow ground for others. In Spain during the long transition to democracy from Franco’s dictatorship (1968-1978) a new film culture was built that distanced itself from the old. However, the transition in film, like the transition in politics, was more easily imagined than achieved. Elements of the old film culture persisted, even among the progressives, while film historians, signed up to the project of the new film culture, have been reluctant to acknowledge these vestigial traces, which have become the ‘bad objects’ of Spanish film studies. But as Ezra Pound once said, ‘you can’t know an era merely by knowing its best’. This lecture will consider the development of Spain’s dominant film culture since 1968 by examining one such bad object, the popular f ilm magazine Nuevo Fotogramas, long considered too frivolous to have played any serious part in the transition, in spite of the cosmopolitan outlook of its writers and editors.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Grimond Foyer.

Further details cab be found on the SECL website.

How Machiavellian was Machiavelli?

Professor Quentin Skinner will be asking this question at our annual Renaissance Lecture on Tuesday, 24th March 2015 at 6pm in Lecture Theatre 1, Grimond Building. All are welcome to attend, and there will be a wine reception afterwards.

One of Machiavelli’s aims in The Prince is to persuade us that the truly virtuoso prince should follow the virtues so far as possible, but should be ready to abandon them when this alternative seems necessary for the maintenance of the state. This is certainly what Machiavelli appears to claim about the virtue of justice. But if we turn to his examination of the so-called ‘princely’ virtues, especially clemency and liberality, we encounter a very different argument. Machiavelli complains that, in our corrupt modern world, some actions regarded as virtuous may in fact be instances of vice, while other actions condemned as vices may in fact be virtues. The aim of the lecture is to disentangle Machiavelli’s complex views about the relationship between virtue and political success.

Professor Quentin Skinner is Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London. His research centres on early-modern Europe, and one of his principal interests lies in the Italian Renaissance. He has published books on Machiavelli, on early Renaissance political painting, on ideals of civic virtue, and has edited Machiavelli’s The Prince.

Turner Prize winning artist, Jeremy Deller, to give Artist’s Talk

Visiting Artist Talks Series Jeremy Deller
5.30pm – 6.30pm, Thursday 26th February

Free. Everyone Welcome.

The Galvanising Shop. [Note; this is the new venue for the The Visiting Artist Talks Series]
The School of Music and Fine Art
University of Kent, Medway Campus
Chatham Historic Dockyard
Kent ME4 4TE

Jeremy Deller is an artist working across media with a multi-faceted practice that uniquely engages with our popular and traditional culture.
Winner of the Turner Prize (2004) and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale (2013).
Jeremy Deller is one of the UK’s most celebrated contemporary artists.