Author Archives: Allie Burnett

Drugs – safety advice and legal high facts

Whatever your attitude is towards drugs, we want you to be aware of the risks. This includes risks to your health and wellbeing, as well as legal consequences.

The best way to stay safe is to avoid drugs but here are some things to consider:

Everyone’s tolerance to drugs is different
Mixing substances (including alcohol) can be unpredictable and dangerous
You can never be sure of an illegal drug’s strength or content
Tell your friends if you have taken drugs in case of any difficulties. Also, if you know one of your friends has taken drugs, look out for them to help keep them safe.

For more drugs related advice, visit the Talk to Frank website.

Warning: Public Health England has recently issued a warning about particularly dangerous drugs, which mimic cannabis and MDMA (ecstasy), in circulation in the region. Users have experienced life threatening symptoms including agitation, delirium and loss of consciousness. Read the full Public Health Statement.

The truth about legal highs

Legal or herbal highs are designed to mimic drugs (e.g. cocaine or cannabis) but may not have been tested for human consumption. New drugs are developed all the time but we don’t know the long-term effects on the brain and body.

The new ‘Psychoactive Substances Act’ means that it’s now illegal to supply any ‘legal highs’ or ‘herbal highs’ for human consumption. This includes selling or giving psychoactive substances to anyone for free, even to friends.

Punishments range from a formal warning to seven years in prison.

Get support

If you need support, you can speak to one of our trained advisers in the Wellbeing Team. Other places you can go for advice include:

The University’s Policy

We also recommend you familiarise yourself with the University’s Drugs Policy.

Image credit: Pills by Grumpy-Puddin. CC BY 2.0.

Dr Bike at Medway – now extended

Dr Bike are now offering their services to University of Greenwich staff and students as well as University of Kent staff and students.

The next date Dr Bike is at Medway campus is Thursday 15 February 2018. Find Dr Bike outside the Student Hub 11.30- 14.30 for your free bike check-up.

Dr Bike are trained bicycle mechanics who regularly come onto campus to check and adjust your bike for free.

Additional work will be quoted individually but will always be at a special reduced rate.

For more information visit the transport webpages.

Mindfulness courses to improve student resilience

Colleagues are invited to attend this session of the ‘New Approaches to Teaching for Experienced Staff at Kent’ series taking place on Tuesday 27 February 2018, 12.55-14.00 in the UELT Seminar Room, Canterbury.

Presented by Dr Elisabeth Curling, School of Biosciences.

As an academic member of the School of Biosciences, I have seen the incidence of acute anxiety within our student population rise year by year. This trend is seen across the HE sector. In a recent 2016 YouGov article (1) one in four students suffer from mental health problems, of which 74% are anxiety related. A research paper from Cambridge published in December 2017 proved in a randomised trial that Mindfulness training in helped students to be more resilient to stress, particularly at exam time (2).

We have so far run 3 X 5 week Mindfulness courses and drop-in sessions (with Lorraine Millard, a qualified Mindfulness teacher) for Bioscience students, and I will outline some of the positive feedback we have received in my presentation. The 5 week course has now been adopted by the School of Arts, and other schools could benefit from introducing Mindfulness to help their anxious students reach their full potential.

Dr Elisabeth Curling is a lecturer in the School of Biosciences with particular interests in immunology, human physiology and student welfare. After completing the 8 week Mindfulness course for staff in 2015, she has been running successful 5 week Mindfulness courses for Bioscience students (from October 2016).

References:

1. https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/08/09/quarter-britains-students-are-afflicted-mental-hea/

2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(17)30231-1

To book a place please email cpdbookings@kent.ac.uk

Postgraduate student? Take the PRES or PTES survey and get a £10 voucher

We are strongly committed to enhancing the quality of your postgraduate student experience at Kent.

About the Postgraduate Research student Experience Survey (PRES)

If you’re a research student, you will be emailed a unique web link to take the PRES. Once you have completed the survey, you will be emailed your £10 Amazon voucher.

The Postgraduate Research student Experience Survey (PRES) is an opportunity for you to provide us with feedback on many aspects of your postgraduate student experience including supervision, academic support, learning resources, skills training, career development and wellbeing.

About the Postgraduate Taught student Experience Survey (PTES)

If you’re a Master’s student, you will be emailed a unique web link to take the PTES. Once you have completed the survey, you will be emailed your £10 Amazon voucher.

The Postgraduate Taught student Experience Survey (PTES) is an opportunity for you to provide us with feedback on many aspects of your postgraduate student experience including teaching and learning, assessment and feedback, learning resources, skills training and career development.

Why should I complete the survey?

We very much hope that you will take this chance to have your say and make your views heard for the benefit of current and future postgraduate students.

The responses you give will be taken very seriously by the University and we will ensure that the postgraduate student community is informed of actions taken in response to feedback.

We are keen to obtain a good response rate so that we can be assured that any changes we make in response to the survey will fully represent the views of all our postgraduate students.

Call for papers for interdisciplinary conference exploring metamorphosis and law

Kent Critical Law Society has issued a call for papers exploring the relationship between metamorphosis and law in advance of its Critical Law Conference in March.

Conference organisers are interested in research that critically examines the different ways law has evolved and changed the world. Some examples include: the adaptations of the law to suit social, political, economic, or developmental change; legal historical analyses of the evolution of law; emergences of new legal fields; regressions; and the need for and possibility of reform.

A non-exhaustive list of possible topics includes:

Law and social change
Transitional justice
Adaptation to crises
Histories of law
Change in the international legal order
The progression of human rights
The effects of technological advancement
Global development
The emergence of alternative dispute resolution
Political shifts and the change of law
Reform and the housing crisis
Sustainable development
Newly emerging fields of law
Law and metamorphosis in literature
The changing face of crime and justice
Legal psychologies

Papers are welcomed from academic staff, undergraduate students, postgraduate students and practitioners across all disciplines. Proposals from literary, scientific, socio-political, economic, historical and philosophical fields are particularly encouraged.

Contributors are asked to submit an abstract of no more than 250 words, together with a biography of no more than 50 words, to conferencekclsoc@kent.ac.uk by Friday 23 February 2018. Any informal enquiries can be directed to: presidentkclsoc@kent.ac.uk

Kent Critical Law Society (KCLS) is a student-led critical lawyers’ group that aims to interrogate the social, economic and political dimensions shaping legal doctrine and contemporary society.

This year’s conference on ‘Law and Metamorphosis’ will be held on Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 March in the Grimond Building on Kent’s Canterbury campus.

Templeman Library study spaces

Bookable group study booths

We now have four booths available for booking, between 9:00 – 21:00, near the IT and Library support desk in Block C on Floor 1. The spaces are perfect for group study so we’ve put them on our booking system for exactly that purpose! You can find a slot through isbooking.kent.ac.uk.

Find a study space in the Library

Similar to our popular Find a PC service, Find a Study Space live availability screens will now show where desks are free in the library.

Sensors under desks can detect whether a space is free or not and the information is then displayed online and on screens throughout the library.

Our trial of this service last summer was successful and we received good feedback from students who used it to find a space to study.

No other information or personal data is collected from the sensors; they’re there to save you time when looking for desk space and to give us a better idea of how the library is used.

Group study rooms

There are two new group study rooms available for booking in D block on the Ground Floor, making a total of 8 group study rooms!

All can be booked up to four weeks in advance and have a large screen and student PC, perfect for collaboration.

Writing Consent: Reframing Sexual Violence with Words

Speaker: Bridget Minamore

Date: Wednesday 7 February 2018

Time: 18:30 – 20:30

Venue: Cornwallis Northwest Seminar Room 5

Admission: Free

Discuss the narratives of sexual violence and consent with Bridget Minamore and explore your personal writings style to convey your thoughts and feelings on the topic.

Bridget is a writer from and based in SE London. She is part of the creative team behind Brainchild Festival and works with charity My Body Back, a project to empower women who have experienced sexual violence. She mostly writes about London, pop culture, race and feminism, as well as the intersections between them.

Find out more and book on Kent Union’s website.

Awareness into Action: Supporting survivors of childhood sexual abuse

Speaker: Silke Grygier

Date: Friday 9 February 2018

Time: 18:30 – 20:00

Venue: Cornwallis Northwest Seminar Room 5

Admission: Free

Join Silke and her team of fellow survivor activists from her ‘Not The Only One’ project as they discuss sexual abuse in childhood, the consequences and understanding our reactions to trauma.

Themes will be addressed through lived experiences, learnings from activism in the survivor community and in a professional practice. The presentation will be followed by a workshop for survivors.

Find out more and book on Kent Union’s website.

The University of Kent Players present ‘The Ghost Train’ this April

The University of Kent Players are proud to present Arnold Ridley’s ‘The Ghost Train’ this April.

The University of Kent Players was founded in 2013 by Neil Hornsey and made up of staff at Kent who love the theatre.

The plot revolves around a party of assorted railway travellers who find themselves stranded in the waiting room of an isolated country station in the evening. Despite the stationmaster’s weird stories of a ghost train, they decide to stay the night in the waiting room. Soon they regret this decision as ghostly and not so ghostly apparitions materialise, before a young man reveals the true reason behind the night’s events.

The play will be performed on the 12 -14 April at the Gulbenkian and tickets can be booked online.

All profits made from tickets sales and programme sales will go to Canterbury and Coastal Stroke Association