The Swimming Gala will be held on the 12 February from 14.00 to 16.00 at the Kings Recreation Centre. It is a free event, open to anyone. Swimmers of all abilities are welcome as long as they can swim at least 25 metres.

There will be serious races but also loads of fun races such as a float race or a ball chase race! There will be prizes and chocolates for the winners.

Teams will be composed of 6-8 people. To register a team students need to fill out the entry form and either email it to sportsdevelopment@kent.ac.uk or drop it off at reception at the Sport Centre. https://www.kent.ac.uk/sports/docs/forms/swimming-entry-form.pdf

The deadline to enter teams is on Wednesday the 8 February no later than noon so don’t hang around!

The editors of Skepsi, a postgraduate-run journal within the School of European Culture and Languages (SECL), are organising an interdisciplinary conference entitled Time to Remember: Anniversaries, Celebration and Commemoration, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the journal, scheduled for 26 May 2016, and are looking for 300-word abstracts for 10 minute presentations.

In keeping with the celebration the conference that has as its focus on memory, or more particularly the phenomenon of the anniversary with its dual attributes of celebration and commemoration, depending on the nature of the event which is being remembered. In either case, it sometimes seems that the manner in which the occasion is marked has become a ritual, an opportunity to contemplate how things have changed in the intervening years, how we travel and come to terms with and reflect on past events. At the same time, however, we also wonder why and for how long we need to remember.

Why do we feel compelled to remember once a year events from the past, not only those from our own lives but those which we may never have personally experienced? What are we remembering? Does the act of remembering gradually metamorphose into a ritual the significance of which become hazy) These and other questions can be debated at our interdisciplinary conference.

Abstracts should be submitted as word documents, with the covering email including the name of the author, institutional affiliation and brief autobiographical detail, as well as any audio-visual requirements. Please send to the conference organising committee at: skepsi@kent.ac.uk by 17 March 2017.

Further details and suggested topics can be found at http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/skepsi/

There’s a lot of helpful content for Kent academics and research postgraduates on the University website: from how to upload your electronic thesis, to applying for funding or making your research outputs eligible for the next REF.

As these services are provided by different University departments, there is no single starting point from which to find all the services and information that are relevant to researchers.

In the Library’s Research Support team, we wanted to explore if such a one-stop shop would be useful and what it could look like. So in October we ran a card sorting workshop with researchers to understand:

• what help do researchers want?
• what information do they need at what point in the research process?
• should the information be presented differently for PhD students and for staff researchers?

Format of the workshop

On a table, we set out five A3 sheets with the stages (nodes) of the research lifecycle (as we saw it) written on them:

1. Your idea
2. Get funding
3. Do the research
4. Publish your research
5. Make the most of your research

We had also written what we thought were the main activities researchers need our help with on around 40 orange Post-It notes.

Then we asked participants to:

1. place the orange Post-Its onto the nodes they thought were most appropriate
2. discuss or provide a running commentary throughout
3. add pink Post-It notes for any elements they thought were missing.
4. suggest better ways of wording things
5. mark with a pen the Post-Its for the “services” they have used.

There was lively discussion among the participants. We deliberately refrained from explaining or making excuses for the way our services or web pages work currently.

Participants

We had 6 participants for the workshop: current PhD students, a recently qualified PhD student now working in research administration, a senior researcher and two mid-career researchers. They represented a mixture of Science, Social Science and Humanities disciplines.

Outcomes

Some of our orange Post-Its got queried, and the participants added quite a few pink Post-Its for things we hadn’t covered or they felt should be in two different places.

The name we had given our first node “Your idea” didn’t resonate with participants and they suggested improvements. For “Publish your research” they suggested expanding/rewording this slightly. They also added a couple of nodes we hadn’t thought of.

We also have lots of comments to work through

It became quite clear that the research lifecycle looks different for PhD students as opposed to more mature researchers, so we will design a separate entry page for both.

Next steps

1. In the coming month, we will analyse the findings in detail.
2. We’ll develop prototypes for separate research support web pages for PhD students and staff researchers.
3. We’ll test the prototypes with researchers in another workshop, planned for March.

If you would like to be involved in the next workshop or have feedback, please email researchsupport@kent.ac.uk

Daniel Harding, Matthew King – pianos
Dan Lloyd – curator

Taking cutting-edge biological research and placing it in the magnificent environment of the Colyer-Fergusson Hall, ‘Cellular Dynamics’ blurs the boundaries between science and the arts.

Accompanied by live music by Phillip Glass, Tarik O’Regan and Gavin Bryars, the event allows the audience to experience the inherent beauty of research data from the University’s School of Biosciences from spectacular fluorescence microscopy to the world’s smallest guitar.

A unique visual and musical exploration of fundamental processes within living cells, ‘Cellular Dynamics’ will reveal fascinating yet rarely-seen elements of the laboratory research environment against an aural backdrop of meditative music.

This event will be accompanied by an exhibition featuring selected images from the School of Biosciences Stacey Collection, which will be on display in the Colyer-Fergusson Gallery during the Spring term.

Admission is free: find out more online.

The Partnership Development Office would like to introduce you to an exciting teaching opportunity that has just arisen and is exclusively for Kent graduates.

Brompton Academy, for which the University of Kent has strategic responsibility for leadership and development, is inviting direct applications from our final year students, for trainee secondary teachers in the following subjects:

• Modern Foreign Languages
• Geography
• History
• English
• Media Studies

If you would like to sustain your relationship with the University of Kent and continue into a teaching career, please read the following Q & A section.

Questions and Answers

Who would benefit from this route into teaching?

If you are in your final year, considering a career in teaching and wanting to start in September 2017.

What are the benefits of this scheme above other routes into teaching?

As you are probably aware, there are numerous routes into teaching, which can be convoluted and confusing. The main benefits of this scheme are:

• A placement starting in September 2017
• A competitive salary in the region of £22k, which includes the salary and training costs
• A guaranteed placement in a forward-thinking, local school for your main placement, for three years
• Support from University of Kent staff, both during the application, interview and work placement stage and also once the programme has started
• A guaranteed paid work placement in Brompton before starting the scheme, for approximately 6 weeks in the school Summer Term (in May and June 2017)
• A significantly reduced teaching load in your first year, to allow for a gentler introduction into teaching while you train

How can I find out further information?

We are holding two information sessions about the scheme, on the following dates:

• Wednesday 1 February, 13.00-15.00 (Stacey Building Lecture Theatre 2, Canterbury campus)
• Tuesday 7 February, 10.00-12.00 (Keynes College Seminar Room 4, Canterbury campus)

If you would like to come along or have any queries, please email R.Spink@kent.ac.uk.