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Cambridge Admissions Office have organised a series of briefing sessions in the coming weeks aimed at Schools Liaison Officers, Faculty/Department Outreach Staff, and any academics and staff members who will communicate with potential students.

The Working with Student Ambassadors Session will be led by the Cambassador team at the Cambridge Admissions Office, and cover the steps involved in recruiting, training and using student ambassadors for events such as open days and masterclasses. This briefing will be suitable for Faculty, Department or College staff who may wish to set up their own ambassador scheme, or who wish to improve ad-hoc events which require student volunteers.

The student-supervisor relationship is vital for success in all research degree programmes. However, the exact role of the supervisor is often unclear and sometimes it may feel as though you are not getting the support you need. This can be frustrating for students and supervisors alike, and can lead to a negative doctoral experience.

Researcher Development has moved to Inkpath.

In order to find scheduled training, book places and record your attendance, head over to Inkpath, select 'single sign-on' and log in with Raven.

Click here to Launch Inkpath

A series of four, hour-long workshops facilitated by Kate Ahl of the Staff Counselling Centre, designed to help participants build sustainable practices to support their wellbeing and resilience in the face of life's inevitable stresses. These sessions were designed as stand-alone workshops that complement one another - so anyone may attend all four workshops or just one on its own. The workshops are delivered via Zoom as a mixture of informational slides and reflective activities to give participants a chance to explore aspects of wellbeing in the context of their own lives. Each workshop begins and ends with a brief guided mindfulness or relaxation exercise.

Workshop 4: Freedom and Responsibility The feeling of being 'stuck' can cause great distress. This workshop looks at how we can identify opportunities for choice and freedom even in situations where our options may seem very limited. We will consider ways to take up our responsibility to ourselves, by making deliberate choices about how to use our time and emotional energy, bolstering our sense of dignity and autonomy.

Zoom joining link will be provided on your booking confirmation email.

This series of four workshops is designed to help participants build sustainable practices to support their wellbeing and resilience in the face of life's inevitable stresses.

Each session in the series is designed as a stand-alone workshop, so anyone may attend all four workshops or just one on its own. The workshops give participants a chance to explore aspects of wellbeing in the context of their own lives.

Originally run in October 2020, and being repeated due to their popularity, Kate Ahl of the Staff Counselling Centre, will introduce each session - an edited recording of the original event - and will be available to answer questions.

Workshop 4: Freedom and Responsibility

The feeling of being 'stuck' can cause great distress. This workshop looks at how we can identify opportunities for choice and freedom even in situations where our options may seem very limited. We will consider ways to take up our responsibility to ourselves, by making deliberate choices about how to use our time and emotional energy, bolstering our sense of dignity and autonomy.

Zoom joining link will be provided on your booking confirmation email.

This session is designed for those from the Dept. of Engineering who have attended a Worktribe training session and would like a refresher of the system. In the session staff will also be shown the reporting functionality in Worktribe, update on processes and PI access/ perspective within the system.

Please Note: It is important that when you book on this course, on your booking confirmation page, click on Add to Calendar to start the process to import the course appointment into your calendar.

• See Related Courses below to take your skills further

Please do not book on this course if you do not work in the School of Physical Sciences, Biological Sciences or Humanities

This course is designed to help School of Physical Sciences, Biological Sciences and Humanities staff involved in the research grant process to gain the knowledge and skills they’ll need to fulfil their role.

Please Note: It is important that when you book on this course, on your booking confirmation page, click on Add to Calendar to start the process to import the course appointment into your calendar.

• See Related Courses below to take your skills further

This session is designed for those from the School of Technology who have attended a Worktribe training session and would like a refresher of the system. In the session staff will also be shown the reporting functionality in Worktribe, update on processes and PI access/ perspective within the system.

Please Note: It is important that when you book on this course, on your booking confirmation page, click on Add to Calendar to start the process to import the course appointment into your calendar.

• See Related Courses below to take your skills further

This course is designed to help ROO contracts staff gain the knowledge and skills they’ll need to fulfil their role within ROO and as a support to departments.

• This is the In Person Face to Face version of the Live Online Worktribe Research Operations Office Contracts course.

Please Note: It is important that when you book on this course, on your booking confirmation page, click on Add to Calendar to start the process to import the course appointment into your calendar.

• See Related Courses below to take your skills further

The location for this training is Heidelberg/ Granada Room in Greenwich House. This is located on the second floor.

Please do not book on this course if you do not work in the School of Technology

This course is designed to help School of Technology staff involved in the research grant process to gain the knowledge and skills they’ll need to fulfil their role.

Please Note: It is important that when you book on this course, on your booking confirmation page, click on Add to Calendar to start the process to import the course appointment into your calendar.

• See Related Courses below to take your skills further

Pregnancy Loss, Infertility & Childlessness: The Current Picture & Best Practice Recommendations for Supporting Colleagues

Within this informative, yet sensitive webinar, delegates are equipped with the knowledge, skills and confidence to more adequately support those experiencing pregnancy loss, infertility and/or childlessness. Notably, delegates have the opportunity to explore the:

• Prevalence of pregnancy loss, infertility and childlessness (showcasing of current research and statistics).
• Physical and psychological impact of each issue (lived experiences to illuminate key implications).
• Impact on partners, who are often overlooked.
• Different types of pregnancy loss and fertility treatments.
• Interventions for pregnancy loss and their potential effects.
• Employee rights at work.
• How to support a colleague who discloses (communication training).
• Available support/where to turn.
• Pro-natal practices and conversations which may be triggering for affected employees.
• Q&A.

Bio: Katy Schnitzler is the Founder of MIST Workshops Ltd., a company providing training, policy writing and support for pregnancy loss, infertility and childlessness at work. Katy is also an academic, and so her training content is informed by the most current research, notably findings from her PhD. Katy has worked with various organisations to improve practice in these prevalent and significant (yet often overlooked) areas - including global energy companies, universities and The NHS.

This year's World Mental Health Day on Thursday 10 October has a theme of suicide prevention.

Yvonne McPartland, Deputy Head of the Staff Counselling Centre, will be delivering a session on suicide prevention for staff in Cambridge. The shocking reality is that suicide is the most common cause of death in men aged under 50 and the suicide rate is currently increasing after many years of decline. This equates to more than 6,000 deaths by suicide annually in the UK and Ireland.

The session is designed to give staff the confidence to challenge the taboo around suicide that makes it such a difficult subject to broach, with colleagues, family members, friends and even total strangers: what is it OK to say, what should I be looking for and what should I do next? The session will increase awareness around suicide, dispel some myths and share some lessons from experience at the Staff Counselling Centre. It will also remind staff what the centre can offer them. The message is that having a conversation could really save a life.

WP Groups and Criteria - What do all the acronyms mean?

Don’t know your POLAR from your TUNDRA? Is FSM the same as PP? Are all students with disabilities considered SEN?

This session aims to demystify the wonderful world of widening participation terms and provide an overview of different groups which may be considered ‘WP’. Using the WP Selection Criteria paper (enrolment key: WP@CAM) as a basis, we will define each term/group and discuss the research behind whether they are underrepresented in higher education or face educational disadvantage, as well as any considerations or shortcomings in some of the criteria. At the end, we will talk through how the priority criteria was constructed.

This introductory session would be suitable for anyone with an interest in widening participation, including both practitioners, managers and senior leads, and will be of particular use for newer staff in this area.

Note: this session has a follow up session which will focus on the more practical side of implementing the WP Selection Criteria.

This training will be held via Zoom, the details of which will be circulated before the session.

Cambridge Admissions Office has organised a series of briefing sessions in the coming weeks aimed at Schools Liaison Officers, Faculty/Department Outreach Staff, and any academics and staff members who will communicate with potential students.

Aimed at all outreach practitioners at the University of Cambridge, this briefing will provide an overview of the recently revised WP Participant Targeting/Selection criteria for use on outreach initiatives. The authors of the paper will explain the rationale behind the paper's revised weighting of WP measures and some of the research underpinning the paper. There will also be some discussion on why targeting/selection is important as opposed to using first come/first serve or relying exclusively on teacher nominations.

This session is accompanied by a skills-based session in April aimed at those with less experience implementing targeting/selection criteria.

Cambridge Admissions Office has organised a series of briefing sessions in the coming weeks aimed at Schools Liaison Officers, Faculty/Department Outreach Staff, and any academics and staff members who will communicate with potential students.

Aimed at outreach practitioners with less experience using targeting/selection on their outreach programmes, this skills-based session will provide examples of good practice implementing targeting/selection drawn from experience running CAO programmes. The session will also explore ways to use other data sources and HEAT to make the process easier.

This session follows on from a briefing delivered in March explaining the new targeting/selection criteria adopted by the Collegiate University.

“Help, my WP programme is so popular I have 10,000 students for only 10 spaces, what do I do?” We’ve all been there, but whether you have an incredibly oversubscribed programme or just want to make sure your programme is working with the right people, this training is for you.

In this session we will go through the University’s agreed upon WP Selection Criteria and discuss how practitioners can implement this in their own activities. We will start by looking briefly at targeting and the tools available to help outreach practitioners target their programme to the right people. We will talk about selection: what types of programmes this type of selection criteria is most suitable for, run through some practical considerations in applying the criteria and suggest some methods for easily sorting your data to help with selections.

This session assumes you have either read the WP Selection Criteria paper (enrolment key: WP@CAM) for background, or have attended the previous WP Groups and Criteria training session.

This training will be held via Zoom, the details of which will be circulated before the session.

Do you have a deadline coming up or a piece of writing that’s long overdue? Or maybe some data analysis that just keeps slipping to the bottom of your to-do list?

Alongside everything else that needs to fit in with our busy research lives, it can be hard to schedule devoted time in which to sit, think, and write. Our online retreats give you time, peace, and space to fend off procrastination and beat writer's block. Each session will provide a friendly and constructive environment in which to meet like-minded peers, discuss challenges and work in a focused way using the established Pomodoro technique.

These virtual retreats are being hosted collaboratively across a number of institutions as part of Academic Writing Month, or ‘Writefest’. Writefest encourages researchers across career stages and institutions to come together in the spirit of collaboration and to foster a supportive, safe, and sustainable writing environment. The retreats will take place nearly every working day during the month of November, and you can book to attend as many or as few as you like (within booking limits for each session).

The table below lists the retreats that are currently planned. Additional dates and times may be added as they become available. Please note that session lengths may vary across hosts.

This day workshop will help you publish your research paper in the most effective way, so that many people will read, cite and build on it, thus progressing your career. The course is for PhD students and postdocs at any stage, whether or not you have already written or published a paper. It focuses on how to write your research paper, how to navigate the peer review process and how to choose a journal for it.

Trainer

Anna Sharman PhD is an experienced researcher trainer who has been an in-house biology journal editor and scientific publishing consultant. She can give insider insights into how to write and publish scientific journal papers most effectively.

Cancellation and Non-attendance Policy

Due to high demand the GSLS will not accept cancellations within 48 hours of the start of the course. Cancellations must be registered by 10am on Sunday 25th September. Any cancellations after this point will be treated as non-attendance.

Non-attendance on this course will result in you being invoiced for £50 to cover expenses.

By booking on this course you are accepting these terms.

The course will help you understand what scientific journals want, how to navigate the peer review process, how to choose the journal that will give you the best results as fast as possible, and how to structure and write your paper. You will get a chance to work on your own next paper, putting together key sentences into a structure and abstract.

Anna Sharman is an experienced researcher trainer who has been an in-house biology journal editor and scientific publishing consultant, can give insider insights into how to publish most effectively. See http://cofactorscience.com/about-us/editors-consultants#anna

Writing at postgraduate level

In this series of four sessions we’ll be taking an in-depth look at various aspects of writing at postgraduate level. Each session will be 90mins, with 30mins at the end for questions and discussion.

Whilst they have been designed as a set of sessions, with each building on from the previous, the individual sessions have been designed to be standalone – which means that you can attend the whole series or just those that particularly speak to you.

Workshop 3: Reader Empathy. Its not just about the writing – its writing for your readers

The primary focus of most writing training is on honing your skills as a writer – and for obvious reasons. But what tends to be overlooked is the reason why we are writing – namely, to be read. Text is generated to be read by a reader and as soon as it has been submitted, it belongs to the reader, a reader who has no recourse to question the writer. This is why the monological form of writing is difficult, as the writer has to structure the text and articulate the content in such a way that they will hopefully be received by the reader as the writer intended it, and so it has to be clearly articulated.

And this is precisely an aspect that novice postgraduate writers often struggle with – the research has been conducted and it is now simply a case of getting it down on the page. As one academic I have spoken to about this put it, they tend to write with no empathy for the reader, thereby forcing the reader to do the hard work of trying to elicit from what they have said what it is that they are actually trying to say. Being widely read has long been known as good training for a writer – but explicitly thinking of the reader when constructing text is often overlooked, when in fact it proffers a useful frame through which to view one’s own writing.

So, in this third session we’ll be looking at the concept of reader empathy and why it’s important to think of your reader when writing. We’ll look at a range of strategies to help you to do this: from the macro perspective of the structure of the entire document, through rhetorical templates, right down to where the reader expects information to be in a sentence.

The other workshops in the series are:

Workshop 1: Why writing at postgraduate level is hard
Workshop 2: The Universitys criterion clearly written - what this means
Workshop 4: The true secret to clarity - multi-level editing

Writing at postgraduate level

In this series of four sessions we’ll be taking an in-depth look at various aspects of writing at postgraduate level. Each session will be 90mins, with 30mins at the end for questions and discussion.

Whilst they have been designed as a set of sessions, with each building on from the previous, the individual sessions have been designed to be standalone – which means that you can attend the whole series or just those that particularly speak to you.

Workshop 4: The true secret to clarity - Multi-level editing

Having got everything down on paper in a first draft is a huge achievement, but this is where the work really starts in the editing – refining the structure, the content, and the language to strengthen your argument and the clarity of your articulation. Academics I’ve spoken to say that on average they go through between 10-20 rounds of edits in their own writing, with the lower end being more in the sciences disciplines and the higher figure more in the arts and humanities disciplines.

In this final session, we’ll be looking at editing from a macro, through the mezzo, and down to the micro level, from the bigger picture of how the entire document hangs together, through how to keep the argument on track at the mezzo level, and then right down to individual paragraphs and sentence, where we’ll be looking at such features as hedging, emphasis, passive voice, and nominalisations.

The other workshops in the series are:

Workshop 1: Why writing at postgraduate level is hard
Workshop 2: The Universitys criterion clearly written - what this means
Workshop 3: Reader Empathy. Its not just about the writing - its writing for your reader

Writing at postgraduate level

In this series of four sessions we’ll be taking an in-depth look at various aspects of writing at postgraduate level. Each session will be 90mins, with 30mins at the end for questions and discussion.

Whilst they have been designed as a set of sessions, with each building on from the previous, the individual sessions have been designed to be standalone – which means that you can attend the whole series or just those that particularly speak to you.

Workshop 2: The Universitys criterion clearly written – what this means

If you’ve ever had a look at the Cambridge Student webpages as to the requirements of postgraduate writing submitted for assessment, you’ll see that the University has only one criterion – and this is that it is ‘clearly written.’ At first glance, this seems both explicit and unequivocal as clarity in all its forms is surely the bedrock not only of postgraduate study, but of academia itself. Yet on further scrutiny, whilst there may be an instinctive consensus that this is a cardinal criterion for postgraduate writing, when it comes to defining what this actually means and how we are supposed to attain it, the matter is far less perspicuous. And indeed, clearly written is not simply an assessment criterion at Cambridge, as the vast majority of guides to academic writing rhapsodise about clarity as an assumed mutually acknowledged objective. Yet rarely is this criterion unpacked.

And so in this second session, we’ll be looking at doing just that – by considering what academics see as the central tenet of ‘clearly written’, namely, argument, and also in what ways the rhetorical expectations of ‘clearly written’ in English may differ from the expectations in other languages.

The other workshops in the series are:
Workshop 1: Why writing at postgraduate level is hard
Workshop 3: Reader Empathy. Its not just about the writing - its writing for your reader
Workshop 4: The true secret to clarity - multi-level editing

Writing at postgraduate level

In this series of four sessions we’ll be taking an in-depth look at various aspects of writing at postgraduate level. Each session will be 90mins, with 30mins at the end for questions and discussion.

Whilst they have been designed as a set of sessions, with each building on from the previous, the individual sessions have been designed to be standalone – which means that you can attend the whole series or just those that particularly speak to you.

Workshop 1: Why writing at postgraduate level is hard

In this first session, we’ll be taking a step back and reflecting for a moment on what it is that you’re actually doing at PG level, as this is far more than simply writing. You’re engaging in a complex, cognitive process of knowledge creation. And so when the writing gets hard, its useful just to remember that what you are doing is far more complicated than just writing – as writing is something that you can all already do and to a pretty high degree of ability. In fact, as we will see, there are numerous factors involved in writing at this level, from the epistemological assumptions of your discipline, through how we construct argument, before we even get to how we construct an articulate sentence – and we’ll be looking at all of these.

The other workshops in the series are:
Workshop 2: The Universitys criterion clearly written - what this means
Workshop 3: Reader Empathy. Its not just about the writing - its writing for your reader
Workshop 4: The true secret to clarity - multi-level editing

A session designed to take you step-by-step through academic writing and publication, with tips and resources to make writing up as simple as possible. The session will demystify the peer-review process, and help you to improve the precision and clarity of your academic writing.

Whether you manage a website, write content or are just interested in how to write for the web, we welcome all abilities to this content community event.

We will show you how users read web content and explore common patterns of behaviour. Once you’ve understood how users consume your content, you’ll feel more confident that you’re helping to provide a good user experience.

The session will begin with a quick update from the Digital Presence Programme.