The SME-DTN and GRADnet Training Day was held on Wednesday, 19 June 2024 at International Students House,  London, W1. This was a great opportunity for our SME-DTN cohort, SEPnet postgraduate researchers and undergraduates to network and learn new skills they can put into practice.

Thank you to our presenters for delivering informative and insightful workshops:

Short talk, Lasting impression by Dr Jamie Gallagher:  Being able to describe what you do, and why, is an essential skill for any researcher. Our trainer is a Science Communicator and previous international 3MT winner who will show researchers how to turn research into the most interesting, engaging and memorable presentation possible. Discover the hints and tips that will make their talk stand out from the crowd, understand the use of body language and visualisation in presenting, how to banish nerves and engage your audience to give a confident performance.

Skills for life by Julia Shalet, Product Doctor: Persuasion is all about swaying the opinions of others and influencing is how you motivate them to act, without coercion! The goal of this session is for you to feel comfortable, confident and in control when trying to persuade and influence others. We’ll work through a simple process that you can apply to any situation and explore a model to help you vary your style to suit different personality types.   

Python/Data Analysis by Dr Tim Kinnear, University of Kent: The ability to interact with data and to present data in a way which communicates understanding about those data is a vital part of research science. This workshop aims to provide an opportunity to work with some example datasets and use guided programming in Python to access, process and produce plots of these data, with a goal of discovering features worth exploring and determining how to explore those features.  This is intended to help one develop skills in approaches to working with diverse data and understanding how to effectively use Python for such investigations in a way which should be able to be transferred to one’s own work.

Delegates feedback was very positive:

• Thank you so much for today’s session. The entire package was fabulous!;
• Great to have a Python refresher;
• Thought-provoking day;
• I enjoyed taking a day away from my research and to learn some new skills!