Grand Meeting 2018 included social and academic elements
Botanical Gardens, plagiarism run and sounding each other out about theses all found a place at the Grand Meeting – the annual meeting for AGRO PhD students and their supervisors.
The annual Grand Meeting for PhD students and their supervisors took place on Monday and Tuesday, April 9-10, 2018,. On Monday afternoon, AGRO’s PhD students from Foulum and Flakkebjerg gathered in Aarhus for the students-only part of the event.
This part of the meeting was organised by the three of our PhD students who are on the PhD committee, namely Carmina Cabral, Betina Nørgaard Pedersen and Nils Onnen. I would like to thank them for their good efforts that enabled the events on Monday to be a huge success.
The day included a visit to the Botanical Gardens and a so-called plagiarism run, where the PhD students visited well-known sites in Aarhus while preparing questions for PhD school leader Jes Madsen regarding the plagiarism test of PhD theses. At the end of the day, there was dinner.
It is important for our PhD students from Flakkebjerg and Foulum to gather together a couple of times a year so that they can get to know each other, exchange experiences, and discuss the challenges they meet during the course of their PhD studies. It is also important that we have PhD students who are willing to carry out PhD committee work.
Carmina, Betina and Nils:
In the Botanical Gardens and Aarhus town:
Focus on the PhD thesis
On Tuesday afternoon the almost 70 PhD students from AGRO and their supervisors met for a day during which the focus was on assessment of PhD theses and qualifying exam reports. Talks were given by previous PhD students who had survived writing a thesis, and who provided good tips based on their own experience.
This was followed by a talk from the PhD committee based on a thorough review of the past many years of assessments of PhD theses in AGRO. Both the most important critical and most praiseworthy points were reviewed.
After lunch, Tove Hedegaard Jørgensen from the Department of Bioscience and ST Learning Lab took us through the workshop “Supervision during thesis writing and assessment”. There was group work in which students and supervisors worked together on identifying the challenges that face the student. Afterwards, the discussion was about who has the responsibility for meeting these challenges.
Since the interaction between supervisor and student is so important, it was good to see that many supervisors and young co-supervisors from both Flakkebjerg and Foulum participated in the Grand Meeting. This made it possible to see things from both sides and to have some good discussions – and contributed to making the workshop a big success.
Slides from all the talks, containing many good things, will be uploaded on AGRO’s website under PhD programme. When you visit the site, you can also take a look at AGRO’s PhD course programme, forms, guidelines and other goodies that can be good for you to know about.
PhD student Carmina Cabral helped organise AGRO’s Grand Meeting 2018 – and she also participated inti. She was very enthusiastic about the whole thing.
- The first day started with final preparations for the trip to the AGRO Grand Meeting 2018 - but first, the social event. The sun was shining and the atmosphere was great, anticipating a rare reunion for us – the PhD students at the Department of Agroecology, usually spread out around the country. We had the chance to meet old and new friends, exchange experiences and debate plagiarism around the amazing city of Aarhus. The tone was light, laughter was abundant, and we finished the day with ice cream and insightful discussions, preparing for the full day ahead of us. The Grand Meeting programme had something for everyone, both if you were a starting, in-between, or almost-done PhD student, and even if you were a supervisor! It was great to get to know how to survive the thesis, and mostly, how supervisors and students have, sometimes, different points of view on challenges that one can come across during the PhD project. In the end, it was very positive to understand that all of us go through the same challenges! The second day finished with heartfelt “see you soons” all around and a feeling of a job well done, anticipating the coming challenges and, of course, the next Grand Meeting.
The PhD committee will not go into hibernation until the next Grand Meeting, but has more events coming up.
One of these entails organising autumn brush-up courses in both Flakkebjerg and Foulum for supervisors with Tove Hedegaard Jørgensen as the teacher. The next Grand Meeting is planned for the spring of 2019, where one of the topics will be presentation techniques.