PhD Day at the beautiful Sentralen locale was a success with approximately 100 attendees. After a lengthy pandemic period, just seeing so many PhDs gathered together under one roof was refreshing! We started off the day with a speech from our Vice Rector, Per Martin Norheim-Martinsen and a round of info on the supports our kind folk over at the University Library Research team can provide, followed by a brief orientation on PhD-forum and what we do.
Presenters held parallel sessions on a variety of topics from kappa and thesis writing, to how to handle aspects of writing for academic journals, to managing all the data we deal with on a day-to-day basis. We hope that all who attended found these sessions helpful. The aim of this event was to bring us PhDs, especially those who began their journey during the pandemic, up to speed. Parallel sessions, were one thing we hoped would contribute to this. Thank you to all the session holders who offered their advice and wisdom! You will find the compiled PowerPoint files at the end of this blog post.
In between breakout sessions, three recent graduates, Håvard Aaslund, Sissel Lea Heggernes, and Andreea Ioana Alecu, took part in a panel Q&A session led by Kristin Solli to share their experiences on thesis writing, focused primarily on what they wished they had known at the start of the PhD research. Several excellent questions were presented and learning from those more experienced than us proved quite enlightening.
Over the course of the day, much time was provided for mingling and networking over coffee, lunch, and dinner. This is an important aspect of the PhD experience that a lot of us have missed and we hope participants could make new connections across programs and fields!
We wish to thank everyone who contributed to and attended this event for making it such a success. And as always, we would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for how we might create needed events to set us all on the right track following a rather strange period in PhD-research history!
Slides from the presenters :