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I am the Westmere scholar for the College of Arts and Law and there are five of us in
total, one for each college, and we are in charge of making sure that people know about
the space and use the ground floor space for social events and other academic events. So,
we run things that might help you with your academic progress. Things like how to present
at conferences. But we also run social events. So, film nights and poetry readings.
I am the Wellbeing Officer here at Westmere. So I'm organising wellbeing events so basically
focused on more mental health and physical health. So we do free yoga sessions for all
postgraduate researchers. And we are going to start with some mindfulness courses next
year. Also free for everyone. Some Tai Chi. We are hopefully going to do a Westmere 5K
in the Spring. But now that's on camera we have to do it so that's good! And we might
start a running group as well.
In the hub, we've had events organised which are both academic and non-academic and I've
got involved in pretty well all of those. They are a really good way of meeting the
other postgraduates who are working here in a variety of disciplines so you get to know
quite a lot of people.
Well, so far we've had a kind of networking event, we've had a Halloween night and there
is a Christmas film event planned I believe. It's been nice. Yes. It's just nice to have
time away from your desk, socialise with people and to get to know everyone throughout the
building.
There's a lot of workshops on after PhD life. I think there's one coming up as well that
I'm going to, specifically for Arts and Law, specifically again for outside academia stuff
because I think that's a bit more difficult to see what you can do or what's available
as well. And then some friends of mine have been to a lot of workshops on statistics.
For my project it's not that necessary but people that have come up and only done English
Language and then you come here and some people do corpus stuff, so with a lot of text, so
the University offers a lot of workshops and help on sort of filling the gaps in your knowledge.
One of my supervisors he actually had our postgraduate colloquium right in Westmere
so they can actually have the reception in the back garden which is really nice so I'm
kind of looking forward to that. Once they've done the landscaping of course!
There's been loads of activities in the Westmere hub already. I've been very lucky to take
part in them as a postgraduate research student but hopefully in the future I'll be able to
organise my own events. I know the space is ideal for conferences and with the various
fora that there are in the college it seems like an ideal space to do it.