Postgraduate Research Community 

Fostering a vibrant and cohesive postgraduate community is a key part of the Doctoral Academy mission. Below you will find activities designed to encourage collaboration, engender relationships, create networks and sustain a vibrant intellectual environment. We encourage all postgraduate research students to engage with these activities as much as possible. While supervisors and mentors are important, it is ultimately the student body that makes a postgraduate programme thrive.  

Training and Training Schools 

While training is a requirement, it is also an opportunity to meet students from across the university and beyond. We often design our training to incorporate a community building dimension, providing space for cross-disciplinary conversation and debate. The Training Schools are intensive multi-day events that happen each year and are a particularly useful time to meet your fellow postgraduate students.  

Keep an eye out on the Training Hwb for details on cross-disciplinary and inter-institutional events. Some trainings (like the Gregynog Theory School) provide unique funded opportunities for students to meet each other around particular questions or problems in distinctive settings.  

The PGR Network 

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University Lecture Series 

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The Postgraduate Conference 

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Competitions and Public Engagement  

Aberystwyth University encourages students to get involved in a range of outward-facing activities. Below we list a number of opportunities for extending the reach of your research and engaging with wider audiences.  

The Conversation: an online magazine that publishes academic research for a popular audience. The Conversation holds regular training courses on how to write for their platform.  

Three Minute Thesis: an international competition that focuses on communicating your research to user groups, civic audiences and the wider public. Students record a video of themselves explaining their research to a popular audience in under three minutes. The competition is currently held by over 900 universities in more than 85 countries. If you are interested in competing in the 3MT please look at our dedicated page.  

Dance Your PhD: The Dance Your PhD contest is run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science magazine, and sponsored by the artificial intelligence and quantum technology company SandboxAQ. Contestants submit an interpretive dance of their PhD work to YouTube and then submit a link with their entry form. The annual deadline is usually around the end of February. We are planning to offer a workshop to support DYPhD submissions soon so watch this space.