Last year, the college undertook a review of its provision of graduate education. One thing that came out of the review was the new grad handbook, which was produced by the MCR over the summer. A second idea that emerged is the possibility of the MCR hosting our own academic conference this year (Trinity and Clare Colleges, for example, hold grad conferences).

The College has expressed interest in such a conference, and seems willing to help fund it. We hope to hold it sometime in May (on a Saturday probably), but we’d like to begin soliciting abstracts now in order to gauge your interest.

Papers by MCR members (*including post-docs and alumni*) would last about 15-20 minutes. A paper might treat a single aspect of your research, give an overview of current/new directions in a particular field of study, or summarise the findings of (e.g.) a PhD or MPhil thesis. The papers, though, should be relatively accessible to anyone at the University (not just to people in your specific field or lab!).

You are eligible to participate if you have ever been a member of Queens’.

I’ve designed another survey in order to collect information about who’s interested in participating. The survey requires that you provide your name and email address, and asks you for both a provisional paper title and abstract.

Click here to go to the survey (i.e. to submit an abstract)

The deadline for completing the survey (i.e. submitting an abstract) is Friday, 23 January.

If we can get the conference through and approved, we’ll organise panels and sessions based on the sorts of abstracts that we receive (in other words, the exact format will depend on the interest expressed by the MCR).

We’ll be sure to keep everyone posted about how this whole process is moving along. If you’d like to help organise the conference, or have any input at all about how we should run it, please feel free to email Johanna: mcr-president at quns.cam.ac.uk