This month we enjoyed a wonderful off-site retreat.  So many people have told me and other exec members how much they enjoyed the event, and that’s really heartening.  Such events are expensive in terms of everybody’s time, as well as the $, so I’m super happy that lots of people got value from it. Thanks again to Ilana and Vicki for organizing, the exec apart from me for choosing the sessions, and to all those who “volunteered” to participate in sessions. 

We received a lot of great feedback via the two sticky note sessions.  I took over S1165 one afternoon and did a first cut of clustering the notes on the big table.  There are lots of great ideas that are easily actionable and would improve our lives and the way we work.  However, there are a couple of larger clusters around internal information flow and collaboration that we need to unpack and maybe get additional information about. 

I really enjoyed Michael’s Laureate launch week, a wonderful event despite the fire alarm interruption.  Great also to see so many QCR people there, as well as lots of senior university people. 

RSS is on this week, and this morning I spoke at “RSS Pioneers” a career-focused workshop for senior PhD students and early career researchers.  It was a great panel with great questions and discussion, but with many similarities to the topics we discussed at our retreat.  Some things are universal concerns and worries. 

The university seems to have made the whole HDR process earlier this year, so we need to get cracking to post topics and turn on our annual recruitment campaign.  See the piece below on what you can do to help with this really important process for our Centre.   There is also a call for EGH400 capstone projects for the mid-year intake.  Everybody can suggest topics, but HDR students and postdocs should talk to their supervisors first. 

Enjoy the issue. 

Peter