Imperial wins Student Experience prize at Guardian University Awards 2017

The Researching Well Together team from the Graduate School

The Graduate School's Researching Well Together project was awarded the accolade at the annual award ceremony.

Imperial saw off strong competition to take the award, which recognizes work to enhance the wellbeing of the College’s 3,000 doctoral students.

Over the past two years, the Graduate School have developed, in partnership with staff and students, a package of support designed to enhance the wellbeing of research students, in line with the College’s Strategy aim to prioritise the mental wellbeing of the student body, recognising this as both a moral imperative and a pre-requisite of academic success.

Professor Sue Gibson, Director of the Graduate School, said: “Here at the Graduate School the whole team is committed to supporting our postgraduate community, so to have to have that recognised nationally is a real honour.

“There is growing evidence within higher education that shows a decline in the wellbeing of doctoral students. This initiative takes proactive steps to combat this trend and offer our postgraduates the support they need to succeed.”

Researching Well Together

The ‘Researching Well Together’ initiative combines three complementary strands that seek to support the different stages of the postgraduate researcher life cycle.

The writing retreat – initially aimed at students in the later stages of their PhD but now available more widely – is implemented in partnership with the Centre for Academic English. The programme comprises short plenary sessions, one-to-one mentoring, as well as providing time and space for students to write.

Meanwhile, the doctoral student coaching programme gives students the opportunity to attend up to four sessions with a qualified coach. It is open to all research students and is designed to focus on both self-development issues and supporting students to develop effective partnerships with supervisors.

In addition, an online course for supervisors is being developed. The course, inspired by themes emerging from the coaching programme, the writing retreat and student surveys, is tailored to specifically highlight to supervisors the challenges faced by Imperial’s research students. 

In order to contribute towards sector awareness and policy change, the Imperial team has shared its work with delegations from Nagoya University Japan, Nanyang Technological University Singapore, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Reading and the Higher Education Academy (HEA). The project has also been presented at conferences organised by the HEA, UK Council for Graduate Education and the Society for Research into Higher Education.

Laura Lane, Manager of the Graduate School, said: “We are proud that this initiative is being developed as a partnership between staff and students, and for the first time aligns aligns support for doctoral students and supervisors.

“Consultation with students and staff has dominated every stage of this initiative and in creating this three-part programme we’ve successfully met the needs of our diverse postgraduate community.”

Guardian University Awards

The Guardian University Awards 2017 showcases some of the great work carried out by UK universities. Awards covered a number categories from teaching excellence to research impact, with the student experience award seeing the highest number of entrants.

The Guardian’s universities editor, Judy Friedberg, said the awards ceremony, presented by Lauren Laverne on Wednesday night, was a chance to celebrate brilliance at universities. 

She said: “By early June, we’re going to have the results of the teaching excellence framework and we’ll know exactly who has been allocated gold, silver and bronze ratings. While the TEF pits university against university, I like to think of our awards as the Untef.

“We don’t judge all universities by the same clunky metrics. We look for examples of brilliance in all types of universities – and then we trumpet those successes to Guardian readers around the world.