Last week, the RSC celebrated the great work of its HDR students with a wonderful day of presentations in the Birch Lecture Theatre. A good crowd was on hand to listen to thirteen second-year HDR students who presented their research in an eight-minute format, during which they all talked about the personal motivation for choosing their PhD project. The presentations were uniformly excellent and there was a great vibe during the day, with a lot of interesting questions from the audience. The emcee, Michael Dlugosch, did a fantastic job and keeping the day running smoothly and to schedule. Prizes were awarded to the best presentations, as voted for by the attendees. The successful recipients were Josh Mitchell (O’Mara Group), Junna Hayashi (Carver Group), Nick Hill (Coote Group), and Joe Kaczmarski (Jackson Group). The awards were presented by the RSC’s Director, Professor John Carver, and the Dean of Higher Degree Research, Professor Imelda Whelehan.
Following the award ceremony, the students surprised John with a large cake and rendition of Happy Birthday in celebration of his 60th birthday - Happy Birthday John!
As part of the lead-up to the Expo presentation day, students took part in two workshops aimed at improving the communication of their research. The first of these was an ‘Effective Writing Workshop', run by the ANU Academic Skills and Learning Centre, and the second was a ‘Presenting Science Workshop’ led by staff from the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science (CPAS). There was a good number of students at both of these half-day workshops, and all of the attendees enjoyed themselves. The attendees would like to thank the staff from ANU Academic Skills and Learning and CPAS for sharing their valuable knowledge and tips regarding the effective communication of science.
The day of presentations was also a great opportunity to welcome the recently arrived Summer Scholars to the school, and to introduce them to the wide range of research being undertaken by the HDR students at the RSC. The RSC hopes they are now feeling inspired to do a PhD in chemistry!
The RSC HDR Student Representative Committee (Joe Kaczmarski, Michael Dlugosch, Simon McKenzie, George Laffan and Kass Von Nessi) thank all of those people who presented or attended the Expo and workshops. The comittee would also like to thank the members of the RSC administration staff for their help leading up to the event, and ANU photographer Stuart Hay for taking the beautiful photos used in the Expo booklets.
