PGT

For much of November I have been undergoing Post Graduate Training (PGT) and though the time invested desvered a blog post.

The university provides two forms of PGT; training by the faculty (Engineering, Science, and Maths) and training by the school (Electronics and Computre Science). Both are designed to equip all new post grads with the basic skills needed to under go a PhD. After discusion with my supervisor it was decided I would be made exempt from much of the faculty training on the basis that I already had a strong research background and would be undergoing the school training any way.

I spent a day being given library and demonstrator training, the library training was less useful for me but the demonstrator training was essential so that I might perform demonstrator duties in labs for the school that I had commited to.

The school training has so far consisted of poster training and encouragement of reading groups. As part of the poster training we were invited in pre-defined groups to create a research poster that was relevant to our group, unfortunately our group had such massively varying interests we were forced into the somewhat generic subject of mobile computing in society - never the less it was a good exercise in the factors surrounding poster design and prompted some inetersting discussion in seminar. I am now currently in the process of the final piece of PGT; the schools research methods course. The focus of the course has been largely centered on building towards the first major PhD assesment, that of the 9 month report. For this I have read and studied two 9 month reports, one on Semantic Hyperwiki's and another on gaming in education, both were very differnt reports highlighting the contrast in different ways to report could be tackeled. The semantic hyperwiki's report was as much as twice as long as the other, and rigorously thorough but somewhat excessive and large parts of it devoted much time to formal specification perhaps needlessly, the other while less intensely through at times seemed more focused. Both also demonstrated what they had learned in different ways, one applied knowledge learnt from the field as a critique of several systems where as the other performed a small experiment and gave an analysis of these results. Ultimately it would seem (atleast to me) the importance of the 9 month report lies in knowing the important contributions that have been made in your field and then to be able to demonstarted them, although my opinion on this is open to change as my training continues.

In conclusion I have found much of the PGT very useful, particularly the open discusion seminar on poster design and the Research Methods course on how to approach the 9 month report. However I still feel much of the PGT, such as the Library Training and to an extent the demonstrator training, is needlessly time consuming in comparisson to what it offers some postgraduates.