SeNSS Director's Bulletin October 2021

Dear SeNSS community, 

 

Welcome back to our returning students and their supervisors! And a warm welcome to our new students and their supervisors! 

 

2021-22 Post-Doctoral Fellows  

Congratulations to our eight new PDFs, and their mentors! 

  • Dr Sreenanti Banerjee, Goldsmiths, Sociology

  • Dr Shai Kassirer, Reading, Development Studies 

  • Dr Ricardo Ontillera-Sanchez, Roehampton, Social Anthropology 

  • Dr Pablo Pereira-Doel, Surrey, Business and Management Studies 

  • Dr Sarah-Jane Phelan, Sussex, Development Studies 

  • Dr George Redhead, UEA, Business and Management Studies 

  • Dr Maisie Tomlinson, Goldsmiths, Sociology 

  • Dr Shannon Wake, Reading, Psychology 

 

Induction Event 

We will hold our virtual annual Induction Event from 12-14 October (https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/95109900143), which is mandatory for all new students, but anyone is welcome. The Induction programme is attached to this email. This will include the launch of the third edition of Sentio, the SeNSS student-led journal. The Student Forum is running a social event on the Wednesday evening at 5pm – a virtual escape room! All welcome to join! 

 

Sentio: The theme this year is ‘Transformation’. While COVID-19 is the most recent and recognisable example of a cataclysmic event that has impacted every aspect of our lives, other events contribute to changes and/or a rethink of our working practices, our priorities, and our sense of global community. The articles in this edition reflect the impact of such transformations both positive and negative, explore how to measure transformations, and understand what these transformations mean for social science disciplines. Join editors and authors presenting their exciting work. We would love to see you there!  

 

COVID-19 linked funded extensions for students 

The next call for applications will be issued during the week commencing 4 October (noting that calls will be made bi-annually - October and April - for as long as is necessary), based on students’ funding award end dates. The policy and process for making an application is available on the SeNSS VLE.  

 

Core team “office hours” 

The core team is trialling offering office hours this year, starting week commencing 11 October 2021. Core team members (bar the Director) will be available on Zoom (https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/95768755941) for one hour each week to answer queries and/or deal with concerns. This is in addition to emailing the core team whenever helpful, not instead of this; we felt it might be easier sometimes to talk to one of us, rather than email back and forth. 

  • Abigail Shirley (Training Manager) and Prof. Fragkiskos Filippaios (Deputy Director): all training queries – Monday afternoons from 2-3pm; and,   

  • Paul Newman (Co-ordinator) and Dr Felicity Szesnat (Manager): all other SeNSS queries – Thursday mornings from 10-11am. 

 

2021/22 Studentship Competitions 

 

  • Our student-led studentship competition for October 2022 entry will now open on Thursday 7 October. Please visit the SeNSS website for details, and re-tweet our recruitment announcement tweets as widely as possible. Our online application portal will be open for applications later in October 2021. We will publicise this opening via all SeNSS channels.

 

  • A reminder that all studentships are now fully-funded and are open both to “home" and "international" students. However, we are limited by UKRI rules to awarding 30% of the total number of studentships awarded to international students (~12 studentships p.a.).

 

  • This year, it has been agreed that SeNSS institutions will be encouraged to put forward one additional candidate per Pathway they belong to where this candidate is a Home student and meets certain widening participation (WP) criteria (this is regardless of structure of studies - 1+3, +3 etc). The criteria to be used to identify Home WP candidates will be publicised shortly. Pathway Groups will not be told which candidates have been nominated due to meeting these criteria, and these candidates’ applications will be reviewed in the same way as any other nominated candidate. We are looking to include both Home and International candidates in this scheme next year, but more work needs to be done on the criteria to be used to identify eligible International candidates.

 

  • The criteria used to grade applications have been amended to make them more inclusive. These changes are reflected in the competition policy and all competition guidance notes, which will be released this week.

 

  • SeNSS will once again ring-fence one studentship for the best Advanced Quantitative Methods application and, as part of our WP strategy, ring-fence 12 four-year studentships for applicants who do not hold a Masters degree of any kind.

 

  • SeNSS requires all academics involved in SeNSS sift panels to have completed their HEI’s standard training in diversity and/or unconscious bias awareness. Please ensure you undertake this training before these panels sit early next year.

 

  • The supervisor phases of both our collaborative studentship competition and our SeNSS-ARIES studentship competition have closed, and supervisors’ applications are currently being reviewed. This year’s winners will be announced on Monday 1 November 2021 via the SeNSS website.

 

  • We will once again run studentship recruitment webinars for potential applicants. We particularly encourage those with little or no knowledge of postgraduate studies to attend and would like to see as many participants attend as possible from diverse backgrounds. Applicants will learn what a SeNSS studentship is, and what funding is available, as well as how to identify a suitable supervisor and write a strong application. We will release the dates for these as soon as possible.

 

Supervisor training/support 

There is a recorded webinar available for all supervisors of SeNSS-funded students to support you in guiding your students throughout their award. It covers useful information such as how to complete the annual Training Needs Analysis, the ERSC rules governing  extensions, sickness absence etc., and the additional funding available to your students to support their research. In addition, SeNSS will run webinars in November (dates to be announced soon) to support those supervisors who will be working with applicants as they draft their applications for our studentship competitions. 

 

If you have any questions about these or any other SeNSS matters, please get in touch with me or any member of the core team. 

 

With best wishes for the 2021/22 academic year, 

 

Ismene 

 

Prof Ismene Gizelis 

Director, SeNSS DTP 

SeNSS Consortium