Helping students to feel part of a community was been one of the main challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a Researcher Development Manager, I worked with postgraduate researchers (PGRs), who already experienced high levels of isolation as they are not part of a teaching cohort.

They do not have timetabled sessions with other PGRs and often start their studies at varying points in the academic year. Instead, PGRs meet each other and develop communities informally, whether over lunch at induction, making a cup of tea at a training event, working in shared offices, or through asking questions at research seminars.  Through this they share their experience, their frustrations, their hopes and their fears – and they learn from each other. The pandemic derived PGRs of these moments of serendipity and informal conversation, leaving them even more isolated, a state of affairs that led to a negative impact on wellbeing, motivation, and progress. So how did we been working to combat this? We started a podcast. To be accurate, we started a second podcast.

Back in January 2020 we had started a monthly Doctoral College podcast called Beyond Your Research Degree, interviewing our doctoral graduates working beyond academia about how they moved from academia to industry, and what career opportunities outside academia are available to people with a research degree. The purpose of this podcast was not to build a community – instead, it was a to build a series of case studies for PGRs to access about the wealth of job roles and career opportunities available to them beyond academia. Similar podcasts existed across the sector, but we felt that they were too vague and did not get at the nitty-gritty of searching and applying for jobs outside of the academy. How do you format a CV for a non-academic job? How can you frame the skills developed during a research degree for a role where research may not be your main focus? These are important questions, and ones that we hoped to answer in a concrete way through our new podcast.​​​​​​​

​​​​​​​When COVID-19 hit, we were already in a good position as a team to move our provision online. Working across all campuses and with large numbers of distance students, we were already offering our training and development opportunities online. This meant that we swiftly found ourselves in demand to support academic and professional services colleagues as they moved their own content online, and gave us the breathing space to look for creative solutions to our online problems – specifically, how to build a PGR community and recreate that experience of sharing and peer learning online.