The Postgraduate Enterprise Summer School is a week-long programme for Doctoral Researchers
at the University of Birmingham.
It aims to equip students with all the key skills and knowledge they need to give their
careers a professional edge, whether heading for private enterprise, academia or the third
sector.
This year the Summer School took a new direction.
This year was a unique year for the Postgraduate Enterprise Summer School.
It's the first year that we have partnered with an external organisation, this year working
with Birmingham & Black Country Community Foundation.
We actually wanted our researchers to be solving real life problems, for a real life organization
We are an independent, apolitical, cause-neutral charity, which just works just for the Birmingham
and Black Country area to engage with local people to help them find local solutions to
local problems.
The students were put into five teams and each was asked to develop a viable business
plan that the Foundation could put into action.
Several visits to the Foundation's HQ allowed the students to get a better understanding
of the charity and research their needs.
I think because of the competition element there's a desire to really make a difference
and to see what they can actually come up with.
Actually going out and being able to see the place and to meet these people and listen
to them, it does make you more passionate about it.
You are really helping people and it's great for motivation.
There were realistic kind of parameters to work with, you had to go and do, you couldn't
just make up research, we couldn't hypothesize about certain things , you'd be found out
immediately if you weren't right on the money.
I think it really increased the competitiveness because we wanted to be the winners and see
our ideas come into fruition in real life.
Each business plan had to be researched and developed in detail, helping students to build
practical skills in areas such as team building, project management and enterprise.
The Postgraduate Summer School goes a long way in actually enhancing the employability
of our researchers as it gives them exposure to how organisations might work, how they
can actually create their own organisations or how they might want to add value when they're
an academic.
To help the students develop team working and communication skills, a series of workshops
and training sessions were run.
These sessions helped students to value the importance of successful team work and gave
them the tools they needed to organise their week.
When you work in a team it's not easy sometimes because you have to go through this process
of understanding where each of you fit in within the larger scheme, the larger picture.
You know you're putting yourself in the position where you have to stretch yourself, outside
your comfort zone, to try and coordinate.
We're all from very different backgrounds, we all do completely different subjects, but
that's actually been really useful.
So you kind of realise how important it is to listen to other people and see what they
can bring to it.
The open nature of the task meant students could take on different roles within their
teams, focusing on the areas that interested them and matched their skill set.
I want to start my own business so I knew I needed to learn a lot of skills in business
in almost every aspect of running a business, like raising funding, making sales, marketing,
so I knew that a project like this, I could really quickly learn a lot of those skills.
Whilst the whole Summer School is a really hands on interactive, hard working process,
we do like to introduce an element of fun, so on a Wednesday afternoon, mid way through
the week, we introduce an African drumming session.
There's still an element of team working and team building going on as part of that session,
all the teams work together to create a piece of music.
We did some African drumming, something I have very little experience of.
It was really good fun, just getting into that.
There were a few sort of shining stars.
There were a few people with secret talents for drumming, a bit of rhythm, so, it was
a lot of fun.
The Summer School culminated on the final day, with each team presenting their business
plans to a panel of expert judges, including representatives from the Foundation.
This allowed the students to demonstrate all of the key skills they'd learned through the
week.
I think doing the presentation was really useful.
It put people under a lot of pressure, and it was also very worthwhile seeing other people
doing presentations because you could see things that you'd missed when you'd been doing
your research.
We're just amazed at the quality of the ideas that the researchers and the teams have presented.
Within the space of a week they've come up with some really innovative, creative solutions
that the Birmingham & Black Country Community Foundation can look to implement in the coming
months.
I think it's going to greatly impact upon my employability.
I've already spoken to companies about doing this course and they thought it was a fantastic
opportunity.
By having met all these different people I know I can work with people from lots of different
backgrounds.
I'd feel more confident going for, say, a business role.
Every group, every team group has actually contributed something new to the charity.
All this information that we gathered and all the hard work that we've done is actually
useful, and they're skills that I couldn't have got anywhere else and now I can take
away and add on to my CV.
I've had loads of fun.
It's been really intense, the team I was with we got on really well, worked some long hours
but it was always enjoyable doing it.