This year’s PGR student reps: Jo, Lina and Toni
I’m currently in the first year of my PhD, working on the brain-body interaction in associative learning and consciousness. My main motivation to become a PGR rep was the importance of community in postgrad life, and ensuring that everyone feels part of a group despite working individually for the vast majority of time. I’ve also become involved with the Doctoral School driven PGR wellbeing and mental health initiative, so please let me know if you have any ideas or comments. I’ll do anything for cats and chocolate 🙂
My PhD is focused on corruption, collective action, and social change. I did my Bachelors in Psychology at Bristol and then a Masters in Cognitive Neuroscience here at Sussex a couple of years ago. I love eating pizza.
I’m Toni, I’m a first year PhD student and I’m investigating the relationship between parenting, children’s experience of risk and challenge and their emotional wellbeing. I’ve been one of the PGR student reps since October 2017. Having just moved down to Brighton from Glasgow in time to start my PhD here, I decided to put myself forward for student rep as a fast track method of getting to know everyone and settling into life in the department. It’s worked a treat so far! J
Our job as Student Reps
Though it might sound generic, our genuine aim as Reps is to help develop a strong collegial atmosphere within which everyone feels supported, and importantly not alone, as we believe this can benefit both wellbeing and productivity. Our infamous surveys are geared at trying to get your input so that we can collectively shape the PhD experience, and we still have a live survey where you can always make comments, either anonymously or not.
Another important part of our job as reps is to ensure that we have plenty of opportunities to get out of our offices and let our hair down together. So far in this academic year, some of you might have joined the Halloween Special, where we watched Beetlejuice with some spooky snacks, the fabulous Christmas party, recent post-AwayDay drinks, or the odd Friday evening at the Falmer Bar.
So far so good! It’s been great fun organising and hosting our socials and getting to know some fellow PhD students. And of course we’ve got more socials lined up for this term! We’re hoping to organise a rather adventurous outing around Easter time that may or may not involve being shot at with paint? So keep an eye out for that! We’ll hopefully have some more details in late February. And then of course there will be the summer BBQ.
We’re also keen to keep up ‘Falmer Fridays’ and there’s usually a few of us enjoying a well-earned pint at the end of the week, so feel free to pop along. We’re here to represent the Psych PGR students, so if you have any ideas for social events you’d like us to organise, please send them our way!
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