Last week on the 30th October the 7th annual York Doctoral Symposium took place. This is a 1 day Symposium run by post-graduate students from the Computer Science and Electronics departments at the University of York. It provides a fantastic opportunity for students to gain experience in writing papers or posters, giving presentations and network with other researchers in their field. Another key benefit of the symposium is that it gives experience in organizing and running a conference to the students who are on the organizing committee, a valuable skill to have for anyone pursuing an academic career. I was on the organizing committee last year, liaising with potential industry sponsors and found it a very rewarding experience, as approaching large companies helped develop my confidence for reaching out to people, which has proved useful when I’ve worked with big name academics outside of my department. The conference keeps getting bigger each year and I would strongly recommend any post-graduate in the relevant departments to attend. The scope of fields on show is huge, any field within Computer Science or Electronics is represented, and there is an increasing amount of cross-discipline research being presented. While the event is run by the University of York and its students make up the majority of the attendees, each year there are several researchers from other UK institutions as well as a few European universities attending. Check out their website and get involved next year!
This year however I was only participating as an attendee. As the runner up in my department’s poster competition (previously mentioned here) I was given free registration. Initially I intended to submit the exact same poster to save time and I was confident in my existing work. However upon checking the submission criteria I noticed that the poster size was A0, whereas my poster was in the department template size of A1. After resizing my poster I wanted to use some of the new found space and so decided to include some of my ensemble work. On seeing the full poster printed at the symposium I was worried that I’d filled it with too much content, losing some of the clarity of the original poster in the process. Other researchers found it interesting however and I had many productive chats about my work and theirs, which has provided me with even more ideas that I’d like to investigate in my final year (where am I going to find the time to write my thesis?!). Unfortunately I couldn’t attend the banquet as I had a hockey match but I was very happy to hear I won the best poster award as voted by the panel of industry experts.
