Our Approach

Our training activities simultaneously support the pursuit of research and students’ personal and professional development. The training pathways laid out below take this as their guiding principle: each enhances participants’ skills in a particular area, opens up new avenues for careers and collaborations and reinforces their ability to complete better research projects and other academic tasks in a timely fashion. 

The principle of fostering student-led initiatives and experiential learning will inform provision as much as possible, complementing a core series of workshops and events, whether through hands-on training opportunities or by tying more traditional workshops to further experiential steps such as internships or funding opportunities for projects. Besides allowing students to form networks inside and beyond the University, this approach offers them important peer mentoring opportunities.

Our researcher development provision is arranged into a number of pathways. These take advantage of existing institutional agenda, such as Public Engagement with Research and Knowledge Exchange, and foster virtuous circles between research and training. Pathways are designed to give participants the flexibility to construct their own programmes by combining several pathways over the course of their time at Oxford.

Flexible and with multiple points of entry, intersection and exit, these pathways open up further opportunities across the University as next steps for participants. They are organised in collaboration with partners with expertise in particular topics, including faculties, departments and external collaborators.