Skills Training
By completing postgraduate study in the Department of Chemistry at Durham you will acquire a host of project- and chemistry-related knowledge and experience as well as more general transferable skills and activities. To help you achieve these goals, the Department has a well-developed training Graduate Skills Portfolio programme for its postgraduate students, which is tailored for an individual student and includes :
- University and Departmental induction courses
- Lecture courses on safety and specialised research techniques
- Weekly research seminars
- Focussed University and Science Faculty courses
- A rolling programme of flexible format and specialised PhD student lecture courses led by leading academics
- 1st and 2nd year progress reports
- 3rd year student research presentations
- 2nd year research student poster competition and prizes
- Research group activities (problem sessions, seminars)
- Undergraduate teaching and teaching training courses
- Public chemistry awareness schemes
- Active participation at local, national and international conferences
The transferable skills you will naturally acquire during your postgraduate studies can be equally applied to both academic and a host of other professions outside of chemistry. For example:
- Independent working
- Identifying aims and objectives and setting/meeting targets
- Team working and networking skills (local, national and international)
- Problem solving and critical thinking, argument and assessment
- Data collection, analyses and reporting
- Communication skills - presenting data, information and arguments at a variety of levels to experts and non-experts alike
- Enhanced written skills such as report writing
- Experiment and time management
- Teaching and mentoring