Dozens of tables filled up the Main Building’s atrium, at Técnico – Alameda Campus, on Tuesday afternoon. Every table had a magic cube. At each table, a Técnico PhD student explained their thesis or project to two company representatives, in a maximum of two minutes. In return, they received eight-minute feedback from the business professionals. And the magic cubes on the tables? “They are here to break the ice”, explains a member of the event management team, “but I haven’t seen anyone use them yet”.Maybe the Técnico students have well-developed ideas.
The second day of the 9th edition of the PhD Open Days is underway. The event took place from 27th to 29th November. The Técnico PhD students were invited to take part in activities such as scientific writing and communication workshops, poster exhibitions, networking with company representatives and PhD alumni talks, among other activities.
The “Navigating the Job Market: A Step-by-Step Plan” activity was André Torcato’s favourite moment. “As there was no preparation, it was very spontaneous and real”, explains the Técnico Physics PhD student, referring to the dialogue with the company representatives. Regarding the PhD Open Days as a whole, the student praised the event, “the programme featured important people from inside and outside academia”. In the case of the latter, the event brought together “people from many places – not just from tech companies – and at various stages in their lives”.
André gave this feedback at the end of the event, after the Out of the Box Session “Leadership Profiles”. The first day of the event, however, included various workshops aimed at providing useful skills to a PhD student. The Técnico professor Luís M. Correia gave one of these workshops, which focused on how to make a presentation. According to the Técnico professor, the PhD Open Days “is an excellent initiative and a good way to address issues such as communication or more specific aspects of PhD theses”. In his opinion “thesis writing, entrepreneurship and project management are skills that anyone should have – and certainly in engineering”.
Catarina Bernardo attended the workshop on the advantages of science communication and expressed her satisfaction with the event programme. The Electrical and Computer Engineering PhD student considers that the presentations she had seen so far had been “very enlightening” and that “the speakers had been able to grab and keep the audience’s interest”. She was also curious about the pitches that would take place later on – short presentations of projects carried out by two dozen PhD students. Maria Carolina Sequeira, a Chemical Engineering student, won first place.
The PhD Open Days was also an opportunity to announce the IST PhD School, an initiative that will bring together PhD students in a community. In a first announcement, the Técnico president Rogério Colaço said “we have many PhD students, but they are still a bit isolated in bubbles”. In this sense, the PhD School will serve as “a space to bring people together, sharing ideas and discussion”, with the aim of strengthening ties between the School, society and the research community on a global scale.
