[Behsci] IAS Studentships Update

[Till Stowasser]

Follow-up.

Thank you to colleagues for pointing out that Iain’s list actually contain all four clusters. I misread the first semicolons as a colon.

So the clusters are:


  1.  Accessible Environments;
  2.  Animal Welfare in a Changing World;
  3.  Nature Emergency: Interdisciplinary Responses by Active Citizens;
  4.  Democracy, Human Rights and Communication/Advocacy in the Digital Age

All of these clusters were ranked significantly behind ours in terms of student EoIs, so it’s pretty obvious that we were not selected based on topical grounds. Three of the clusters are related to Environment, so it seems that this is a focus the University wanted.

I am still expecting official feedback from IAS and will fill you in once we received that.

Best,
Till


On 8. Jun 2023, at 22:25, Till Stowasser <till.stowasser at stir.ac.uk<mailto:till.stowasser at stir.ac.uk>> wrote:

Dear Behavioural Science cluster,

IAS asked us to circulate the e-mail below. Happy to comply. It also reveals the successful clusters, even though Iain (I guess inadvertently) only revealed 3 out of 4. So the fourth cluster is still a bit of a mystery…

Best,
Till

Begin forwarded message:

From: Institute for Advanced Studies <ias at stir.ac.uk<mailto:ias at stir.ac.uk>>
Subject: IAS Studentships Update
Date: 8. June 2023 at 15:59:27 GMT+1


Cluster leads, please can you cascade to members of your clusters


Colleagues

I would like to update you all on the outcome of the inaugural IAS Studentships competition. We have been communicating with cluster leads and students over the last week as we thought it appropriate to inform them of the outcomes of the process first. We know there is widespread appetite for more information about how the process unfolded and the choices we made as part of a more general update for everyone who has participated, and we appreciate your patience in waiting for this.

The competition has been an outstanding success. We received over 600 valid Expressions of Interest for the 39 potential clusters that colleagues put forward for the competition. The quality of the student applications we generated was genuinely outstanding. It is clear that there is huge demand to come to Stirling for study at doctoral level amongst the very best students. This is testament to the quality of the cluster propositions that colleagues generated, and I would once again like to offer my thanks to everyone that was involved in creating a proposal.

The IAS Executive met at the end of May to review all of the valid EoIs and determine our preferred studentship award winners. Our panel considered all aspects of the cluster proposal, student quality and alignment between cluster/student proposal aims and objectives in coming to its decisions. The standard of shortlisted students in terms of existing qualifications and experience was extremely high indeed, and completely outstripped our expectations such that we could have awarded the 16 studentships available several times over.

In coming to our final decisions, we reached consensus that four of the proposed clusters had a particularly outstanding combination of research potential and student quality that marked them out as the very best of an extremely strong field. These were Accessible Environments; Animal Welfare in a Changing World;  Nature Emergency: Interdisciplinary Responses by Active Citizens; Democracy, Human Rights and Communication/Advocacy in the Digital Age. Special congratulations to colleagues who put forward these cluster proposals; we look forward to working with you to make them a success for the students and the University.

IAS will be conducting a review of how this year's process worked over the summer with a view to putting forward options for how subsequent rounds of the studentship competition will be run. We will contact all clusters about this in due course, but cluster leads are of course able to contact me in the interim if you’d like to discuss any aspect of the process.

Once again, can I thank you all for the energy and enthusiasm that has been generated by the first round of studentships and that we hope to build upon in future.

Very best wishes

Iain.


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