Five takeaways from the DCU Business School Summer School

In June, DCU Institute of Business and Society held its first PhD Summer School. Over three days, doctoral researchers from across Ireland and beyond came together around a single theme: creating research impact.

The programme paired an array of engaging speakers from academia, practice and policy with discussion-based workshops designed to encourage collaboration and dialogue amongst peers. It is worth saying why that combination mattered. “Impact” is a word that appears in almost every funding application, progress report and confirmation viva a PhD student will ever write, and yet it is rarely something we get the chance to talk through properly, either with each other or with the people on the receiving end of the research. Setting aside three days to do exactly that proved incredibly valuable.

Here are five things we took away from the experience.

An extended network

Coming together with a group of peers was a great opportunity to meet people within and outside DCU, and to connect with researchers from different topic areas. We left the summer school with a larger network, opening up new connections and potentially more opportunities for future collaboration.

Doctoral research can be a solitary business, and the networks we are encouraged to build are usually vertical ones; supervisors, examiners, senior scholars in our field. What a summer school offers is something different: a horizontal network of people at the same stage, wrestling with the same methodological headaches and the same three-in-the-morning doubts. Those are the people you will be reviewing with, co-authoring with and sitting on panels with for the next thirty years.

How to create a research impact beyond academia

Hearing from speakers beyond academia, and seeing real examples of collaboration and impact, definitely inspired ideas about how to approach and design research to achieve impact, and reinforced the importance of building industry relationships as part of that process.

We learnt that impact is not a section you write at the end of a project; it is a set of decisions you make at the beginning. Who is the research actually for? Who needs to be in the room when the questions are being set, not just when the findings are being shared? Speakers were candid that meaningful partnerships take years to build, and are far easier to start before you have results to disseminate than after.

Time to reflect on our research

As a PhD student, you don’t always have time to stop and think about your research. Attending a summer school is a great opportunity to pause, listen to others speak, and think about how their work relates to your own research or what you can learn from their wisdom. It lets you reflect on your progress and can spark new ideas that sometimes come from surprising tangents.

There is a particular kind of clarity that only arrives once you step outside your own literature for a few days. Sitting in on a presentation from a field you know nothing about can be oddly productive; with no expertise to fall back on, you end up listening for the structure of the argument rather than the detail, and that is often exactly the lens your own work has been missing.

Ideas for future career plans

Listening to speakers from different industries and backgrounds can provide valuable insight into jobs across industry and academia, helping you think about future career options. From running sustainable businesses to marketing chocolate bars, we heard from a diverse range of individuals who shared insights into their careers and roles, inspiring career ideas.

What came through most strongly was how few of those careers had followed a straight line. The choice is rarely the binary, academia or industry, that it can feel like from inside a PhD. People had moved between sectors, come back and taken detours that turned out to be the making of them. Hearing that in person, from people who are visibly enjoying their work, does more for your sense of what is possible than any careers guide.

Enhanced confidence as researchers

Being in a group with many new, friendly faces, each with interesting research topics of their own, meant a lot of time spent on introductions. Introducing yourself and talking about your research is great practice and can really help build confidence around your work and your identity as a researcher. When the week is over, you should have your elevator pitch honed to perfection!

Repetition does something useful here that solitary preparation cannot. Each time you explain your project to someone new, a little more jargon falls away and the actual point of the thing comes into sharper focus. By day four, most of us were describing our research more clearly than we had managed in months of writing about it.

Looking ahead

If there is a single thread running through all five of these, it is that impact, like research itself, is fundamentally a social activity. It happens through conversations, relationships and networks, and it is built long before anything reaches publication.

Our thanks to Julie Bertz and her organising committee and everyone at the DCU Institute for Business and Society who put the programme together, and to the speakers who gave their time so generously.

To any doctoral researcher weighing up whether to give four days to something like this next year: go! The time you think you are losing, you get back with interest.

Authors: Penny Coughlan & Ana Rodriguez