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How we ran social sessions
The social sessions we ran fall into several distinct types:
Type: Drop-in, informal
In-person or virtual?: Virtual (Zoom)
Duration: 60 minutes
Reoccurrence: Once every two weeks (moving day of week and time of day)
Event description to advertise session to postdocs: Session title - How’s the journey going? Drop-in - An informal drop-in session to check in with the Prosper team (and fellow pilot participants) on how your journey through the pilot is going. Think of this a bit like a virtual version of popping into the Prosper office for a chat.
Comments: We found these sessions to be relatively low effort and beneficial to the small number of postdocs who dropped in. Attendance at these sessions tailed off notably in the final three to six months of the 12-month cohort, so suggest that running these types of sessions is of most benefit toward the start of a cohort.
Type: Drop-in, informal with a set topic and pre-work
In-person or virtual?: Virtual (Zoom)
Duration: 60 minutes
Reoccurrence: Ad-hoc, not a reoccurring pattern
Event description to advertise session to postdocs: Join this informal session to discuss what a flexible mindset is and how adopting a more flexible mindset can aid your career development. Ahead of the session read this article https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-having-a-growth-mindset-actually-means and listen to this podcast https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/how-to-adopt-a-growth-mindset
Comments: We ran one journal club style session, it ran over lunchtime (12:30 – 13:30) on Zoom. Whilst only a few postdocs attended this, those that did had engaged with the linked material in advance and came ready to have a discussion.
This type of session can be a really nice way of getting participants to engage and discuss a subject in some depth
Suggestions: If you have an engaged cohort (or research staff association) you could ask them to generate a list of topics they’d like to discuss in a journal club format. They could also suggest relevant articles or podcast episode/s.
Associated documents
How to run a journal club session on flexible mindset.
Prompt questions for flexible mindset journal club.
Type: Drop-in, informal with a set topic or prompt
In-person or virtual?: Virtual (Zoom) and Mural (virtual whiteboard)
Duration: 60 minutes
Reoccurrence: Once every two weeks (moving day of week and time of day)
Event description to advertise session to postdocs: See the associated document for topics and advertising descriptions. If we ran a session more than once and changed the session name both are included. Links have been deliberately removed.
Comments: We held regular virtual social sessions, on a range of discussion topics. We arranged them so they didn’t occur on the same weeks as the ‘how’s the journey going?’ drop -in sessions. We found if we called the sessions ‘social’ this put some postdocs off attending, so we called some 'revisit and refresh' sessions.
These sessions were not recorded as this would have stifled discussion. Mural boards, capturing the main discussion points raised, were typically the on-demand resource created so those who couldn’t attend live didn’t miss out altogether.
Associated document
List of all session titles and descriptions
Type: Drop-in, informal with a one-pager (single slide or Mural) visual to recap
In-person or virtual?: Virtual (Zoom)
Duration: 60 minutes
Reoccurrence: Roughly once every 3 months (in a 12-month cohort)
Event description to advertise session to postdocs: See the associated document for topics and advertising descriptions. If we ran a session more than once and changed the session name both are included. Links have been deliberately removed.
Comments: We found periodically holding informal recap sessions helped to signpost postdocs and aid in addressing feelings of being overwhelmed, missing things or not being aware of sessions that had been going on.
Associated document
List of all session titles and descriptions
A LinkedIn profile exchange and a CV swap session were run with our second pilot cohort.
Type: Registration required (to pair up/plan group sizes) and pre-work
In-person or virtual?: Virtual (Zoom) and LinkedIn
Duration: 60 to 90 minutes
Reoccurrence: Ad-hoc, no reoccurring pattern
Event description to advertise session to postdocs: See the associated document for topics and advertising descriptions. If we ran a session more than once and changed the session name both are included. Links have been deliberately removed.
Comments: These sessions ran after the postdocs had been on the cohort for around three to eight months after the start of the 12-month long cohort.
Associated document
List of all session titles and descriptions
Type: Registration required (due to catering and room limits)
In-person or virtual?: In-person
Duration: 60 minutes to 4 hours
Reoccurrence: Ad-hoc, no reoccurring pattern
Event description to advertise session to postdocs: See associated document for titles and advertising description. Links have been deliberately removed.
Comments: We found that the more informal sounding socials didn’t get good numbers of postdocs registering (in more than one case we cancelled the event due to low sign-ups) and high rates of last-minute drop-outs. The more structured ‘Meet, share, eat, repeat’ was more successful (although a last-minute train strike on the day limited the number of attendees slightly).
Associated document
List of all session titles and descriptions
Recommendations
- Set a theme or prompt question, we found a ‘social’ isn’t typically enough of a draw to get good postdoc attendance.
- Consider carefully how you can involve anyone unable to attend live. You could share any outputs from discussions with the whole cohort on a Mural or Padlet.
- Avoid recording the live sessions as this can limit and prohibit discussions.
- Steer clear of running these sessions simultaneously live online and in-person.
- Run social sessions face-to-face if possible. Neither of our two pilot cohorts liked Kumospace (an online platform where your video appears as a floating head and you can navigate around a virtual room to talk to others). Zoom with options to breakout was slightly preferred.
- Don't underestimate the value of social sessions, we found that encouraging postdocs to have discussions led to sharing of challenges and solutions, enhanced networking and benefitted their career development .
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