Personal development

We are keen to support all staff, students and future students in their careers in Biology.  All staff and students are required to take the subconscious bias training and read associated resources offered by the University.

Careers: Our resources for careers in Biology has advice for all ages and career stages. The Careers Centre has published an EDI career resources hub with links to resources and work experience opportunities that support multiple identity groups.

Students        

New students should consult the relevant handbook:

• Undergraduate handbook
• Postgraduate research student handbook for PhD students

*New Page*: New PGR students: our PGR reps have compiled information they wish they had known when they first arrived: useful PGR resources spanning visas, accommodation, travel, health, socialising and many others.

Careers Events

• We hold annual careers events for our 3rd year undergraduate students.
• We hold careers sessions for postgraduates and early career researchers, showcasing the many different career paths available, with talks on getting independent fellowships, first lectureship, the joys of teaching, or moving away from traditional academia into science policy, science consulting or short-term excursions from science. Sessions from 17 January 2017, 23 January 2018 and 19 March 2019 can be found in our news section. The 2020 session was postponed due to the Covid19 lockdown, but we managed to hold a dual-delivered session on 1 Oct 2021.

Tutorials

Our tutorials for 2nd and 3rd year undergraduates focus on several employability issues, but include Equality, Diversity and Inclusion material. We have looked at bias – both that of the students themselves and the bias they may face during their career, at audience diversity for public engagement, at diversity in teamwork, at sample selection and bias, and at role models and mentors. We have showcased these EDI tutorials at Learning and Teaching events, and the Univ Glasgow acknowledged these in assisting development of their app: UofG Equality and Diversity.

Staff

Recruitment

• Recruitment checklist. Our advertising and recruitment checklist highlights EDI issues that should be considered in recruitment of new staff.

• Any staff involved in recruitment should undertake the recruitment training. Those involved in assessment of candidates should also refer to our EDI Guidelines for the Assessment of Candidates and Recruitment Presentations

New staff

• New Staff Induction Handbook
• School of Biology Teaching Handbook

Annual/ongoing

• Early career resources: our BEDI post-doctoral reps have compiled a list of useful resources for early career researchers.
• Annual review: we hold annual review and development meetings for all staff once each year, generally in the spring. Policy and procedures vary slightly for academic staff who undertake the Academic Review and Development (ARD) and for support staff who undertake the Review and Development Scheme (RDS).
• Grant applications.  Within the School of Biology, we have initiatives underway to help researchers improve success rates for grant/fellowship applications. This includes: provision of successful grant exemplars via the internal staff website, offering internal review for all grant/fellowship application submissions (contact the Biology Director of Research to set this up), we run in-house grant and fellowship-writing workshops, and have a research grant application checklist with items to consider from 3 months prior to the grant deadline.
• Workload model. Biology has developed a comprehensive workload model, enabling us to ensure (via our annual BEDI report) that there are no inherent gender, age or other biases introduced inadvertently by School policies. We continue to revise the structure of this model so as to maximise transparency and fairness.

Mentorship and Promotion

• Promotions (for academic staff): we regularly provide input to the university promotions process to help ensure fair and transparent procedures.
• Regrading (for technical and administrative staff): our guide to the regrading process was designed to try to clarify this procedure.
• Mentoring Schemes: Our summary of major mentoring schemes was produced to assist staff seeking mentoring opportunities.