Scientific training
We will identify competence gaps and ways to fill them, together with dScience and the NORA graduate school. Literature reading clubs will be organised.
Research visits and networking
UiO’s PhDs/postdocs will regularly spend periods at UiT and vice versa. They will have research stays at leading academic groups abroad, including with our international partners. Supervisors will also be involved in these visits, to guarantee steady progress.
Transferrable skills
Integreat will provide training across a broad range of transferrable skills, together with the existing UiO Marie Sklodowska-Curie co-fund graduate schools and the dScience community services. Courses and workshops will be dedicated to career development, for example in scientific and proposal writing; techniques for scientific presentations and result visualisation; media training, writing and presenting for the public and social media; scientific supervision (with practical experience by supervising MSc students); coached teaching experience; preparing personal research web pages.
Mentoring and career progression
We will experiment with two new forms of mentoring:
- “Young Mentor Seniors” reverses the traditional direction of tutoring, recognising that much competence in the field of AI and creative problem solving is developed by the younger generations. By disrupting the premises of one-way mentoring, a better exchange will be achieved.
- “Shadow a professor” means that a PhD/postdoc will follow closely over a short period an experienced scientist to learn about the multiple facets of the job, and the way to lead and supervise science.
Gender aspects are of particular importance. Towards the end of the PhD, we will help the student explore different career options and support in the transition, including mock interviews.
Research autonomy and leadership
We experiment with “international research kitchens” our pop-up workshops. PhDs/postdocs will invite a small group of junior and senior researchers to spend time together in an informal and friendly environment (like young chefs in a kitchen), to brainstorm ideas and sketch methods on specific themes. This helps to develop research autonomy, networking and project structuring. Integreat will also participate in international challenges (e.g., DREAM, SemEval/CoNLL) and moonshot research initiatives.
Academic culture
We will help develop an intellectual academic culture and mindset. Through workshops and other events we will discuss, for example, the societal responsibility of science, the aim of publish and flourish, how to distinguish options for collaboration and competition with other researchers, and how to balance academic and family life. We will set up teams of PhDs across the institutions who work together.
Alumni
We will offer to our formal students the possibility to remain a member of Integreat.
All these activities will create engagement and enthusiasm in our young researchers from around the world. Many activities will be open to external PhDs/postdocs.