I was invited to give a presentation about organising the Writing Club at the NUBS Digital Research Festival in September. In the presentation I explained our motivations as colleagues and how we got organised, as well as reporting some of our outputs so that we could ensure institutional support. The presentation finished with an encouragement for others to get involved, especially as some of our valued members have moved to other jobs since we organised our ‘Writing Commons’.

People said it was an encouraging and inspiring* story of Outstanding Research Citizenship. During the Q&A, one of the PhDs in Entrepreneurship asked about joining the ECR Writing Club. I said that I would be happy to assist in helping them to organise their own PhD-focused group as that would probably be more helpful.

A couple of emails later, it was agreed with the PGR Director that I would run a Thesis Writing Bootcamp on a Saturday in early December.

We advertised the PhD Thesis Writing Bootcamp using this poster (below) which was emailed to all NUBS PhDs. The call to action required applicants to complete a webform with a specific writing project (e.g. thesis chapter, conference paper, journal article) and a detailed plan for the Bootcamp, as well information about their current writing practice. A snapshot of some responses are shown below.

All 9 applicants were invited to join the bootcamp with detailed instructions for how to mentally and physically prepare (see link).

*yes, we can now use ‘Award Winning’ to market our activities 😉

During the 1-day Thesis Bootcamp we completed 12 Pomodoros — or 5 hours of focused writing. Quite an accomplishment.

As the facilitator, I was ‘in the trenches’ with the other Bootcampers. My writing project involved progressing a paper for a special issue that I’d been mentally planning for many months (egads, it’s nearly a year!). I ‘arrived’ at the Virtual session armed with: notes about the method and the results of our analysis from my co-author, the target word count, and a blank page. By the end of the session I’d drafted half of the paper.

We had 9 PhD students enrolled and two academic staff (1 facilitating, 1 PGR Director seeing what it was about). We had 2 last-minute withdrawals and 3 who left before the session finished.

Feedback was very positive (4.75/5 stars)!

Suggested improvements, were to keep with the longer lunch (45-minutes as planned instead of shortening it to 30) and to ensure the Zoom host (me) was vigilant about muting attendees who left their mics on.