Residential Training Course: Testimonials

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The residential training course for postgraduate students in economic and/or social history has been running almost continuously since 1999.

In that time, more than 200 students have attended the course.  Their feedback has been uniformly positive; some testimonials can be found below.

  • This has been the single most useful event I have been to since the start of my postgraduate studies.  Thank you.
  • An excellent, inspiring learning experience.  The most useful two days of my PhD study to date.
  • The course was very well run indeed and was of immense value for me at this stage of my doctoral work.
  • This was a great opportunity to spend a few days thinking deeply about the main themes of my thesis. What am I trying to say? Why should anyone be interested? I learnt a lot from listening carefully to other presentations – and to the feedback they received.  I think everyone who attended developed more confidence in offering constructive feedback to colleagues.  This led to a more critical approach to my own work.
  • For students like me that study at an institution that does not have a significant presence of economic historians then having the opportunity to meet other students and academics in the field is especially useful.  The critical and constructive feedback that has been supplied to me will greatly raise the quality of my thesis.  The course has given me much greater confidence in my own abilities as a researcher, presenter, respondent and chair.  While I recognise that the course is expensive to run, I greatly hope that the Society will find a way to keep it going so that PhD students from across the country can continue to benefit from the best postgraduate scheme that I have seen offered by any Society in the UK.
  • The most useful/interesting aspects of the course for me were quite selfishly the feedback I received orally as well as the written comments on my paper.  My supervisors felt that this course would be particularly helpful for me as I am not formally enrolled in an economic history department. Officially, I am in geography although it is clear that within social sciences, research topics can easily straddle academic borders. The opportunity to see the very broad range of what constitutes economic history was also very helpful for me.
  • In discussion and with more formal written feedback, I was made aware of methodologies and theories that will greatly enhance my research, in some cases taking it in new, more fruitful directions – I am very grateful for that. I am also so grateful for no-nonsense advice and feedback more generally from the academics who took part. They were all so generous with their time and made great effort to offer tailored, genuinely useful feedback. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole course and would encourage other postgraduates to take part in future!
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