Just came across the following article which details how Monash University ran an immersion course for PhD students enrolling in their EMBL Australia PhD course (EMBL – European Molecular Biology Laboratory). Students are heavily involved in organising this course, some of who are also speaker. The students and participants are not only taking part from universities around Australia but also from overseas with opportunities for a group of students to travel internationally in the future.
The outcomes and benefits seem to include an increased focus for students on their research project, increased contacts and networks to help with aspects of their project and increased exposure to a much wider audience of other researchers and collaborators to enrich collaborative opportunities.
Some companies run similar events in that new recruits are not just trained as part of an induction program only to be rostered to a specific work zone, but are exposed to an immersive experience that includes a much wider range of colleagues from within that organisation … and this includes where people hang out, what they get up to, and all those ‘non core skill’ areas that enrich the collaborative opportunities that make a workplace culture rock along.