The 15th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference (PGR2021), organized by South East European Research Centre (SEERC), the research centre of CITY College, University of York Europe Campus, was successfully held online during 27-31 May & 3 June 2021.
Many participants attended this year’s 12 research presentations –classified under three research tracks and accepted based on the extended abstracts submitted–, 7 research workshops and the 3MT (3-minutes thesis) competition. Almost all participants were extremely active in the online platform with questions and comments addressed to the presenters. Feedback forms were further forwarded to the presenters as additional feedback that experienced researchers provided as discussants at the end of each presentation.
In order to facilitate the above process, 5 sessions were designed for including 2 or 3 papers maximum with no parallel sessions evolving concurrently, thus offering considerable time for discussion after each presentation maximizing the attendance and creating an environment that also boosts interdisciplinarity. On average, 17 participants attended each of the 12 presentations and every session received on average a 6.7 out of 7 evaluation score in the polls taking place at the end of each session. All the above, combined with at least 2 reviews that presenters received towards their submitted extended abstract, contributed to achieving one of the two main goals of the PGR conference; to offer high-quality feedback to the participating young researchers.
The other aim of the conference has been to offer high-quality research training to participating young researchers. To facilitate this, PGR2021 further included 7 Research seminars and workshops provided by experienced researchers (achieving on average a 6.9 out of 7 evaluation score) and the 3MT (3-minutes thesis) competition (enabling students to think and identify the most important points of their research to effectively communicate them in 3 minutes). Finally, students received training regarding valuable employability skills since they organized the conference completely by themselves under the guidance and mentoring of a few experienced researchers.
We would like to thank all participants, session chairs, discussants, research workshop organizers, presenters, and organizers for enabling an ecosystem to achieve research excellence through an enjoyable atmosphere.
We look forward to the next one (PGR2022), where we aim to use this year's experience and offer another successful hybrid event maximizing participation and engagement. Research is about asking the right questions, an aspect accurately reflected by the word cloud of the questions and comments from the participants.
