Many members of our Essex postgraduate research student community are also carers and we have some personalised support and development for you. This could mean that you provide regular unpaid care to children, a family member or a close friend with an illness or health condition. There are also those who may juggle several care responsibilities.
Whilst there are differences between these categories, they also share common specific needs and challenges to your studies. In response to these needs, The PGR Carers Professional Development Support Scheme has been launched by Proficio to ensure that students with caring responsibilities have access to the same training opportunities as others in our community.
We understand that if you are a PGR Carer, in order to take part in training and other research-related activities, you may need to pay for care on top of other training expenses. We don’t want this to eat into your Proficio budget for training and are therefore offering additional funding for students with caring responsibilities to facilitate your attendance at conferences, courses, or other research related activities such as archival work.
You can request to claim up to £150 for care expenses per individual event and a total of £500 per year to ensure that you aren’t left out of pocket.
To apply, simply fill the PGR Carers Financial Support Form and send it to us at Proficio@essex.ac.uk.
There is now a suite of dedicated courses for PGR Carers available to book on the Proficio Booking Portal, which are more flexible to suit your needs and which will allow opportunities to engage with a community of Essex PGR Carers.
These sessions will provide a space for PGR Carers to share their challenges and collectively seek to resolve them through discussion. They will also provide a valuable support network.
While 1:1 coaching is already available in the pre-viva period, this delivery will be extended to offer sessions to PGR student carers throughout their PGR journey, as well as outside the standard working day, thus facilitating the ability to engage at a time more adapted to those with caring responsibilities.
This adaptation of the our successful “time/project management” course will be pre-recorded to ensure its accessibility at a time that suits the carer, and will introduce a number of techniques to help PGR student carers manage their time effectively.