So this is likely to be my final blog post for this internship, as I finish up this week. I’ll shortly be handing over to new blogger, Anna Rezk, and I really look forward to seeing what she brings to the site! You’ll get a proper introduction from her when she starts.

My time on the SGSAH blog has been fantastic, I’m really happy we got to do so many guest posts and fellow PHD’ers were able to share their research and interests, and it was fun to share the Research Showcase and Summer School blogs. I am grateful I got to share some of my own research and, especially, to tell everyone about PRAXIS, my creative component.

It was great to run themed months on Mental Health, Women in Research and Race Equality. I hope that these themed months continue and that as readers get to know the calendar for these, we get more and more guest posts, as they’re a fantastic way to share your research and reach a wider number of readers.

There are a few things I’d hoped to achieve but life got in the way a little. One of those was to get a podcast running, short interviews with other researchers that readers could listen to while they had lunch or scrolled through their Twitter etc. While I didn’t manage to get that consolidated, I am pleased to say that we have the very first of those episodes below!

In Conversation With… Amy McTurk-Starkie

Amy was a guest blogger in August helping to oversee the Women in Research theme. She did a fantastic article for us, which you can read here. Last week we sat down for a chat and you can listen to it below. Apologies for the sound quality in some places as we had to try and juggle the various demands of technology and remote recordings. Luckily, Amy’s voice comes through better than mine!

I hope you enjoy the first episode, and I’ll be working with new blogger Anna to hopefully deliver more of these to you all soon! Completing an internship alongside PhD work and various health and life stuff can be a juggling act but it’s a worthwhile one – it’s helped me to feel more connected to the PhD student body and my own cohort which has been especially useful coming out of lockdown, where so many of us felt isolated from our peers.

I look forward to seeing what Anna brings over the next 6 months and hope to stay in touch with as many of you as possible! Here’s me, Garry McLaughlin, signing off and wishing you all health and happiness and an exciting Academic journey, whatever stage you’re at and whatever route you’re taking. Here’s to increasing the quality of conversation and filling up the world with more love, less hate and generally uplifting each other wherever and whenever we can!