Supporting female engineering students: insights from a PhD literature review

This week, I attended the annual meeting of the University Science and Technology Librarians Group (USTLG), held at the Dyson School of Design Engineering, at Imperial College London. I was delighted to be able to make this meeting – partly because it’s always a useful and thought-provoking day, but also because I sadly had to cancel my planned attendance at last year’s meeting due to a bout of covid.

Last year I had planned to give a short presentation about my PhD research, and some initial insights from my literature review (I blogged about this here, in lieu of my cancelled presentation). This year, having now officially completed my first year (FTE) of the PhD, passed my confirmation review and secured ethical approval to begin my data collection in the autumn term, I thought I’d give an updated presentation, as well as talking a bit more about my plans for collecting my data.

I really enjoyed giving this presentation yesterday, and was delighted at all the thoughtful questions attendees asked. I sometimes wonder if my research is at all interesting to anyone other than myself, so it was gratifying to hear from so many of my peers that they were interested and looking forward to seeing my findings! I also gained some useful contacts for recruiting participants from other universities, many thanks to everyone who expressed interest and offered to put me in touch with colleagues in their engineering departments.

I believe all the slides from the day will be on the USTLG website soon, but in the meantime I’ve added my own slides below, if anyone wasn’t able to attend but wants to see what I spoke about.

I also really enjoyed hearing the experiences of other science and technology librarians, many of which really resonated with my own! I will be blogging my reflections from the day as a whole over on my professional development blog.