The BBSRC Yorkshire Bioscience Doctoral Training Partnership (YBDTP) knows that diversity strengthens our research community, leading to enhanced research creativity, productivity and quality, and societal and economic impact.
We are working to bring down barriers and promote equity in access to our DTP and as a part of our DTP we work to the following ethos:
- Equality means that everyone has the opportunity to succeed.
- Diversity means that differences are recognised and valued.
- Inclusion means we are creating a research environment with attitudes that value difference and practices that allow everyone to succeed.
We actively encourage applicants from diverse career paths and backgrounds and from all sections of the community, regardless of age, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation and transgender status. We monitor our recruitment at every stage, from initial application to offer making, to ensure our processes are equitable and that appointments are made on merit.
Working in partnership
We also work in partnership with GenerationResearch (GenRes), a summer studentship/ internship programme for undergraduates across our region that is designed to recruit talent and potential from all backgrounds.
GenRes is developing a sustainable, equitable approach for student recruitment that facilitate greater inclusion by offering STEM internships at universities in the YBDTP.
Summer internships offer an exciting chance for undergraduates to experience research. Access to these programmes is important if students want to be competitive with their peers when applying for funded PhD studentships. It also offers the student a chance to gain authentic experience in a scientific lab while undertaking a novel research project, often working with current YBDTP PhD students, to get a feel for what postgraduate research is like. In this way a student develops confidence and can visualise themselves as a PhD student.
These valuable experiences need to be promoted to students with protected characteristics, who often do not apply or do not win these opportunities due to financial restrictions, lack of support, or problems with the usual selection procedures. This can result in more barriers to undertaking postgraduate research degrees.
GenRes summer internship programmes are working to change this by creating processes that encourage applications from all backgrounds, provide training and mentoring to support all appointed students, and create visibility of the programme to ensure equity to all current and future participants. Working with GenRes, the YBDTP is playing a role in supporting, promoting and providing these valuable experiences.