Here are some frequently asked questions about PubhD!
PubhD was a pub conversation that turned into something! It started with the question: “Do you think we could persuade local Ph.D. students to come and tell us what they do if we buy them a pint?” From that conversation, @Kash Farooq and @Regan Naughton (who are non-academics and are not connected to either of the local universities) started PubhD. The first event was in Nottingham in January 2014. Since then there have been events in 20 other cities around Europe. Basically: the idea works and it is spreading! Note: It is called PubhD. Not PubHD! (Because it combines “Pub” with “Ph.D.”, and so needs a lowercase ‘h’). PubhD has a very simple (and easy to replicate) format : Three PhD student speakers each have 10 minutes to talk about their subject area to an interested audience in a pub. There are up to 20 minutes of (friendly!) Q&A per speaker. Each speaker gets at least one pint (or other drink of their choice). Firstly, it’s important to note that PubhD event is not just another science thing. We encourage researchers from all subject areas to tell an audience about their work. See the previous events pages for examples of subjects areas we’ve covered at PubhD Nottingham. When we first started PubhD, we wanted researchers to “bring their research to the public”. We wanted “pub level” talks so that you do not have to be an academic to understand them. This has happened at Nottingham, but we do get a lot of academics in our audience too. We estimate our audience is 50-50 academic/non-academic. Since the format has spread to other cities, we’ve found that some PubhDs are more academically focused. They are more about building a PhD community and allowing academics to get public speaking practice. That’s obviously fine too! These PubhDs still ensure that the talks are at a “pub level”, as even if a room is full of academics, you still may have, say, a physicist needing to explaining their research to say, a historian (and vice-versa). As an organiser, it’s up to you which way you want to go. However, note that many speakers add their PubhD appearance to the outreach sections of their CVs. This may not be possible if you have a 100% academically focused PubhD. Where you have your venue impacts the type of audience you get. If your pub is in the city centre, you’ll get more non-academics in the audience. If your pub is a student pub near the university, your audience is likely to be mainly academics and students. If you want your PubhD to be for public outreach opportunities, we feel that a city centre pub is a way to go. Here are some tips on how to set-up your very own PubhD. This page includes advice on setting up a website, a Facebook group, creating Facebook events, etc. Note that you don’t have to be an academic or be connected to a university in any way to start a PubhD. In Nottingham, both organisers were not academics and not connected to either of the universities there. There is a Facebook group for organisers. Somewhere to post questions and get hints and tips from other groups. If you are thinking about starting a PubhD feel free to join this group and ask any questions you have. You can always leave the group if you are no longer interested! Please help yourself to logos, banners, etc here. Love it or hate it, Facebook is very useful for promoting events. Using Facebook groups and pages for event promotion can be highly effective, rather than groups. Also, public Facebook event pages can still be viewed by people that don’t even have a Facebook account. We share these Facebook event links by email and Twitter with no issues. We have a Facebook page and share with the facebook organiser’s group Over many events, our event structure has settled down into the following routine: Start about 7:00-7.30 pm with the introduction (explain what will happen over the evening, the format, the breaks, the subjects, the requested donation) 10 min talk + 20 Q&A 10-15 minute break (here we collect the donations and buy speaker drinks) 10 min talk + 20 Q&A 5-10 minute break (more drinks) 10 min talk + 20 Q&A End around 9:00-9:30 pm (we encourage the audience and speakers to hang around and chat; we often have people staying until closing time). The pub appreciates that we have two breaks: more time for the audience to spend money at the bar! We feel that this is an important nice-thing-to-do for our pub, considering that we are getting our venue for free. The startup has the most effort, which we’d say lasts about 2 weeks. It’s not a huge amount of time but does require some effort. Tasks involved include: We occasionally fire off a tweet or email if we come across a potential speaker. e.g. if a PhD student follows our Twitter account, or joins the Facebook group, we encourage them to sign up to speak. Some PubhDs are just run by one person, some by two or three. Obviously, it’s always easier with more than one person, but they have been run successfully with just one person. Look for pubs already hosting “pub based speaking events”. For example, the following groups exist in many cities and towns across the country. Also, ask in the Facebook organiser’s group of their experience in finding the ideal venue. Many pubs are very open to the idea of having events in their pub, as it brings in business for them. Some things to look out for in a venue is the noise level of the room, the lighting, and obviously the size of the room in the venue. Typically in Dublin, we get an average of about 40 people attending. It’s definitely a healthy enough audience to make it worthwhile. We ask the audience for about €1, which we use to cover our costs and to buy drinks for the speakers. We usually get enough donated to pay for the speakers’ drinks all night. Also, to keep it as cheap as possible to run, we only go to local researchers (we don’t pay travel expenses). We are also actively looking for sponsorship from various institutions to help provide extras such as food platters for our audience and speakers. PubhD Lisbon kindly bought the domain pubhd.org. It can be used this to provide you with an email address like dublin@pubhd.org, cork@pubhd.org, or nottingham@pubhd.org. All this will do is forward emails to where ever you want them to go to (e.g. to your Gmail account). We at PubhD Dublin have bought the pubhd.ie domain, and can offer @pubhd.ie emails to any of our Irish partners. Anytime someone writes or speaks about us, we keep a track of it here. Let us know if we’ve missed something that should be on this page.