Graduate Retreat

Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland

Graduate Retreat

Each year students of the MASTS/SUPER Graduate School come together for an annual retreat. The goal of the retreat is to bring together the geographically dispersed MASTS/SUPER postgraduate population and to create a tight-knit student community while providing useful and informative training sessions and seminars.

Feedback includes – “It was a great chance to meet other MASTS students, staff and scientists and have informal conversations. The guest talks were great and well chosen, it’s always fascinating to know how successful scientists got to where they are today”.

The 2023 retreat will be held in person at the MacDonald Resort in Aviemore (15-17 March).

The 2022 Retreat was held online (16-18 March). Check out our draft programme.

For both 2020 and 2021, the Graduate School Retreats were held online for all students to attend. See the programme here

The 2019 annual MASTS Graduate School Retreat was held 13-15 March at Loch Insh, near Aviemore. See final programme for further details.

Speakers from previous years have included:
Mark Batho (CEO of SFC); Jonathan Benjamin (Wessex Archeology); Joanne MacDonald (NERC KE Fellow); Andrew Brierley (Professor, St Andrews); Lyndsey Dodds (WWF);Phil Newton (NERC); Nick Owens (SAHFOS); Linda Rosborough (Director, Marine Scotland); David Raffaelii (Professor, York University); Mark Shields (DECC); Prof Frank Rennie (UHI), Colin Moffat (Head of Marine Science), Simon Merrywest (University of Manchester), Sam Ilingworth (MMU); Andy Watson (Professor, University of Exeter); Mark Inall (Professor at SAMS) & Carol Sparling (Director of SMRU).

Example Student Comments

“I’m really grateful for this splendid opportunity. The Retreat was grand, extremely interesting, well organized and, mainly, plenty of wonderful people. MASTS community has a real power and we can feel it, especially during this kind of events.”

“The MASTS retreat gave us an exciting overview of several career pathways that will be available to us once we complete our PhDs. It was inspirational to hear the experiences of young professionals excelling in their fields, spanning from academia to policy and consultancy”.

“The MASTS retreat was a great opportunity to explore the career pathways following a PhD. The talks, discussions and exercises were relevant and very useful. On a personal level, this experience has also been really good. I’ve gotten to meet other PhD students from across the country who have similar interests to me and with whom collaborations may develop following the social enterprise event. I strongly recommend this experience to other students.”

“I found the MASTS postgraduate retreat to be extremely rewarding because it promoted not only sharing ideas within the MASTS community, but it also opened up our horizons towards policy makers, governmental departments, charities and funding bodies. I believe such gatherings are highly valuable for our personal development and for future networking opportunities.”

“The retreat has been a great opportunity to establish fruitful personal and professional links within the MASTS postgraduate community, which will hopefully set the scene for future collaborations and knowledge exchange”.

For further information on the MASTS Graduate Retreat, please contact the Dean of Graduate Studies

Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland