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9:58am on Saturday, 17th June, 2023:
Comment
A number of PhD scholarships were recently made available at Essex University, and lecturers were asked to propose applicants who might be in receipt of one. They (the lecturers) had to write a 150-word proposal, so a shortlist could be constructed.
There are 41 applicant names on the list for the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering. Well, strictly speaking there are 40, as two people have the same name. I'm not sure how many places they're chasing, but 17 seems to ring a bell.
British universities are routinely taken to task for lack of diversity, so let's see how we fare here.
Judging only by their names, 32 applicants are male and 9 are female. That's not a good ratio in general, but it's pretty good for CSEE.
As for ethnicity, well the cultural background (if not nationality) of applicants can be guessed from their names, too. Obviously this is very hit and miss, but roughly speaking we have 18 from the Islamic world, 10 from India, 5 from China, 3 from Nigeria, 2 from the Spanish-speaking world and 1 each from Thailand, Greece and England. Ironically, despite our having 70% of applicants associated with the same two cultural regions, this is probably going to give our diversity rating a huge boost.
It's not easy to guess the socio-economic background of the applicants from their names. If they're from the UK, they're probably not all that well off (because if they were they'd be going to a Russell Group university). If they're what the government classifies as "overseas", they're either going to be independently wealthy or poor but incredibly smart. I rather hope the scholarships go to the latter rather than the former.
We used to get large numbers of PhD students from the EU, but Brexit put a stop to that. Now that all those supervisory slots the EU students used to occupy are freed up, though, we're able to import our future researchers largely from the Middle East and Asia instead.
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