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It is a well-known fact that graduate students do a lot of research. They painstakingly immerse themselves in books, reports, surveys, and experiments until they finally produce a carefully written thesis. It’s not so well known what their topics of study are, not to mention the results of those exhaustive (and exhausting!) theses.

Grad Chat is a radio program at Queen’s CFRC radio station with the goal to inform the public about some of the groundbreaking research that Queen’s master’s and PhD students produce. (Grad Chat is primarily for graduate students, but does occasionally feature post-doctoral fellows and their research.)

Colette Steer, Recruitment and Events Manager at the School of Graduate Studies (SGS), says Grad Chat serves two main purposes.

“It gives students an opportunity to practise speaking to the media and get their message out, and it informs listeners about some of the excellent research that’s happening here,” she says.

Ms. Steer is also the radio host of Grad Chat and loves talking to the students about their often narrowly focused projects that dig deep into a particular topic. “There’s some really interesting research happening. There’s so much more to English literature, for example, than Shakespeare plays and Jane Austen novels.” 

In saying this, Ms. Steer is most likely referring to students such as English literature PhD candidate Emily Murphy, who described her research on a recent episode of Grad Chat. Her research focuses on discourses of mental illness and gender in the modernist literary period across different aspects of society – such as celebrity culture and social activism.

Sara Pavan, Political Studies PhD candidate and a Trudeau and Vanier scholar, was a recent guest on Grad Chat and discussed her research project exploring how different immigrant groups – including poorer as well as well-off economic immigrants – become politically active in Canada and the United States.

Ms. Pavan thinks Grad Chat is an excellent way to talk about her research in a way that non-academics can understand.

“In academic research, you have to pay attention to technical details. These are important but they can sometimes distract you from why your research matters. Talking about my project on the radio reminded me that I’m actually doing something worthwhile in the world.”

In addition, Ms. Pavan says it’s becoming more important to be able to summarize what you’re doing concisely, to help in the process of writing research grant proposals.

“After my show, I noticed a bump in my LinkedIn activity. I was invited to connect with scholars from U of T and in Alberta,” she says, adding that she encourages all her fellow graduate students to sign up for an episode. The half-hour show is pre-recorded so students have lots of chances to rephrase and correct.

Some other recent Grad Chat topics include Multi-elemental Risk Assessment of Various Types of Rice (Nausheen Sadiq, Chemistry), Generating Electricity While You Walk Using An Energy Harvesting Backpack (Jean-Paul Martin, Mechanical & Materials Engineering), Salmonella food poisoning in Pregnancy (Shuhiba Mohammad, Experimental Medicine), and Wave Uprush Modeling Along CRCA Shoreline (Hadiseh Bolkhari, post-doctoral fellow, Civil Engineering)

airs Tuesdays at 5 pm on CFRC Radio 101.9FM.