Voices from Overseas Institutions
    Thanks a lot for organising this workshop and your contniuing help and assistance!
    The iSchedule system was working very well!
    The virtual workshop worked excellently and provided many useful opportunities for meeting potential candidates. Most candidates es were even better prepared than at the presence workshop last year. "Thank you" to the organisers!
    Excellent system. I have only a comment: some students told me that in China they cannot use Zoom so they needed to have a VPN. it would be important that we are informed of the appropriate mean to do a virtual meeting so that we don't ask candidates to try to circumvent regulations.

    Otherwise I think the system and the selection of candidates, filtering etc. was extremely well organized. This is imcomparably better than the previous workshop I joined for selecting Chinese Students.
    Most (all apart from 1) of the students who asked me for a meeting were very unrelated to my area of research so were entirely unsuitable. I looked through the delegate list and only two more had a topic fit. So it is clearly not the best place for me to find relevant candidates.
    The system is not very intuitive. It's very inconvenient that there's no easy way to extract student data from the platform in bulk. There's also not a lot of options for ranking students if they fit your research field or your projects fit their interests. It's not very convenient that all the interviews take place externally, it would be better to arrange this on the platform itself.
    The virtual PhD workshop China 2021 was well organised.
    We did not expect to be already contacted in October by potential candidates, which increased oiur daily work load unexpectedly..
    But it gave us time to prepare the interviews and to better know the interviewees. However, we had to wait until November sometimes to have access to the CV and research project in the candidate profile. Also, languague tests were not often communicated.

    The 3 delegates from UCLouvain were quite satisfied with this recrutement fair. We will have to wait until September 2022 to know the real impact of our participation: number of PhD candidates, quality of the candidates and quality of their research project. These different factors will be analyzed and discussed. Depending on the conclusion of the study, we will decide weither or not to participate next year.
    - background of the candidates. some had degrees from universities or colleges. not all seemed to be from first double class universities.
    - if possible, try to get the English test results available as much as possible.
    - in the last year, 2020, we did a PhD fair with Academic Transfer. there we had the opportunity to 'decorate an online booth' with lots of brochures, PR films. we had an online lobby so you could monitor online visitors who had an interest in Leiden and talk to them and ask questions and start a conversation. that would be a worthwhile addition. to interact with possible interested candidates. now this was only via email , so more a static than a lively live conversation
    - we would like to receive feedback from students on the university presence
    - the zoom session for Leiden had 275 visitors. i dont think the creation of the wechat group afterwards was succesful. Administrators like Yun Tian and myself couldnt get in. would it be possible to have the email addresses of those who signed up for the Leiden presentation?
    - more feedback to follow by email to Harden Dang
    - for me, the Ischedule system didnt work. i couldnt get zoom invites for the same 20 minutes intervals arranged as was in the ischedule system. probably my fault. that was really a pity.
    - what I would have loved is to interact with other university representatives as well, both from Leiden and other international uni reps. so you can chat a little about how things are going. refer candidates to each other. there were quite some students interested in Leiden but wanting to study subjects that we dont offer. so I just recommended other universities to them.
    or , I wanted to refer candidates to other Leiden representatives because they were the professor in the field - but that was not possible as far as I could find out. that really was a big miss for me. hope it can be solved with a new digital version. keep our fingers crossed for 2022
    At our both we couldn't use the fair as a recruiting fair, because the recruitement of the doctoral candidate is done directly by the different professors. It makes that I could only give advice to the candidate about how to apply for a doctorate in Germany, but not have really interview. Even if this was explicitely written in the booth description, I think that some of the candidates where disappointed.
    The number of slots was limited compared to the slots live and we had to disappoint many students.
    I was surprise not to see as many students as we use to see during the face to face meetings. As it was easier for students to register and connect with the online platform, I though more students would come as it would have been easier for students outside the two big centers (Beijing and Shanghai) to connect. A bit disappointed on the numbers.
    The answer to question 4 is an estimation. It is not easy to have an accurate record.

    I feel that the workshop this year has been very well organised and much better than the last year. In particular, iSchedule System is great. It will be great if there are a few more additional functions in iSchedule System such as
    1) For the students who requests for the appointments, search for the students with the same subject
    2) Group (such as the students with the same subject) based operations such as set up the open agenda, send a group message etc.
    Using Zoom is a bit tricky for several German institutions due to data security concerns with that tool. Allowing a wider range of programs (BigBlueButton) for the interviews would be good.
    the iSchedule system works fine, but it is a bit cumbersome and slow at times. And it would be great if one would get notified of new messages (currently we are only notified of new meeting requests) by E-Mail.
    For the ischedule system, I would have been more likely to schedule individual appointments with students if they were shorter (15 minutes) and if we had the ability to book multiple people in one meeting, based on similar research areas.
    Regarding 4.: We do not know until now how many CSC fundend phd students we have gained in the last 7 years (even after enquiries at all institutions and persons involved with CSC) .Thus, our institution will weigh a future participation before a final decision.
    It is better to let the school decide whether to offer meeting-IDs to all the students.
    very poor show-up percentage of candidates, even though they confirmed by email
    system should allow one student to book with more than 1 professor from each university which is convenient. especially for open agenda.
    We would like to set the interview time to 15 minutes. After my presentation I missed some time for Q&A for 30 minutes. I also would like to see an open Q&A instead of only interviews. Students can ask general questions in a group, this is very efficient.
    NA
    Although the iSchedule system was very good the number of available scheduled appointments was very limited compared to demand so we had to move everyone on to the open agenda.

    The communications with students suggested that there would be a more formal interview and the possibility of immediate offer making. This is not something that we (or most top UK universities) can offer so we would prefer the communications to be more carefully worded at future events.

    The amount of support from organisers and speed of response to any emails was really appreciated!
    As a suggestion, the online platform could be made easier to navigate - more straightforward - at least from the recruiters' side.
    The scheduling system otherwise works fine.
    Thank you for organizing this.
    Many have complained that the system that it is easy to miss a message or an important notification, because it does not send an email notification. This is a feature that would improve the current system a lot, both for students and delegates. I believe some students never realized I had requested a meeting with them, and I had to follow-up with them directly outside of the iSchedule system.
    If possible, one student could book appointments with different delegates from the same university next year.