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WRSA Bursaries

Applications are invited for the 2016-17 Warwick Retired Staff Association Bursaries which aim to support creative and cultural extra-curricular activities by Warwick undergraduate or postgraduate students.

Bursaries of up to £1000 will be available and two or three awards, not necessarily of the same value, will be offered to the chosen applicants. In recent years we have supported a range of projects:

  • 3rd year Medical: Photographic exhibition based on project visit to Borneo
  • 2 Postgraduate Medical Students: Article based on work experience in the ‘Empty Quarter‘ of Oman
  • PhD History. Endangered Pasts: a Photographic Gallery of Mizo Photographs
  • (Held at the Modern Records Centre)
  • 2nd year English: Literature translation and performance
  • Postgraduate Applied Management: concert of operatic extracts
  • 2nd year English Literature: arts magazine
  • Postgraduate: multimedia Chinese-speaking website
  • Engineering students: erection of a screw water pump for the Allotment Society

Interested students are invited to send a single typed A4 sheet, outlining their proposed activity and indicating how a WRSA Bursary would be used to help them. Timing and costing should be provided, together with an indication of the extent to which the project may benefit the University and/or the wider community as well as the individual recipient.

It is essential to include on the application: name, contact addresses (postal and e-mail), degree course, year of study, and, if appropriate, the name of a member of staff who could provide background comments on the proposal. Please note, charity applications are not eligible and previous awardees cannot reapply. Ideally, the WRSA wants to provide ‘pump-priming’ money: projects that have already attracted considerable funding will not be as favourably considered as those for which a grant from the WRSA might make all the difference.

Whoever you are, whatever your project, make a strong case and, you could be successful. Recipients will be expected to keep the WRSA Committee, through its Chair, informed about any performances, exhibitions, etc., directly related to the project. In addition, all recipients must agree to provide a report on their finished project, as these reports will be included in the WRSA Newsletter and will encourage its members to give awards in the future.

The closing date for application is Friday, 18th November 2016.

Successful applicants will be informed as soon as possible after this date and an award presentation will be made at a small reception in the Atrium, University House later in the term.

Please email applications to: RSA@warwick.ac.uk

Or send applications clearly marked ‘WRSA Bursary Application’ to:

Tim Wilkinson
Retired Staff Association
Human Resources
University House
COVENTRY
CV4 8UW

Find out about past WRSA Bursary Winning proposals:

Acting as Treasurer for Warwick UniBrass, to support Unibrass 2015.
Warwick UniBrass is a brass band competition, hosted at Warwick University for the first time in 2014 and now in 2015, involving 17 university brass bands from across the UK. It also involves two sets of workshops led by professionals from the ‘Mighty Cory Band’ and from the Coventry-based Jaguar Land Rover Band and Warwickshire Music Service.
Individual sessions will be aimed at children, children and parents, and the general public. The event will be covered by local media and social media outlets. The application is to fund the costs of the necessary rehearsal space in the Arts Centre for the proposed workshops.

Endangered Pasts: A Proposed Gallery of Mizo Photographs at the Modern Records Centre (MRC), University of Warwick.
The bursary will enable Kyle to mount a gallery of photographs in an exhibition in the MRC for one week in Spring 2015. This exhibition will present not only the historic photographs themselves but also, most unusually, their transient character by applying speed-up procedures each night to demonstrate the temporal effects of heat and humidity.
A large number of historic photographs exist depicting the life and culture of the Mizo people from a north-eastern hill state of India. Many of the earliest ones, from the 1890’s, were due to Christian missionaries, who recorded the transition from an animist culture to one overwhelmingly Christian. Later contributions came from the Mizo people themselves. All of this material is undergoing degradation under the demanding environment of heat and humidity, and Kyle has directed a four-member pilot project in Mizoram under the British Library’s Endangered Archives

View more

Development of Online Resources for Teaching Biology in Resource-limited Settings.
The lack of laboratory resources and modern teaching materials can be a major challenge to biology education, particularly in developing countries. The project aims to address this situation by developing an educational website filled with ‘hands-on’ biology experiments that require minimal or no expensive scientific equipment to run. The target audience will be high school students and their teachers. Some content for the website has already been developed and implemented in Ghana and Tanzania. The project would establish a virtual resource centre to improve practical biology education; the components of the project would comprise:

  • Organising and developing resources for the website.
  • Designing, building and hosting the website for an initial period of two years.
  • Improving the website to incorporate feedback.