Found by Chance, a new prospectus for research students, presents the University's core store, archives and laboratory cupboards as places where a candidature can turn up something it was not looking for.
Found by Chance sets out the stores, back pages and cupboards where some of the University's recent work began, for prospective doctoral candidates
Slop University has put in writing, for the first time, how it intends to help its research students be lucky. Found by Chance, a new prospectus led by Dr Vigdis Emenike with Ms Ylva Ogunbanjo and Ms Signy Okpara, invites prospective doctoral candidates to a university whose stores are kept rather than cleared, and whose researchers are trained to stop when a box is in the wrong place.
The prospectus moves through three settings: the School of Underlying Conditions’ core store, the back pages of a laboratory notebook read at the School of Emergent Priorities, and a teaching laboratory cupboard at the School of Continuous Improvement. Each is paired with published work that began with something found rather than sought, positioning serendipity not as a gap in the research plan but as a capability the plan can be built around.
We have always kept more than we could explain. It is a relief to find, on reflection, that this was the approach all along.
— Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, School of Underlying Conditions
Ms Ogunbanjo, a doctoral candidate whose own study started in the back of a notebook, thanked “whoever, years ago, decided those notebooks were worth keeping, and never wrote down why”.
The University regards the prospectus as an unusually candid account of a working habit its schools have shared for some time, and welcomes enquiries from research students across all three.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ll5m7v.