Testimonies

We have received at least 586 testimonies, updated 15:00 on Friday 29th January 2021. We highlight only a few selected testimonies here.

Dr Jason Chuen, MBBS, MPH, DipAnat, FRACS, Clinical Associate Professor, Austin Health, Department of Surgery, MDHS

As Director of the Austin Health-University of Melbourne 3dMedLab, a recognised center for Medical 3d Printing and Image Processing nationally and internationally, our existence would not be possible without the resources and support supplied by Research Computing Services' Training and Engagement Team, and its predecessor at Research Platforms. As a result of this friendly, co-operative and engaging team we have built, in the space of 6 years, a specialist laboratory which leads research and practical implementation of Medical 3d Visualisation and Medical 3d Printing. Our success has been key to enabling many research projects, and the establishment of ARC-CMIT, the Australian Research Council Centre for Medical Implant Technologies, which together with its national and international partners received funding of $4M from ARC. ResPlat and ResCom have been key to developing and disseminating the grass roots awareness of technology required for the next generation of biomedical engineers and medical technologists, and a major plank of the success of UniMelb in this field. I strongly urge the University to preserve as much of this team and service as possible.

‌Rory Healy, Undergraduate Student, FoS

I was considering a research position at the University of Melbourne, but upon hearing of these changes, I am now reconsidering studying at the University of Melbourne. If I cannot be supported during my research, why would I consider choosing this university to conduct my research at? I would always choose a university that supports me over one that intentionally cuts the funding and support of its research and training department. Support for researchers is crucial, no exceptions.

Richard Ferrers, Unimelb Engagement, ARDC, Monash University

I have been welcomed to participate at Resbaz events along with other members of the Victorian research community, and enjoyed the community and training provided. I especially enjoyed the data visualisation training, D3, and Observable notebook. I used this training, in a Parliamentary Submission as a rapid prototyping tool to answer a question posed by the Parliament, and to visualise complex value assessment of NBN's broadband technology alternatives. The results were invited to be published in a Telecommunications Journal (and data here and here) and led me to be invited to join an industry and policy development group, which has researched the same topic; value and future of the NBN. A second Journal article was invited after presenting further work on the topic (NBN International comparisons), as well as publishing underlying data. A recent report by that group was released in late 2020, with feedback by both the Communications Minister and Shadow Minister, and with impact across industry and cross-bench MPs. None of this impact, and my participation, would have been possible without the training of the Research Computing Services Training and Engagement Team. Their training has been invaluable, and led to publications, industry and policy impact. I applaud their contribution to my work.

Dr Mitchell Harrop, Research Fellow, FoA

We've just obtained funding from Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC 2020 Platforms Open Call PL069 - "Time-Layered Cultural Map of Australia 2.0"). This means TLCMap.org will be progressing in great strides in 2021 and we could not have done this without the community. Not the service. The community that exists around the service has informed the platform. It will become increasingly difficult to obtain funding from ARDC for an institution that is not investing in the kind of community ARDC values.

I have already written two letters of recommendation for members of this community seeking employment/education at other institutions since the original announcement. You can't just put a community on pause. You will lose it and the skills and capabilities within very quickly and be forced to start from scratch at great expense in the future.

‌Michaël D. Monty, MCWPE, PGDipArts, BA(HUM), DipJus, Honours Student, FAM

During my time at The University of Melbourne, I have completed two theses, and a Major Project for my Honours degree this year. In all of these qualifications I have used the universities research facilities and services, such as ResBaz and MATLAB to name a couple. They have proved invaluable in connecting with a cohort that I would normally have no opportunity in engaging with. My experience is the university has a long way to go in non-STEM areas of study when it comes to research platforms. The digital research environment needs greater participation from all areas of academia. I would have to say that I would be lost without these platforms.

I intend to carry on with a PhD level of study however I am fearful that this decision will have a severely negative impact on my choice to study further at the University of Melbourne.

‌Assoc Prof Carol Hartley, Associate Professor, FVAS

All of my RHD students and post-docs have used these services on multiple occasions over many years to support our research projects, our ability to obtain competitive grant funding and our publications. In future, those of us lucky enough to still have employment will have less and not more time to learn new skills to support any future ability to attract funding.

‌Dr Aleks Michalewicz, BA(Hons), GCertArts, MA, PhD, Research Data Specialist, MDAP

Research and Computing Services' Training and Engagement team provides an invaluable service to the University's academic community. Disestablishing this unit will result in the loss of experienced specialists who have been supporting research at the University for many years, not to mention the invaluable institutional knowledge and technical mastery that the team possesses. Given the University's focus on digital research uplift, it is difficult to understand the benefit of such a decision, even if restructures may be required. The opaque nature of this decision adds to the confusion. The Training and Engagement team functions as a crucial nexus and entry point for supporting world-class research. In my current role, our colleagues at Training and Engagement have supplied vital support to multiple projects and collaborations, not to mention to the MDAP team itself. Beyond structured training, being able to approach the training team in an ad hoc manner for consultation has resulted in streamlined and efficient results in our work with researchers, and has served to reinforce the strong research ecosystem and collaborative research spirit at the University of Melbourne.

‌Professor Cordelia Fine, BA, MPhil, PhD, Professor, FoA

My graduate students have benefited from the excellent Training & Engagement service training, which I would not have been able to pay for. They have also benefited from the community role it plays connecting graduate researchers, not to mention the vibrant and energetic ResBaz (in which I have also enjoyed participating). It will be a great loss to our graduate students if this service (which seems to be a cost-effective success) is defunded. It is hard to see how this would not have a negative impact on research productivity, research quality and interdisciplinarity.

Dr S. Thomas Kelly, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, RIKEN National Institute, Yokohama, Japan

I attended the first Research Bazaar event in Melbourne in 2015 and trained as a Software Carpentry instructor there. This was a valuable training and teaching experience for me as a PhD student but also had far reaching benefits. After attending Research Bazaar, we set up successor events across New Zealand drawing inspiration by and resources from the Melbourne team. These events continue to benefit researchers throughout Australia, New Zealand, and other countries by providing a community with wide range technical and domain expertise that can provide expert guidance that a traditional research group or IT department cannot. I am currently in Japan leading a group to translate Carpentries lessons into Japanese, introduce these initiatives to Japan, and support multilingual educational content on the web in coordination with a similar effort in Spanish and Portuguese. I likely would not be involved in efforts if I had not met the ResCom team and attended their events. Their activities are net benefit, not only for the University of Melbourne, but they have also embraced online networking to become a hub of research training throughout Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. During this time where digital research skills are in historic demand, it would be extremely short-sighted to shutdown and existing world-leading training initiative. This would leave countless early-career researchers worse off and be damaging to the international reputation of the University.

Dr Alice Garner, PhD, BA(Hons), Research Associate, MGSE

I have sought the help of the ResCom team from the start of the current ARC Linkage project I am working on, based in MGSE, to help establish robust and sustainable data storage, sharing, analysis and presentation for an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research team. I have completed training in NVivo, been referred to SCIP and to digital stewardship, and more, none of which would have happened if this Training and Engagement team and its deep network across the university did not exist. There is no way my team / project could afford external consultants to help with the various platforms we are using, which include NVivo, Filemaker Pro, Tropy etc. The advice I have been given has helped me to set up our project in a much more systematic and thoughtful way and has encouraged me to continue exploring the digital research space in all its manifestations and possibilities.‌

Assoc Prof Laura Jacobson, Laboratory Head, MDHS

The Research Computing Services Training & Engagement team are a vitally important component of my lab's work and the training and education of our student from Hons to PhD and beyond. In particular we use the training provided by the team in the use of the program R. R’s remarkable flexibility and power is central to our work, but it is a complex system and guidance by experts is essential to harvest its power. Training by this team of experts, and the community/forum provided, make it the “go to” place for complex problem solving that would otherwise take significantly longer to achieve, if it were achievable at all without their guidance, or would cost the university and its researcher substantially more money to outsource. Financially, this team is a bargain. Its loss would slow research, increase costs, reduce the standing of the university in complex analyses and statistics, and break valuable networks amongst the sharpest analytical minds of the university.

Dr Megan Good, BBSc(Hons), PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, FoS

Without the Introduction to R course (with Jeremy and Pablo) that I took at the start of my fellowship I would never have been able to undertake the quantitative research and data analysis to the level I have in the past few years. I feel like I have so much more to offer as a researcher and this has really increased my confidence. This was key to me returning to research after a long career interruption (to have kids). I cannot overstate the impact this has had on my life.

Jan Christopher Quing, Alumnus (Master of Urban Planning), MSD

Honestly I dread to think where I would be without ResCom. Without all the workshops and meetups I have attended and learned from, I would not have been able to compliment my urban planning studies with highly sought after skills in data analysis and data science (MSD/ABP does not have the selection of quantitative/technical subjects to reflect the needs of the current job market). As an international student then, I honestly I would still be unemployed in a tough pandemic-ridden job market without the skills in R, Python, and Git. I owe so much to Pablo and the rest of the ResCom for the job security that I have right now. I hope that the university would not take away these important opportunities and integral learning experiences for current and future students-- these are ever more important in this era.‌

Dr Guy Prochilo, PhD, Assoc Lecturer in Research Methods, ISN Psychology

The Research Computing Services added substantial value to my PhD program during my time at the University of Melbourne. It is through this service that I was given the opportunity to learn data analysis and technology skills that were essential to my research and which continue to be essential in my professional life in academia. This included applied tutorials on R statistical software, MATLAB, Bash/Linux commands, and Parallel Processing with High Performance Computing: workshops that provided knowledge and skills that went above and beyond what was capable in-house in most research groups. The Research Platform Services also provided an important sense of community of like-minded and research-oriented individuals that I felt was sometimes lacking in general PhD life at the University of Melbourne. I am indebted to the Research Platform Services for improving my overall PhD experience, and for allowing me to emerge as a graduate of the University of Melbourne with a much stronger skillset than I would have otherwise attained.

Assoc Prof Robert Day, Associate Professor, FoS

I have supervised numerous graduate students - international and Australian - who needed training in R and often other software such as Python. Training in such research computing skills is key to research in Aquaculture, fisheries management, and other biological research.‌

Sarah Manuele, PhD Candidate, MDHS

As a PhD candidate who started their PhD journey amidst the COVID-19 crisis, I can attest to not only the necessity of this training, but also the long term benefit of it. The support trainings in place for early career researchers and new PhD's is somewhat lacking, particularly with the numerous changes and inconsistencies in statistic and data trainings across universities Australia. The availability of this training, in conjunction with the thorough delivery of the information, has enabled me to engage more readily with my study peers, and helped ease the large burden of independently learning how to use a new program. This program has helped numerous others like myself engage and understand elements of research which would have otherwise been unavailable during COVID; for this to be one of the programs which are defunded due to COVID seems contraindicative to the clear need for the delivery and availability of this information. Pablo and Jeremy are passionate and enthusiastic individuals who clearly dedicate a lot of time and resources to increasing the knowledge base of there peers, and to disestablish their program would be a detriment to the university and the emerging researchers at Melbourne. I truly hope you reconsider the importance of this program and the information being shared, and how its continuation will in turn continue to benefit the research produced by the students within this institution.

Professor Deb Verhoeven, Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and Cultural Informatics , University of Alberta

I have personally benefitted from the services of ResCom in terms of software training but more to the point their work has been field changing. I should say fields (plural) changing. Their work has opened the eyes of many scholars in non-technical disciplines to the wonders of research data and code. Their impact cannot be underestimated. And yet, inexplicably, it appears it has been.

Cancy Chu, MCulMatCons, PhD Candidate, FoA

I am alarmed, concerned and puzzled by the proposed closure of Research Computing Services (ResCom) at the University of Melbourne. Without ResCom, the University risks losing a generation of digitally equipped research, resigning both faculty and research students to what can be done with 20th century tools. The services that ResCom provides has been integral to my PhD experience and enabled me to carry out key aspects of data analysis, visualisation, and communication for my thesis. Not only have I obtained irreplaceable research-targeted training in digital tools that I use almost every day (Python, LaTeX), but it has also been one of the foremost places that I have been supported in my professional development by outstanding instructors and fellow researchers. This will be a huge loss to countless researchers now and in years to come.‌

Dr William Pettersson, PhD, Research Associate, University of Glasgow

ResCom brought me to UoM many times, for a number of events from Hacky Hours to training sessions and ResBaz. These events have all helped me find a number of academic collaborators and good friends, and I have used the example of the University of Melbourne to build similar communities in my new home at the University of Glasgow. The work that ResCom does really does put the University of Melbourne on the map when it comes to researcher training and interdisciplinary collaboration.

John Boikov (MBinf Candidate), Masters Candidate, FoS

I can't believe that this is even a question! Are you serious? YES, there should be a free Training and Engagement service as this saves (especially from my own direct experience) literally thousands upon hundreds of thousands of hours of sole researcher-directed learning in terms of becoming equipped with the necessary knowledge to utilise digital tools effectively. How can a University in the Digital Age call itself a University if it doesn't equip its researchers and students with the necessary tools (funded, might I add by the very same student loans and tax dollars that are provided by past and present students) to be able to learn how to use those tools effectively?

This is an absolute travesty on the part of the University of Melbourne that such an idea even be brought to the discussion table, especially if that idea is in the name of "cost savings" as this team provides researchers with experience-based shortcuts that end up accelerating University Research and student education alike. How am I, as a student new to HPC and Cloud Computing, supposed to learn the fundamentals of my craft without proper training? By spending literally hundreds of hours trawling the internet for answers to questions that I could be getting answers to within the day through this service? I thought this was the 21st century, not the 20th? Research is collaborative and one of the major issues within research is that there is not enough support or connectivity amongst different disciplines, this service solves much of these problems by providing computing-related knowledge and experience, knowledge and experience that pervades huge swathes of research across many different disciplines.

This service is a mini-example of a public good which benefits the entire research community, a public good which the University would - in fact - benefit from financially given the enormous efficiency boost gained from sharing of knowledge and experience.

I have a 2 year old daughter who will hopefully become the next generation of University of Melbourne student, if the University chooses to disestablish such teams as this when such knowledge and experience is integral and critical to the needs of its student and researcher then I will gladly look elsewhere when the time comes for her to begin her tertiary education and I will inform other parents. I am sure that - as a parent - I am not alone in this sentiment when it comes to disestablishing such vital services as these, please reconsider this decision and ensure that the efficiency gains provided by this team continue and are improved upon.

Meghana Kulkarni, Teaching Assistant, FoS

I have been a part of the ResCom as a volunteer teacher and helper for R training sessions. In my experience the training session had a great response always, due to the huge benefit student received from it. I have observed that these sessions not only gave a valuable learning opportunity but also to interact with other researchers and students from diverse background using the same tools. I have seen students respecting the opportunity to learn a new skill without any cost, the cost which perhaps may not be affordable to many, in addition to their current expenses. I sincerely think that this service should continue helping researchers to improve their skills which directly affects their quality of research.‌

Jared Collette, PhD Candidate, MSE

Throughout my PhD Candidature, the Training & Engagement team of Research Computing Services has been essential in providing training for techniques and software I use every day throughout my research. Training I attended involving git, python, latex, Linux, Ubuntu, parallel computing, reference, all are techniques I use near daily in my research. Coming into my PhD, I had very limited experience in any of these, yet the Training & Engagement team of Research Computing Services laid down the foundation for each of these techniques through their training. It would be deeply upsetting if these incredibly important trainings were to be cancelled. I fully support the continuation of the Training & Engagement team of Research Computing Services.

Georgia Caruana, BBiomedSci(Hons), PhD Candidate, MDHS

Undertaking and completing a PhD is a huge challenge, and in addition to conducting one's research, it requires extensive professional development to gain the skills essential to succeeding in one's candidature and as an early career researcher. Statistics and statistical programs are a frightening concept that are new to many of us in our research journey, and becoming proficient in them is near impossible to do independently. The ResCom team offer students and staff an amazing opportunity to gain these skills in a productive, interactive and highly informed way, making the task less daunting and actually fun. I had never used R prior to starting my PhD and within the financial constraints of a PhD I was so concerned about how I was going to learn it. I came across ResCom and they completely saved the day, with their R course becoming a highlight of my candidature. I learnt so much, gained a lot of confidence with applying the program to my research and also met like minded people along the way. I cannot speak highly enough of this course and the other services they offer. I believe they are absolutely essential to research at the University, and with so many constraints already in place to PhD students, especially those studying without a scholarship/self funded, losing this amazing, INVALUABLE resource would be an absolute travesty.

J. Rosenbaum MCA, PhD Candidate, RMIT

Resbaz has been one of the highlights of my research career and was a key component to my choosing to pursue a PhD after my masters by coursework. I have assisted in the tents in training and enjoyed the experience immensely. I have even considered doing my own mini course at rezbaz. This may well have been the starting point to my interest in teaching after my PhD is over. I have used many of the things I have learned and made fantastic contacts and friends and learned so many things, I have explored new technologies and enjoyed the experience immensely. ResCom will absolutely be able to continue to provide services online until the covid crisis is over and I will be delighted to attend again.

Dr Alistair Legione BSc MSc PhD, Lecturer, FVAS

The research computing training service is vital to the development of research and research training at the University of Melbourne. This service allowed me to learn and build knowledge about high performance computing, scripting, use of git whilst I was a PhD student, and still now as a lecturer I find myself signing up to sessions to learn about new technologies or to develop skills that could assist me with my research. Additionally for every new student we get, we send them to these training courses so that they too can gain this knowledge from dedicated experts. As an early career researcher I have zero funding to able to send students to these types of training courses, making the ResCom training team invaluable as a service to the University Research community. Removing them is a short sighted decision, the cost of which I can't imagine has been fully considered.

Daniel Urrutia Cabrera, PhD Candidate, MDHS

Research Computing Services Training was an excellent resource that allowed me to acquire important skills and keep myself busy during the lockdown caused by COVID-19 pandemic. As a PhD candidate, I often do not have time to learn and master by myself complex techniques such as programming. These trainings provide all the basic knowledge required to get started in the field of bioinformatics, a highly valued skill in the biomedical research. I now feel that my value as a future researcher has increased thanks to these trainings.

Catherine Nunn, BAppSci, MA, PhD Candidate, FoA

The training provided by the team has been (and I hope will continue to be!) of immense benefit to my PhD. I have learn how to use Omeka, Latex and done introductory sessions on Matlab. I will use these methods in my PhD and without the training workshops I would not have been able to learn these skills. The cost of sourcing these types of courses externally is prohibitive to me. The fact that I can learn these skills as a PhD candidate sets Melbourne Uni apart from other institutions and gives added incentive (and value) to study at Melbourne. By cutting these jobs you will be diminishing the quality of research at Melbourne, and the overall quality of the University. I also participated in the ResBazaar and Researcher Connect events, and found them to be extremely well organised and useful. To cut these talented people's jobs is short sighted and irresponsible.

Dr Joshua Thia, BSc, MSc, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, FoS

Receiving accessible and affordable computational training is an essential resource for students and researchers that would not necessarily have this made available to them in their undergraduate degree. Disestablishment of this service represents a considerable blow to the UniMelb research community and will undoubtedly impact the quality of work and affordability of professional development.

Furthermore, this team that pioneered the RezBaz initiative are top notch. I attended the ResBaz meetings as a postgraduate and they were hugely beneficial to my learning and inspired me to pursue computer programming and statistics more rigorously during my PhD. Loss of this team would be a major loss to UniMelb's knowledge and skill pool.‌

Allison Clarke, BSc, GradDipIntDev, MEval, Research Assistant, MGSE

An absolutely crucial service that is essential to me and to my colleagues doing our job at the UoM. I have taken R Studio, NVivo, and LaTeX courses though the Research Computing Services, as have many of my peers. We are constantly making the most of these services: whenever we have a need to learn a new software to improve our research and productivity, if we need a course refresh, or if new staff come on-board. Part of why I love working at the UoM is having access to such amazing training. There is just not the equivalent anywhere else. The courses are professional, relevant, and accessible. The trainers are experts, who understand the University context.‌

Dr Angela Devine, PhD, Honorary Research Fellow, MDHS

I have relied on training to improve and expand my skill set, and there are a number of courses that I would still like to take when I find the time to enroll. Many PhD students and early career researchers don't have funding to pay for courses, so this service is integral to their skill development. In turn, this improves the quality of unimelb's research outputs. If you plan to take it away, what are you proposing to replace it?‌

Dr Teagan Altschwager, Senior Research Fellow, FBE

This is an excellent research community and provides a unique advantage to Uni Melb by helping academics to expand their research expertise in a cost-efficient and timely manner. Finding these kinds of courses externally would incur significant costs for academics, and hinder their ability to further their research skills, with subsequent impacts on research impact and publication potential.‌

Jacqueline Felstead, PhD Candidate and Sessional Lecturer, FAM

Training and Engagement have been invaluable to my students during Covid. Two of their trainers taught my undergraduate student classes 3D Slicer and Rhino which importantly expanded what they could achieve at home during isolation. Their success in engaging these students was demonstrated by the number of who attended their subsequent Training and Engagement drop in sessions. I am immensely appreciative that they were able to help me adapt my classes to these changed circumstances. I have been lucky as a PhD candidate to have their help too and if anything these changed circumstances show what can be achieved if the scope of their program was extended.‌

Nick Bell, Research Manager, FoS

Staff and graduate researchers within my lab group have found the training sessions INVALUABLE in getting their bioinformatic analytical skills refreshed and updated. Losing these training sessions will be extremely harmful to many in the unimelb research community.‌

Dr Angeline Ferdinand, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, MDHS

The courses offered by the Training and Engagement service have been critical to my and others' upskilling over the years. I personally have undertaken training in NVivo and LaTeX, which I have utilised in my PhD and Postdoc with the University. I have also recommended the NVivo training to others in my team. The service is an investment into the University's researchers, and its disestablishment would be a blow to building the capacity of current and emerging researchers.‌

Ella, PhD Candidate, FoS

Through the research training platform I have learned R, an essential tool to my research. Without learning this tool I would be incapable of conducting analyses and publishing my research. Research computing services is the sole place where I have found sufficient training to be able to use R. Without their courses I would have had to pay thousands for an R course. Taking money away from essential research or out of my own pocket.‌

Dr Caitlin Pfeiffer BVSc PhD, Lecturer, FVAS

This service is essential for building RHD student and ECR capacity and the cost of equivalent training outsourced would be unsustainable and lead to reduced research performance. The demand for these services is very high ongoing and it has led to innumerable positive research outcomes and collaborations since its inception, including interdisciplinary research that just would not have happened otherwise. I would not have reached my current career stage and research success without this training which is very cost-effective considering its scope and the quality of expertise. To lose the RCS training and engagement team is false economy.‌

Dr Pradeep Rajasekhar, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Monash University

The training provided by ResCom has been invaluable to myself and many other researchers not only at Uni Melbourne, but at many other universities. They paved the way for training researchers on digital skills to improve research productivity. I have personally benefited from the Python, Matlab workshops, and from the network I've gained from training events and ResBaz.

I know there are plenty of online recorded courses, but it never really replaces the face to face workshops (in person or online) . As busy researchers, finding time to do online courses is hard plus these courses are pitched at a very general audience. However, the workshops by RCS have always been pitched at the right level for researchers, and meeting other researchers even from other fields and learning how they use various digital tools to gain more insight into their research has been fascinating and useful in my work.

The fact that Uni Melbourne had such a service and as far as I know is probably one of the first ones to start training researchers in digital skills showed the progressive nature of the university. However, this move to drop RCS is extremely regressive and will be a bad blow to the research community. Doing research is hard enough, and this move will guarantee it.

Dr David Wilkinson, Research Fellow, FoS

The training I received from Research Computing Services was integral to the formative years of my PhD at The University of Melbourne. Without it I would have had a significantly harder time completing a programming heavy research program in quantitative ecology. In addition to the cumulative six days worth of workshops I attended, I made extensive use of the program's capacity for voluntary teaching where past attendees can come back and help teach future workshops to new students. This was an invaluable source of teaching experience that is otherwise difficult to come by for early career researchers. Without both the skill training and teaching experience I would not be in the position to run a fortnightly math and coding club in the School of BioSciences with a mailing list in excess of 200 participants that run the gammut from honours students to professorial staff.‌

Isobel Walker, PhD Candidate, MDHS

I am a lab/clinic based PhD student and decided to learn to code after watching fellow students waste days of work simply 'copy-pasting' data, or holding a ruler to the screen as they try to understand a single line in Excel by eye. Learning a coding language (R) has been absolutely critical for my PhD: it reduces errors, improves reproducibility and dramatically improves time efficiency. I now use R for experimental and clinical data organization, statistical analysis and data presentation. For more complex analysis, my basic understanding of R has given me the opportunity to better engage with the statistician I work with and collaborate on ideas that I would not otherwise been able to understand. The coding courses run by Pablo and Jeremy have been absolutely critical for me to pick up a computer language at PhD level. In a single day of the Introduction to R Studio course I learnt and understood more than I had in weeks of trying to learn the basics on my own and using online courses. I still refer to their course content and highly recommend the course to all my colleagues, 2 of whom have also attended the course and subsequently started using R. As I now become more proficient in coding, I hope to attend the more advanced courses/bootcamps to improve my coding skills for my PhD and beyond. I also hope to attend their LaTeX course series to write my thesis with this software (again, I am motivated to do this after watching fellow students waste days trying to do nominal tasks in word). These courses are in high demand and often require a wait list. They should be fully supported to increase frequency and meet the demand.

Shyanaka Rathnayaka, BSc(Hons), MPhil, PhD Candidate, MSE

I have attended several workshops conducted through Research Computing Services team which made a significant contribution to my PhD Journey. The workshops they conducted on Cloud computing, LaTex, and Python are of very high quality and very clear at the same time.

Losing their contribution would make the life of future PhD students very difficult. Hence I strongly feel they should continue to be operated within the University as an integral part of the research community.

Ben Kreunen, Tech Support Officer, University Digitisation Centre, Library

Over the last 20 years there has been a steady decline in technical support across the university leaving researchers to attempt to acquire technical skills and knowledge beyond their own areas of expertise. The training and engagement provided by Research Computing Services over the years has been an important resource to researchers at the university to forward and refine their research methods. The value of their engagement extends well beyond just providing training, providing researchers with inspiration when attempting to adopt new technologies, and hope when they come up against problems they can't find help to solve. Their engagement activities bring technical expertise that is mostly hidden around the university together with researchers desperately looking for help. With no alternatives in sight this change will only hurt they university's ability to innovate and potentially reduce the quality of research.‌

Dr Alysson M. Costa, Senior Lecturer, FoS

The services provided by the Training & Engagement team of Research Computing Services are invaluable and should be increased in the times we are living, when the move to new forms of teaching / engaging are not only a way to be a better teacher and researcher but indeed, the only way to be a teacher and researcher.‌

Dr Mike Jones, BA(Hons), MARes PhD, Postdoctoral Research Associate, ANU

As a staff member and PhD student at the University of Melbourne from 2008-2019 the training and community building centred around ResCom and ResBaz were incredibly valuable. Disestablishing this area will have a huge impact on the ability of researchers and other staff to access training, share knowledge, and build collaborative opportunities. These are exactly the sorts of services a contemporary university requires, particularly in the current climate. The team and its work should be the envy of institutions around the country, rather than treated as an expendable resource.

Lauren Pikó, BA, PhD, Research Methods Workshop Coordinator, ABP

This team is crucial to the successful research output of the University, at doctoral level and beyond. This is especially the case in 2020, where these workers have supported massive transitions in research practice across the board and which have only increased the need for specialised support. In teaching research methods to doctoral candidates, I have seen firsthand how closely the success of candidates' work is tied to the level of support and training they receive in these areas, and cutting that support through cuts to this team will undoubtedly flow on to problems with candidature progression, researcher retention, and subsequent research impact. The ensuing financial loss for the university, and the loss to its prestige and impact, would greatly outweigh any short term gains from a departmental cut here, and would ultimately undermine the integrity of this University as a research institution.‌

Payal Bal, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, FoS

These workshops and training are VITAL for students and researchers alike. I’ve found them incredibly helpful over the years to build by capability in HPC, spatial analyses with python, skills I did not acquire coming out of my studies and PhD. They're the backbone of research and capacity building at the university, and the university would be doing a huge disservice discontinuing these. These might seem like easy cost cutting, but I assure you that actions like these can be crippling for research at the university. I do not have more words in me yet, but I am more than happy to be contacted for comment.‌

Dr Laura Bird, MPsych(Clin), PhD, Early Career Researcher, MDHS

The R Studio training courses have provided me with the necessary basic skills to be able to implement statistical analyses in R for my research results, and increased confidence and capability to troubleshoot difficulties in R statistical code. I unfortunately didn't get training in R or other statistical packages (other than SPSS) as part of either my undergraduate or postgraduate training, which is a significant limitation in psychological sciences. If it weren't for the Research Computing Services community and the amazing workshops they have held this year (even throughout the COVID-19 lockdowns!) I wouldn't have had the time to go and self-learn these basic concepts and skills, nor the confidence or motivation to implement them. It's one thing to read a self-help technical manual, but another thing entirely to have friendly faces providing you with information and practical exercises to help build your skills. The graphs I will produce using techniques learned through these webinar workshops will significantly improve the quality of my future publications and the accessibility of how my results will be able to be shared with public and scientific audiences. They offer incredibly valuable services related to other statistical and data visualisation packages, and it would be an extraordinary detriment to the early career researching community of Melbourne University to lose such a welcoming and inclusive service for students and staff wishing to up-skill and enhance the quality of the work they do for the University.

Carmen Glanville BSc(Hons), PhD Candidate, FVAS

ResCom has provided me with valuable training and support in digital tools that were essentially unused within our Centre. I have also used various online training packages for these tools but found the ResCom approach to be far superior. I have now introduced many others within our Centre to these tools, amplifying the impact of ResCom's training and I continually recommend their services to other graduate researchers.

Sharon Wong, PhD Candidate, FoA

I have used Research Computing Services (ResComp) extensively over my candidature both as a student attending the workshops and as a ResLead helping the community coordinators to train other students.

The help and guidance I received on the use of a range of software and tools were extremely beneficial for my research. It has helped me to perform a number of key tasks such as literature reviews (NVivo), questionnaire analysis (NVivo, R), quantitative analysis (R, Matlab), how to format and write my thesis (LaTeX), how to print samples (3D printing), coding and data visualisations (Python, R) and even working with large datasets in Spartan (HPC). The community meetup sessions and hacky hours for each tool has also been extremely helpful in speaking to other users in the research community so we can problem solve and collaborate together. Hence, it is a key research support service that is indispensable in helping me to perform my research and data analysis efficiently.

ResComp provides access to training that is not available for researchers outside a University (some tools are only available at University). Even if there are external courses available they would be extremely costly and inaccessible to most researchers. Unlike the ResComp modules, the external providers of such training would not be targeted at researchers and their needs. The ResComp training provided has been key in developing my personal skill set in a range of digital tools that are in high demand in the workplace. This is essential in enabling RHD researchers to translate their skills into industry post completion of their degree.

In conclusion, I think that ResComp is an essential service and benefit to the research community at the University of Melbourne (and other Universities that attend these sessions) and should not be disestablished. This is pertinent where research and the world at large is highly dependent on the use of digital tools to solve challenging issues.‌

Dr Damien Irving, Postdoctoral Research Associate, UNSW

This is truly heartbreaking. I was part of the very first intake of ResComs back in 2013. As a PhD student, it was so exciting to join such an innovative program. We launched the Research Bazaar (which is now hosted annually at a dozen universities around the world), kick-started a local Carpentries community (I've lost count of how many hundreds of researchers have attended Carpentries workshops at the University of Melbourne) and had a blast doing it. It was truly the most rewarding part of my PhD experience. I went on to work as a climate scientist at the CSIRO Climate Science Centre and now I'm with the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre. There's no way I would have been able to conduct the data intensive research I have without the skills and knowledge gained during three years as a ResCom.

Tegan Brown, MFES, BSc(Hons), PhD Candidate, FoS

I attended introductory R sessions which were a fantastic service and made me feel like I wasn't the only research student that was learning these skills from scratch. The tutors were patient and generous with their time. The introductory courses provided me with the skills and understanding of the basics to be able to (now) help myself through other online forums, such as Stack Overflow. The skills and confidence that I learned in a 2 day course would have taken me to much longer by myself, while also making me feel isolated and, quite frankly, stupid for not already knowing how to write code in R. The group environment of these courses made me feel like part of a community that was learning together.

This is a critical and unique university service for research students and should be a priority for the University in terms of student research success and wellbeing.‌

Jonathan Garber, Research Data Specialist, MDAP

Being involved with this organisation as a student, volunteer, and employee has been fundamental to my growth as an academic and a digital expert. I would not have been able to accomplish what I have at MDAP nor complete my PhD without the support and training from RCS trainers.

Vanessa Tang, PhD Candidate, MDHS

Dear Professors, I am an clinician studying my PhD at the Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences. At the start of my PhD, I didn't even know what Python was and how to install it on my computer. The resources by the ResCom team has provided me with the tools to start programming in different coding languages: Python and R. These tools have contributed to my understanding and programming of psychophysics experiments and building beautiful figures / graphs (that are not from excel or GraphPad).

Although these resources can be accessed online via youtube or external online courses, creating a 'hub' or 'community' where these tools are easily accessible and advertised at the university is essential to equip the university's own grad research students with some computer programming skills. It provides the University of Melbourne grad research students an advantage as early career researchers in a data rich world.

Learning has to be accessible and if the university fails to provide even a handful of beginner resources to aid their grad research students who are keen learners, the university is effectively erecting barriers to education.

Katie Wood, Senior Archivist, Student and Scholarly Services

As a professional staff member who supports teaching, I have used the ResCom training team multiple times over the past few years, both for my own training and for training for students. Without support from the team in using Omeka, we would not have been able to give hundreds of capstone History students practical skills in research data management and communication with the public and online, essential skills they will use in numerous careers they may chose after graduation. That is just one example of the valuable work they have helped me undertake. Their adaptability, skills and responsiveness mean that I can say without hyperbole that this is one of the easiest and most rewarding teams to work with across the University.‌

Dr Mathew Ling, Lecturer, Misinformation Lab, Deakin University, and Founder, Australia and New Zealand Open Research Network

As the academic environment becomes more competitive, institutions that support their staff in developing innovative approaches will prosper. ResCom/ResPlat is an unparalleled resource for enabling staff and students to continually develop rather than simply being staid and static. Furthermore, it provides an excellent delivery point for other professional development, e.g in helping researchers adapt to open research practices and so on. ResCom represents a competitive advantage over other institutes, you would be well served to preserve that edge.

Kaitlyn Hammond, PhD Candidate, FoS

The R courses were extremely helpful at the beginning of my research. I use R for everything now and honestly could not do my research without it, but would have been too scared to even start without the guidance I received in the intro courses at the beginning of my PhD. I recommend them to everyone who is just starting! It's so important to be supporting technical and quantitative skills and making this accessible to students is part of the University's role. Please rethink terminating the program. It will be extremely detrimental to the research coming out of the university.‌

Dr Tyne Sumner, Researcher & Consultant, COO-P / FoA

I was a member of the ResCom training team between 2014-2018. This role was critical for my career development as a professional staff member of the University as well as my research output. I was also able to build a comprehensive national network of collaborators and peers via the service as well as connect the University of Melbourne with a growing cohort of skilled professionals from around the country working in the digital research capability space. The service is absolutely critical to the digital skills training needs of a growing number of Graduate Researchers (and others) at the University of Melbourne. Without an adequate replacement service/s (or alternative) in scope, disestablishing the service in 2021 risks leaving thousands of researchers without the necessary training they need to complete their MA/PhD and/or other research.‌

Jessica Horton BAdvSc(Hons), PhD Candidate, Burnet Institute

The training provided by the Research Computing Services team was excellent and I have recommended their courses to many colleagues. Modelling and high throughput statistical analysis are fundamental to modern biological scientific research but learning these coding programs is an overwhelming and anxiety-inducing task. The R courses run by Pablo and Jeremy explained the program in an accessible and engaging manner and I walked away with a real sense of understanding. I greatly appreciated those courses and was truly impressed that they were freely offered to university staff and students. I think it would be an awful blow to the university community if these services were no longer available.‌

Seema Karki, PhD Candidate, MSE

For international students like me the training offered by ResCom are so much helpful and handy. Also during the pandemic, the frequency of training on R helped me to reduce the stress level and perform my data analysis through R Programming. Please retain such infrastructures at University that one can be proud of. These are not only the services offered by ResCom but add value to UoM's profile.

Dr Lars Goerigk, Senior Lecturer, FoS

Various scientific branches have shifted towards digital research tools. In fact, the University of Melbourne has driven a push towards digital/computational research, for instance by establishing an emphasis on Computational Biology. However, focussing more on computationally driven disciplines, means that the next generation of researchers need to be given the right tools to work in those areas. We, for example, are a computational chemistry group and rely on our students to have the right know-how to tackle our research questions. During their undergraduate studies there are only limited opportunities for our students to acquire those skills, due to the other courses they have to take towards their majors. ResCom Training has proven to be an essential tool to train new MSc and PhD students, so that they can more proactively work on their research projects. To me this is an essential service whose discontinuation may have a serious impact on the University's research capabilities.

Dr Hédia Tnani, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Pasteur Institute of Tunis

ResCom training has been a great opportunity for me to improve my skills in many fields. I've attended the R, Matlab, Python and Linux training. The skills ResCom provided me has helped me a lot. My work involves lots of programming and I didn't have the skills to even start my research work. I had to use Matlab and never used it before. I attended Alicia's sessions and little by little I learned how to do basic analysis in Matlab. I was able to ask questions and to clarify many doubts I've had. With Python I tried to watch online courses but it wasn't a very successful strategy. I've been attending the Python sessions and this helped me a lot. The trainer and the helper were very skilful and made the difficult concepts easy to understand. To attend those sessions I had to wake up at 5am sometimes due to the time difference but I didn't mind because I was sure to find a response to my questions. We did many exercises and quizzes also to understand those concepts which brought fun to the learning process.

I'm using those skills now to complete my research work. I would like to thank all the amazing trainers that gave me the opportunity to learn and improve myself. Without the ResCom Training I wouldn't have learnt Matlab, R and Python and wouldn't have been able to make a progress.

Dr Nicholas Doidge, BSci, DVM, PhD Candidate, FVAS

As a PhD student working in the microbiology and conservation spaces the use of bioinformatics is essential to my and many others work. The Research Computing Training Services have been absolutely essential to helping me understand how to interpret and represent complex biological information through R, Python and others. Losing this essential training service would be a huge blow to research at the University of Melbourne across multiple disciplines. Please use common sense and do not cull this absolutely essential training program.‌

Alice Whitehead, B-SCI(Hons), PhD Candidate, MDHS

"I am deeply alarmed to hear of the proposed changes to the Research Computing Services. I have benefitted from the training made available by the Training & Engagement service, undertaking training in Python and R. This has been crucial to my research project, and has allowed me to include cutting edge research methods in my research which I would not have otherwise been able to use. After receiving this training I have taken this knowledge to my lab group and trained other researchers, introducing them to new tools and methods which have helped their research. In this way, the impact of the Research Computing Services goes well beyond the individuals they have trained.

To change the funding model of training services would disempower researchers to upskill. As a graduate research student, having to pay for these services would have likely prevented me from accessing them at all, and would mean my research would be utilising outdated research methods from the early 2000s, rather than the methods I use now, which are under such active development that a protocol from 2019 is out of date. The impact of my research will surely be greater because of the skills I gained from the Research Computing Services training.

Researchers at the University of Melbourne can not stay at the leading edge of their field without access to training in the digital skills offered by the Research Computing Services. To remove this service from the University's offering is akin to getting rid of the library. These services are at the very core of our research, and without them the quality of research performed at the University will suffer.

To remove this service is at odds with the function of a University as a hub for the exchange of expertise and ideas at the forefront of current and emerging knowledge. "

Luc Betbeder-Matibet, BA, MPH, Director eResearch Technology Services, Division of Research, UNSW

We run the equivalent service at UNSW. We consider this to be a critical service for our Researchers. The functions support high levels of quality to reduce institutional risks and shadow services getting established with lower quality and higher costs.

Rieneke Weij, MA, PhD Candidate, FoS

I have done two courses through ResBaz, one in R and one in Python. It has been crucial for my PhD research to use the two and these courses taught me everything I had to know to get started. If these free courses weren't offered by ResBaz, I probably couldn't have done them, because of their great cost elsewhere. The ResBaz team is a group of extremely knowledgeable and skilled people with great teaching skills. Their Training and Engagement service is essential for a top-notch university such as the UoM as it provides students and staff with those extra skills that are becoming more and more important in our nowadays work-life. This service is a beautiful testimony to our university community and how we work together, stay engaged and help and learn from each other across different disciplines, status, ages, backgrounds. This service and this team is needed and irreplaceable.‌

Lev Bromberg, PhD Candidate, MLS

I have found the service invaluable for my research. The training was very engaging and informative, and the presenters were very knowledgeable. It allowed me to gain new qualitative research skills such as using the software NVIVO. Without this training learning to use NVIVO would have taken me a long time as other forms of training would have likely been unaffordable. I was looking forward to gaining further research skills and learning to use new tools using the service.‌

Benjamin Wagner, PhD Candidate, FoS

I have taken some of their courses in the very beginning of my PhD and got some invaluable skills that I could build on myself through this platform. I later went on to become a volunteer tutor, helping out on ResCom's R courses and really appreciated the experience and knowledge exchange with other tutors as well as the students taking the course. I did encourage anyone starting out in our department to take their introductory courses and every single one who did told me how amazing their experience was and how thankful they were for the Service ResCom is providing for free to graduate researchers. This tells me it is an invaluable platform that needs to be continued, or the University would loose on of their key research support systems for any Masters or PhD student.‌

Christina Van Heer, BSc, Grad Dip Psych, Post Grad Dip Psych, PhD Candidate, MDHS

...the research platforms service has continually helped address the gap that the university has failed to fill to provide crucial workshops that allows graduates to learn to code, version control and take advantage of the high performance computing. Given the strong need for data based professions in industry, and the decline of research positions as the university continues to make redundancies and reduce funding for research, leaving our researchers ill equipped reduces the value of the Melbourne experience. Faced with declining quality, students can and will study elsewhere. For each PhD student the university does not take, they lose $100,000, along with lost productivity for research groups. Thus, the cost to the university is large, and something they can easily quantify if they use some of the business acumen which they have recently gained by understanding the consequences of rare events such as pandemics, which pose high risk.

Niina Matthews, BEng, Honours Student, MSE

When starting my Honours project this year I had to learn the use of 3D Slicer software. This is an open source program with minimal training courses available, even though guides exist. Without someone to ask I had to rely on videos that covered some of the use but did not really explain the functionality or go into content I specifically needed. Plus there was no interaction. My mentor was aware of the ResCom Training programs and advised to check the 3D Slicer training on offer. I attended an online session tailored for the modules and extensions I was needing to learn, and later was in contact with the trainers when further questions came up.

I can't praise the staff who ran the course enough. They were inviting, encouraging, and frank and honest in their approach to the use of the system they taught. I was impressed to find that the training was offered free of charge for the research students, and felt that the students attending were looked after.

As the open letter points out, services provided by ResCom is highly cost-effective and has been in high demand. Cancelling the service may not provide a huge financial saving in the bigger scheme of things, but will impact many and decreases the value of services provided for the research students.

Aaron Soans, Alumni, FBE

Cancelling the service may save the university a small amount in the short term but it will come at a much larger long-term cost to students and academics. Students will have to incur out of pocket expenses, may experience delays on their projects, become more over worked and stressed. Academics will have to spend more time providing basic support to students rather than focusing on research.

From personal experience, ResCom has provided invaluable support to update my skills after graduating and has kept me linked to the university.‌

Dr Melissa Preissner, BEng(Mech)/BA(Hons), PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Monash University

This is a vital service for any research intensive university. This type of support is tailored and specific, which cannot be replaced by standard off-the-shelf online courses. I attended the Research Bazaar at Melbourne Uni 5-6 years ago (at the start of my PhD) and thought it was very comprehensive in its offering of high quality training and support. My own university (Monash) didn't have coding / data analysis support at the time. Fortunately, Monash has now built up a coding and bioinformatics support community via the Data Fluency platform (based on the 'carpentry' workshops offered by Melb Uni), which I have relied on on numerous occasions. My (engineering) PhD supervisor did not have time to show me basic things like setting up python or R, plotting and statistics, command line scripting, etc, and I did not have many lab members to help me.

Moreover, the ethos of these services is to promote open source software, saving the University money on ongoing expensive licensing fees. For example, Monash Uni has not renewed its Adobe license recently, and is encouraging staff and students to use high quality open source options. I have also worked in industry prior to my PhD and they often do not have (want to pay for) licensed software (eg, matlab) and require skills in python and R instead, which can be seen in job ads too.

Antigone Christou-Rappos, Bachelors Student, FoS

I participated in a LaTeX Training program in 2019 and I found that the skills and knowledge I gained was invaluable for my mathematics classes. To disestablish our Training & Engagement team as part of the Pandemic Reset Plan (PRP) is an anti-job-ready decision.‌

Justin Mammarella, BE, BCS, DevOps/HPC Engineer, RCS, Business Services

I develop and maintain the infrastructure that forms both the Melbourne Research Cloud and HPC environments. Rescom have delivered training in support of these services which has been essential in maximising the utility of our infrastructure.

Early in the development of these facilities the University identified a deficiency in computing skillsets across research, and a need for Applications based training. Furthermore, it was not enough to build the infrastructure, researchers need to be engaged and compelled to use the best tools that are available to them.

The Rescom team were fundamental in bridging the gap between world class research and using state of the art computing resources. Training academics to integrate Cloud and HPC resources into their work-flow is an ongoing endeavour, the demand for this requirement will not diminish as a result of the global pandemic; evidence suggests that training demand has increased. Disestablishing Rescom will damage the link between researchers and the peta-scale campus and is likely to cost the University more financially in the long term. I am concerned the University will be forced to either outsource or re-establish the expert knowledge, networks and materials cultivated by this team, at a greater long term cost.‌

Adhitya Sutresna, PhD Candidate, FoS

ResCom has not only provided a platform for me to begin learning to program in Python, but also provided a community that supported me in that process. The fact that it is a free service made it accessible not only for me, but everyone else who made up the community, without which the platform would be much less useful in providing their services.‌

Lachlan Simpson, Systems Administrator, UNSW

I was previously employed as both a ResCom and as a Systems Administrator within the UoM Research Technology Services. My role as a ResCom gave me communication skills, understanding and empathy that are needed as a designer of systems that researchers would go on to use. It reminded me that documentation needs to be written. That strange corner cases will be found and that patience is necessary. But it also showed me that helping people be better researchers, and do better research, is unbelievably rewarding work. I still use those skills at UNSW and my contribution to their team is reflected in the skills I learned at UoM.

Dr Isla Carboon BA(Hons), PhD, Academic Specialist, MDHS

I was made aware of RCS via Researcher Connect and so relieved and excited to have an option to get training for a statistical package (R) that I would need for teaching and update my knowledge on another package (NVivo). I was so impressed that the University provided this - there was nothing like it when I was here 13 years ago. The training was high quality and the ability to reach out to a community of practitioners when needed is invaluable. I can see why you would look at this service and consider it non-essential - that people can get training elsewhere and cover the cost themselves. Obviously I don't know your cost and RoI measures but I believe cutting the RCS is a false economy. I suspect that relatively speaking it will not be a high cost to the University and replacing the training services with external private providers will cost far more than the current outlay. In terms of RoI, understand that it's value to both staff and students is multiplicative - my students have benefitted from the training I received and the students who get trained also teach each other. What makes this work well is having the people who run the communities supported. Cutting this service would be a huge loss to the University research community, not just in terms of its capability building but the connections it creates between otherwise siloed researchers and teams.

Alha Bin Zulfiqar, BEng, Masters Candidate, MSE

I was introduced to ResCom training at the start of my first semester. I enrolled myself and watched the basic tutorials on Latex. I never thought that it would prove so much beneficial for me especially in my first semester but infact I ended up writing a final report for a subject, that was worth 20 percent on Latex and It helped me achieve 94 percent marks. I am really looking forward to attending future tutorials to build on the skills that I learnt in the first Latex tutorial held by ResCom Training.

Dr Suzie Sheehy BSc(Hons), DPhil, Senior Lecturer, FoS

In my experience the difference between a mediocre graduate and an excellent one is how quickly they can pick up and use the everyday skills required in their role either as a researcher or valued employee - there is no way a graduate supervisor can give them the hands-on learning that ResCom provides in tools such as python and MatLab, yet these tools are essential for their success. In my opinion the kinds of training offered by ResCom should be massively expanded, not reduced! Anyone can take an online course in these things, but a well-curated hands-on intensive with direct feedback is the kind of difference that a UniMelb education and research environment should stand for.

Erika Bartak, PhD Candidate, ABP

The ResCom training team has been invaluable to me during my PhD the last few years. I needed Nvivo training for my research, and attended a few in-person training sessions before the pandemic hit and the campus was closed. Not to be deterred, the training team quickly flipped to providing training and support online. The online self-guided modules are excellent, and the webinars were perfectly timed to help me get back into my research, and overcome some of the isolation of doing my PhD at home. The regular emails and Facebook group updates also provide support and connectivity for the dispersed research community. It makes no sense to me why a research institution like the University of Melbourne would disband this wonderful research training service. Both our research outputs and our research community will be poorer for it, and I am certain the supposed dollar savings of terminating such a service will prove to be a false economy.‌

Dr Louise van der Werff, BSci, BEng(Hons), PhD, Business Analyst, RCS, Business Services

I am one of the affected staff members who will lose their jobs following the disestablishment of the Training and Engagement service. For the past 5+ years I have been helping to support researchers learn valuable digital research skills, firstly as a trainer in medical image processing and 3D data analysis, and now as a business analyst for the team as a whole. I have seen the immense amount of gratitude for the service as expressed by our participants who include graduate researchers, early and mid career researchers, career academics, research assistants and more. I would personally have found great value in this type of service if I had been able to access it when I completed my PhD in the years before this.

This team is made up of researchers and community members, providing intensive and research targeted training to allow researchers to efficiently upskill in the digital tools they need to complete their research. I believe this system to be superior to researchers either having to self teach or outsource to expensive commercial training services. In addition, the community and social offerings of the service including the running of multidisciplinary events such as the Research Bazaar and Researcher Connect allows for valuable social support and interactions as well as interdisciplinary collaborations.‌

Kachun Lay, Masters Candidate, FAM

During the pandemic. Rescom has played a pivotal role as a training platform for me as a graduating masters student to better my skills in using digital media. It is through this training that Rescom so professionally provided that helped me gain the confidence to start making digital artworks and are now under display as part of my graduation exhibition at the Faculty of Fine Art and Music. Save Rescom!‌

Lu-Yi Wang, PhD Candidate, FoS

I have attend several trainings on different softwares provided by Training & Engagement team of Research Computing Services. They provide professional and passionate sessions! I not only develop skills from their workshops but also understand what kind of things a certain software can/cannot do and if it is necessary for me to transfer to another software. Now, it is a particularly important time to keep this service alive during pandemic because it provides an important and irreplaceable platform for researchers and students of Unimelb keep learning and improving themselves during this difficult time! It also encourages people to learn online and offers opportunities for us to interact and listen to people from other fields (both speaker and participants)! It will be a great loss to close this service and a great pity for future researchers and students! People are the most valuable resource of a university and closing this service is like cutting off the investment in people from unimelb!

Ursula Soulsby, Business Analyst, Infrastructure Services

I worked in the former Research Platform Services from April 2012 - Jan 2015. I saw first hand, in the previous researcher training services how valuable their work is. Training was domain relevant, up-to-date, responsive to feedback and cheap for the hours actually worked by the team. If the latest team you are proposing to disestablish is even half as beneficial to researchers, you are making a mistake. Don't do it. Will a for-profit encourage a young researcher, tweak their code, improve the content of the next class based on feedback? No. One of our most valuable assets, researchers, will be turned into a number in a cost centre.

Timothy Cottier, PhD Candidate, MDHS

I completed the beginning and intermediate matlab lessons and found them immensely invaluable. Alicia is an incredible instructor, the content is very well structured, the lessons are clear and transparent, the learning goals are very clear, and I always left every lesson knowing what to do. I tried to teach myself matlab using Mathwork's provided resources and it took me way longer, it was very complex, and I didn't learn much. Rescom's educational resources were invaluable and allowed me within 8 weeks to code experiments and do statistical analysis for my PhD. This is the bread and butter of my field. Without this course, future graduate students will not be able to learn these skills. They will have to teach themselves, and it will waste of valuable and limited research time. We're not taught matlab in our undergrad, even though it is ESSENTIAL for a lot of cognitive neuropsychology research. Please, please don't remove rescom classes, and especially the rescom matlab classes.

The team are kind and very passionate about what they do. They are incredible instructors.