Emerging scholars from the University of the Free State (UFS) are now invited to apply to participate in the third cohort of the Emerging Scholars Accelerator Programme (ESAP) that starts in January 2023. 

The programme provides support to candidates as they build a sustainable academic career with complex and often competing demands for excellent teaching. This, as well as research productivity and impact, engagement with the wider community of national and international academic and non-academic stakeholders while they participate actively in leadership and service to the UFS community. 

The members of the ESAP group are colleagues who recently completed their PhD degrees and many of them were appointed at UFS shortly before they were selected for the programme. The programme benefits candidates in various ways, including individual career development discussions with the manager of the programme, Dr Henriȅtte van den Berg, the participants and their line managers. Another way in which the programme benefits candidates is to encourage and support colleagues to make full use of funding and leadership development opportunities. During the challenging times of COVID-19 travel restrictions and limited social contact with colleagues, the programme facilitated meetings with important support departments such as Directorate Research Development, the Office for International Affairs, Human Resources and the Directorate: Community Engagement (CE). In June 2022, we gradually started with contact sessions to improve the sense of community of candidates.

The first two ESAP cohorts exceeded all expectations in terms of the number of promotions to senior lecturer and associate professor positions, research performance reflected in NRF rating, books published and articles published in high-impact journals. Our candidates are also making their mark as leaders of academic departments and feature prominently in the annual Teaching and Learning and Scholarship of Engagement awards. The duration of the programme is two years after which the best performing scholars advance to the Future Professoriate Mentoring Programme. The best-performing candidates in the group are testimony to the old adage “the more you put in, the more you get out”. The members of the group work hard to make the transition to senior academic levels and are highly talented and committed. The programme helps them focus on what is important to build rewarding, meaningful careers. 

PhD graduates who obtained their qualification in the past five years and are appointed in full-time academic positions on any of the UFS campuses are eligible to apply.