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Employability is rapidly becoming a primary aim of PhD programmes. Internships have been shown to maximise students' chances of employment; however, there is limited evidence for how relevant this approach is to social science PhD students. This article reports on a mixed methods study, designed to utilise secondary and primary programme evaluation data collected through student (n = 18) and partner (n = 15) questionnaires, student (n = 30) case study reports and interviews with partners (n = 7) in the first five years of an internship programme running at a UK Russell Group university. The study found that the social science PhD internship programme surpassed the high expectations of both PhD students and partners. The key implication of the study is that the programme boosted student employability, demonstrating to students and employers that traditional PhD social science study provides transferable workplace skills and internships enhance these skills and illuminate a wide range of non-academic employment pathways. The study provided the evidence needed to engage future students and partners in the programme, and to improve the framework for programme evaluation. An expansion of the programme is recommended, alongside ongoing monitoring and alignment of non-academic partner, university and student needs.

In an initial investigation of differential expression of genes caused by cis-acting regulatory elements in rice, the lack of reproducibility led us to question the basic premise of allelic expression imbalance determination: namely that departures of cDNA expression ratios from those observed in genomic DNA provide unequivocal evidence of cis-acting polymorphisms. This paper describes experiments designed to demonstrate that stochastic variation in low copy number of targets in PCR reactions give variable allelic ratios even when starting with the same copy numbers of the two alleles. These significant departures from an expected 1:1 ratio provide an explanation to the lack of reproducibility observed for our cDNA measurements. Key words: rice, allelic expression imbalance, single base extension assay, low copy number targets, allele expression assay. Lors de travaux visant a mesurer l'expression differentielle de genes causee par des elements regulateurs en cis, un manque de reproductibilite a amene les auteurs a remettre en question l'assise meme de la methode de determination du desequilibre de l'expression allelique : nommement qu'un ecart observe dans le ratio d'expression des alleles constituait une evidence sans equivoque d'un polymorphisme en cis. Dans ce travail, les auteurs decrivent des experiences demontrant qu'une variation stochastique chez des cibles de faible abondance produisait des ratios alleliques variables meme lorsqu'on commencait avec le meme nombre de copies des deux alleles. Ces deviations par rapport au ratio 1:1 attendu permettent d'expliquer le manque de reproductibilite observe pour les mesures d'abondance des ADNc. Mots-cles : riz, desequilibre de l'expression allelique, essai d'incorporation d'une seule base, cibles a faible nombre de copies, essai d'expression allelique. [Traduit par la Redaction], Introduction Cis-acting regulatory polymorphisms offer a novel source of genetic diversity that is largely under-utilized because of the difficulty in assessing the relative strengths of different allelic variants. Only in [...]