AUT Pacific held its third Writing in Pacific – Pacific Postgraduate Writing Retreat at Vaughan Park Retreat Centre, Long Bay, North Shore on 21 – 24 September 2012. These retreats are held four times a year for Pacific postgraduate students to ‘escape’ to the peaceful and tranquil settings of Vaughan Park to take part in workshops, share their research with fellow postgraduate students, access the help of AUT academic and support staff, and focus on writing. This was attended by 16 postgraduate students and four academic staff. This last retreat was also a little different in that on the first day, the postgraduate students were joined by 7 undergraduate students in their final year of their undergraduate degrees from across the various faculties. These students were invited to attend to get a ‘taste’ of what postgraduate study would be like in the hope that they too would consider doing postgraduate study. The day began with getting to know eachother – undergraduates, postgraduates and staff which continued over lunch. 
After lunch, a postgrad panel talked about what postgraduate study was like and this was followed by a postgraduate presentation by Salainaoloa Wilson, a PhD student who talked about her journey through postgraduate study and in particular about her Master’s research on Samoan language maintenance in New Zealand. In the afternoon, the undergraduate students took the chance to respond to what they had heard and talked about throughout the day; they shared what they had learnt and all of them indicated that postgraduate study for them was definitely an option now. Before dinner, the undergraduate and postgraduate students took time to play some sport on the beach and continue the conversations from throughout the day. In the evening, Agnes Masoe (PhD candidate and Graduate Assistant from the Faculty of Business and Law) was the dinner speaker and she presented on her PhD research on Accountability of NGOs in Samoa. This was an excellent session and generated a lot of really great discussion.
Throughout the weekend, the postgraduate students also got the chance to have one-on-one sessions with academic staff (Dr. Juliet Nanai, Dr. Camille Nakhid, Professor Marilyn Waring, and Professor Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop), listen to sessions by Rosemary Godbold (AUTEC Executive Manager) who spoke about the Ethics application and process, and Dr. Camille Nakhid who ran a session on ‘Definitions of Pacific Diaspora and Transnationalism’, as well as have time to do individual study and writing. 
The final Writing in Pacific – Pacific Postgraduate Writing Retreat for the year is booked for 23-26 November 2012. For more information, contact Salainaoloa Wilson on salwilso@aut.ac.nz or 9219999 x 6041.
Author: Salainaoloa Wilson (PhD Student)
