academia Archives - Page 3 of 8

08/06/2015

There is no magic formula…(sorry!)

I recently attended a mentoring event that left me faintly frustrated and I was finding it hard to put into words exactly why. Eventually it came to me – at these events people always want the answer to the same question: what is the magic formula for succeeding* in academia? The problem is that there isn’t one, and I always feel really bad having to say that.

Sadly being smart is not enough. You need to work hard (not 24/7 or anything insane but you can’t slack off all the time and expect to succeed) and you need to be lucky. That luck can involve being in the right place at the right time, having the right skills, or knowing the right person. Of course people make their own luck, and being in the right place is not going to help you if you don’t also have the CV to be able to grab the opportunity. But still I would say that luck plays a fairly large part in most people’s careers. Of course you need publications, preferably in well-respected journals (Science and Nature papers would be a bonus!). But how many publications depends on your field, the post and, importantly, who you are competing with. The same applies to grants, presentations, teaching, outreach etc. This makes giving generic advice really difficult.

Another problem is that things are changing rapidly in the academic job market. Often we get advice from PIs who got their jobs in a completely different economic and academic climate. For example, I got a PhD with no papers, no research experience, and when I was half way through my MSc degree. These days this wouldn’t be enough for me to get PhD funding from the Irish Research Council. My point here is that you should take generic advice with a grain of salt, and also try to avoid getting annoyed with PIs for not giving you the “magic formula”. All we can do is tell you about our personal experiences.

What kinds of advice might be more useful (beyond the obvious advice to “write more good papers”)? First, before you’re looking for jobs take a senior academic in your field (preferably several) out for a coffee to show them your CV and ask them if there are any obvious gaps. This gives you the opportunity to fill those gaps before it becomes an issue. Second, when you start applying for jobs, try and get as much information about the job as possible from the advert but also ask people in the department if you can. This might save you time, for example if it turns out there is an internal candidate or if your CV is really not competitive, or give you an idea what the department is really looking for. Third, if you apply for jobs and get rejected, try and get feedback. This won’t always happen due to the volume of applications, and it won’t always be useful, but it’s worth a try. And don’t let rejections discourage you, keep on trying!

Good luck, and if you do find the magic formula please let us know!

*this assumes that getting a permanent job is equivalent to success!

Author

Natalie Cooper @nhcooper123

Photo credit

http://cnx.org/

24/04/2015

Zoological Zodiac

Aries- March 20 to April 20. Your model will converge around the 13^th, which is in no way related to your model convergence dance (turning in a circle three times and raising your left hand twice). Please stop doing it, we can all see you.

Taurus- April 20 to May 21. A reviewer will suggest additional work prior to publication. Reply to the reviewer with an audio file of yourself singing Bruce Springsteen’s No Surrender and the reviewer will back down.

Gemini- May 21 to June 21. May is a great month for fieldwork. Even if you’ve never done it before and all of your prior research is theoretical, give fieldwork a try. Sure, it’ll be grand!

Cancer. June 21 to July 23. Luck is on your side! This is a great month for finicky experimental work. Optimize your PCR this month and it’ll work at least until June. Probably.

Leo. July 23 to August 23. As Mercury moves into retrograde, your ability to make Powerpoint videos run will be at its peak. Plan an exciting video filled slide show for the 17^th. You can make it work this one time!

Virgo- August 23 to Sept. 23. Students in your research group will actually submit work on time. Be prepared for an influx of papers on the 23^rd. Assign random grades and see if anyone notices.

Libra- Sept. 23 to October 23. Your research team is going to face an ethical issue within the month. Ask everyone in the department what they think of it and then pick a response out of a hat to solve it!

Scorpio- October 23 to Nov. 22. A research road block will be solved by just ignoring it until the email moves to the second page of your inbox. Go ahead, ignore the issues!

Sagittarius- Nov. 22 to Dec. 22. News of your ability to comfort sad undergraduates will spread this month. Stock up on Kleenex and sweets in preparation of the post-exam panics.

Capricorn- Dec. 22 to January 20. Someone in the department will steal your lunch twice this month. Try leaving snarky post-it notes. People love those!

Aquarius- January 20 to Feb. 18. Write a grant application. Please, just write it. Everyone’s waiting on you. Come on.

Pisces- Feb. 18 to March 20. You will be struck with inspiration for a fantastic research project at a conference but then forget it before you can write it down. You should really carry a pen and paper more frequently.

Author: Mystic Mo, william2[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit: http://www.freelogovectors.net/

17/04/2015

Productivity!

A few months ago in our weekly NERD club we ran a session on dealing with stress. Part of this session revolved around what made us stressed, and one of the big problems was feeling like we had too much to do and too little time to do it. To follow up on this, this week we looked at how to be more productive. Many of our discussions revolved around the ideas presented here and here.

What makes us less productive?

The causes of our lack of productivity varied across career stages and the types of work we were involved with. Almost everyone had one major problem – the internet. Postdocs and PIs complained about the huge volume of emails and the desire to deal with them. PhD students weren’t so distracted by emails, instead their issue tended to be things like news websites. All of us have problems with distractions like social media, cute animal pictures and xkcd. Solutions included strictly restricting time doing these things, and/or the number of links you are “allowed” to click and explore before going back to work!

Another big issue was other people. This included supervisors/collaborators who won’t respond to emails or always delay or cut short meetings, suppliers messing up equipment orders, arcane university policies requiring endless form filling, constant interruptions from students etc. This is probably impossible to solve, but did provoke an interesting debate – what if your productivity actually reduces the productivity of someone else? For example, many of us had examples of people who would delay replying to emails until it was convenient for them but this would severely delay someone else working on the project. Another common complaint was people who call you to ask questions – this is great for them as they get an immediate answer but often frustrating for the person who has been interrupted. The only solution we could think of was a) talk to the person involved and calmly explain the problem to see if it can be solved and b) to all think carefully about how our actions affect others (of course I’d like to think we all do this anyway but I know we don’t!)

Finally, we discussed how these distractions all become worse when you have something you really don’t want to do (for me this is grading!). You will do literally anything other than that task. Again this is hard to solve, as it requires self-discipline (and for many people it requires the sound of the deadline whooshing by). My solution has been to work out a really short amount of time that I think I can cope with doing that task for. I then set a timer and do it for that long, or often longer as these things are rarely that bad once you get over the initial hurdle of starting. I then reward myself with a break. I find this works even better if you can do it with a colleague. Yes, it takes far longer to get the task done than it should, but it does get done rather than sitting on your desk and giving you the side-eye all day/week/month.

Unique snowflakes of productivity

An important thing to note throughout these tips is that different things work for different people! I find working at home great for my productivity, others find they spend the whole day tidying the house. I work best in the evenings, other people work best at 6am. Do whatever works for you!

Potential solutions

Be kind to yourself

I think this is most important, especially in light of the stress discussions we had earlier in the year. Most of us are more productive when we eat well, get plenty of sleep, exercise regularly and work sensible hours. Yes, you will get a lot of stuff done if you work crazy hours for a couple of weeks. But that increase in productivity comes at a price of burn out, getting sick or generally losing motivation for the project. Working a 35 hour week has been shown to be most effective for prolonged productivity. Taking breaks is also really important.

Redefine and monitor your productivity

Sometimes our frustrations with how we are doing are related to what we think counts as productivity. We might set goals that are too high, or forget about all the little things we achieved during the day. A suggestion was to make a thorough to-do list (I use trello.com to keep my to-do list synced across multiple computers and because you still get the satisfaction of ticking stuff off!). Making the list is also a useful procrastination activity (see below)! It does make me feel weirdly better when I see small tasks being ticked off, even if the larger whole of the task is yet to be completed.

Find out where your time is going

Another common complaint was coming into work, seemingly working hard all day, but then having nothing to show for it. One suggestion from @DRobcito was to try keeping a “time diary” for a couple of weeks. This involves just noting down somewhere what you’ve done and how long it took you to do it. Although annoying to do, this is a great way to see where your time is going, what you should be spending less time on, and what kinds of activities you might want to say no to in future because the time expended doesn’t match the benefits.

To Pomodoro or not to Pomodoro

A lot of articles on this subject recommend the Pomodoro technique where you work for 25 minutes, take a short break, then work another 25 minutes. After four or five repeats you take a longer break. Most of us had tried this, or a version of it, and most of us found it didn’t work for us. I think this may be related to it being hard to get anything sensible done in 25 minutes when analysing data or writing a paper. But as mentioned above, I often use something similar when grading papers which works really well.

Have a “me” day

This is perhaps more for people later in the their careers, but it’s good to have one day a week where you don’t do anything for anyone else, and you don’t go to any meetings. You only do things that will add to your CV. Essentially this means working on papers or grants. Maybe not such a big deal for PhD students, but I can definitely go for weeks without working on any of my research. Another thing to avoid on these days is admin and non-essential emailing.

Procrastinate effectively

Instead of watching a video of a capybara bathing with ducklings during a break, move on to something that requires zero intellect, but still requires doing for your work, for example reconciling expenses/receipts after a trip, formatting references, playing with figures, searching for new literature etc. Having said that, it’s important to also take proper breaks, and to ensure you see the capybara video.

More efficient meetings

Another suggestion from @DRobcito was to have 22 minute meetings. We were dubious about this but he claims it works, mostly because you have to cut to the chase immediately. He also suggested scheduling back-to-back meetings to prevent any of them from running over. Again this doesn’t always work and can just lead to all your meetings starting late which may be great for you but is unfairly detrimental to the productivity of the people waiting for you.

Dealing with emails I

A number of people use the “5 sentence max” email rule to keep emails short and to the point. If an email needs to be longer you should Skype or meet in person. We decided this works sometimes but not others. Many of us like to have details on email rather than talking them through on Skype or in person. Additionally, some of us really hate the trend of really short email replies because it’s hard to gauge tone, and also it seems a bit rude not to address the email to a person. This may be a cultural thing.

Dealing with emails II

Most of us can’t get much done without internet, so turning off the internet wasn’t an option. But we can all turn off our email notifications on our phones, tablets and computers. This prevents you from dealing with the emails as the come in, but also removes the distraction of the notification itself which can break your concentration. Different people had different strategies for emails. Some do emails in set blocks of time, others do them during breaks. I think in terms of not injuring other people’s productivity it’s probably polite to at least triage your email in the morning and sometime in the afternoon. I also use the rule that if I can respond to the email/do what it asks me to do in less that 5 minutes, I do it then rather than leaving it to fester in my inbox.

Manage your time, energy and attention.

This article explains this in more detail. Essentially, being productive requires that you have time to work, the energy to work, and the attention to work. Even if you have an hour to work on a paper, you still won’t be productive if you’re too tired to do anything useful or keep getting distracted. All of the above are solutions to one or more of these issues.

Author

Natalie Cooper @nhcooper123

Thanks to @DRobcito, @jonesor and @naubinhorth who helped with suggestions for our discussions.

Photo credit

wikimedia commons

20/03/2015

A Day in the Life of a PhD Student

We thought it might be interesting to share what the daily life of a PhD student actually looks like. So here are three perspectives on the average day.

Adam

A typical day for me begins between 8 and 9. I start out by checking my emails for correspondence and any interesting new papers that have been published. You typically have content alerts set up to send directly to your email account. As the blog administrator, I often upload new posts to our site in the morning.

I’ll usually be in the middle of composing a paper given that this is the main part of a PhD student’s work. This has three aspects to it, reading, writing and coding. I don’t adhere to a rigid timetable day by day, instead I’ll just pick one of the three that I’m interested in doing at the time.

I take a break at 11 and 1 where I talk to my friends about work as well as shooting the breeze. I work until 5 or 6 most days and if I begin to flag in the afternoon with doing research I’ll try my hand at writing a blog post. I share my office with four other people so the idea of the lonely academic is definitely not applicable in my case.

Thomas

Fortunately my day does not only consist of writing papers and analysing data! In fact I spend also a good amount of time doing rather chilled out stuff (such as drinking coffee, reading/writing sciency blogs, checking conferences or trendy papers on twitter or reading/writing emails). I also spend some nice hours chatting with my colleagues, whether it is at lunch break or in the office and whether it is about the last Hobbit movie or the simplest algorithm to match names in a phylogeny.

The “purely productive” aspects that can lead to a publications are actually constantly fed by the “less productive” ones (such as chatting around or reading stuff) and I’m always glad that these are not mutually exclusive parts of my day to day PhD life.

Deirdre

My typical day is very similar to those of Adam and Thomas above but, as my PhD is very empirically based I also have bursts of field, outdoor and lab based experiment days so, to be different, here is what a day in the field (doing freshwater work) for me is like:

Typically I get up sinfully early, pile on as many layers as I can and head out in the (hopefully preloaded) van for a long drive to the field site with my field buddy of the day.

We’d spend anything from 2- 4 hours at the different sites collecting algae and invertebrate samples from our cages, usually pausing for a slightly soggy cheese sandwich in the middle or to chat to curious a passer-by. On clear weather days this can be lovely and you see all sorts of beautiful country and wildlife but the rain makes everything take twice as long- especially when you need to see below the water surface. Not all bad though, on one of these rainy cold days our bedraggled selves were invited in for tea and scones to one of the lakeside houses. Then it’s a long drive back, trying to do some water filtering and sample sorting on the winding country roads. Usually, depending how late we get back, then there is the unloading of the van and lugging all of the samples to the cold room for storage. Fieldwork is great fun though; it lets you see the country and bump into all kinds of creatures and characters.

Authors: Adam Kane, Thomas Guillerme, Deirdre McClean

Photo credit: http://www.blogmarketingacademy.com/which-is-more-secure-the-9-5-job-or-self-employment/

09/03/201509/03/2015

Radio skills for scientists

The Irish Academy of Public Relations recently hosted a free event, “Radio Skills – A Special Evening for the Science Community” at the FOCAS Research Institute in DIT. The points raised and ensuing discussions provided interesting insights into relationships between scientists and journalists.

Ellen Gunning, director of the Academy, chaired the evening. From her experience of teaching public relations and interview skills, she described how many scientists are like Guards (the police) in how they deal with the media. Both professions are trained to communicate in a very impartial, specific and direct way with an unhealthy dollop of jargon. However, the key to effective public communication is to cut the jargon and to identify a clear, straightforward message which will be interesting and understandable for non-specialist audiences.

Professor Hugh Byrne gave a scientist’s perspective of dealing with the media. He highlighted the increasing importance of public engagement and research dissemination beyond the ivory tower of academia. Researchers must engage with the media to create a sustainable scientific research culture in which scientists are accountable for how they spend tax payers’ money.

He also discussed the “dark side” of engaging with the media. Many scientists are wary of journalists because they are afraid of being misquoted or that their research will be sensationalised. The immediacy of a live radio interview is a scary prospect for scientists who are used to careful drafting and re-drafting of their words for academic publications. As Professor Byrne pointed out, many scientists are used to building their arguments backwards: weaving different strands of argument together to finally reach the main conclusion or take home message at the end. Journalists want the opposite: the hook for why your research is interesting or important needs to come first.

However, scientists need to get over their fear engaging with the media. Good journalists are not trying to catch you out: they want to get their facts right just as much as you don’t want to be misquoted. Good science communication stems from a feeling of trust and complicity between the scientist and journalist.

Sean Duke continued the discussion with a journalist’s perspective of working with scientists. He further underlined the importance of building good relationships and trust with researchers. He pointed out that, despite their concerns, scientists have more control of a news story or interview than journalists. Researchers are the experts in their own field, they are the ones who dictate the parameters of a story so it’s up to scientists to find the interesting nuggets of information or take home messages. To do this effectively, it’s a good idea to follow Duke’s checklist for how to deal with journalists.

Journalists want:

A good story: find a way to give it to them by explaining your science through reference to everyday life. What’s interesting about your research and why should people care?

Explanation, not patronisation: scientists need to explain their research clearly so that it’s understandable for a non-specialist audience but don’t slip into “dumbing down” your story.

Scientists who take control: remember that you’re the expert so you should lead the story. If you’re contacted by a researcher for a radio show then treat it as an audition for the live interview. Have an agenda for what you want to communicate, it’s up to you to dictate and take control of the story.

Journalists don’t want:

Jargon: scientists are brainwashed to use complex terms that might as well be a foreign language to most audiences. Think of yourself as a translator: don’t use acronyms or obscure terms that will alienate and confuse your audience.

Defensive interviews: treat an interview with a journalist as an opportunity, not a penance. Good journalists are not trying to catch you out but neither should you expect them to know every detail about your research field. If you are asked what you think is a strange or misguided question, give the journalist the benefit of the doubt instead of becoming defensive about your position.

To be lectured: scientists are used to giving lectures or presenting at conferences. These formal settings are very different to the informal, conversational style of most interviews. Don’t complicate an interview by slipping into lectorial mode.

The Irish Academy will explore some of these topics further and provide more in-depth radio and PR training for scientists during their one day training course, “Radio Interview Skills for Scientists” on the 11^th of April. Places on the course are limited to six people and can be booked here. Details of the Academy’s other courses can be found on www.irishacademy.com.

Author: Sive Finlay, @SiveFinlay

Photo credit:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primaryhistory/world_war2/daily_life/

02/03/2015

What do professors do?

Whenever I go home I repeatedly deal with the age old question non-academics ask academics: what do you actually do? I always find this a tricky question no matter who asks. Some people have tried to make it easier by asking me to describe a typical day or week, but this doesn’t really help as it changes a lot from week to week! In 2014 I attended five conferences and two workshops, did two weeks of fieldwork in (cold and wet!) Madagascar, and gave four seminars at different universities. I also worked on at least ten completely different research projects with different groups of people. Most weeks I’d work on one of those at least a little. But other than the research, I don’t really have an “average” week. Most weeks I’ll attend NERD club, and a meeting (or five) and I usually interact with my PhD students to some degree. But the exact details depend on the time of year (exam season/term term/outside term time), and where I am with projects, grant deadlines etc. So instead of specifically telling you what *I* do, I’ve compiled a list of the kinds of activities professors/lecturers are involved in.

Professor/lecturer jobs are often split into three areas: research, teaching and admin. However, I prefer to think of it in the same terms as on our promotion forms: research, teaching, service to your institution and service to the community. Admin sadly forms part of all of these things, like a layer of really horrible jam sticking together the cake of academia. All of these things also seem to involve a lot of emailing. If you defined my job by what I spend most time on, I’m probably a professional emailer…

Research includes fieldwork, lab work, analyses, coding/programming, planning future projects, managing finances, supervising PhD students and postdocs, writing press releases, reading papers/books, writing papers/books, writing blog posts about research, grant writing (this is the worst!), attending conferences, networking, writing reports, attending journal clubs etc.

Teaching includes giving lectures and tutorials, supervising labs, preparing lectures and labs, getting materials for labs, setting and grading essays, supervising projects and desk studies, giving careers advice, writing reference letters, putting teaching materials online, arranging timetables and room bookings (and dealing with the inevitable mix-ups that occur), providing extra reading, marking exams, invigilating, checking attendance, advising students who are experiencing difficulties, being a personal tutor etc.

Service to your institution includes sitting on committees, acting as Director or Dean of some administrative entity, promoting the institution via social media and/or traditional media, helping at Open Days, organising seminar series, providing graduate student training, internal examining theses, interacting with alumni, organising journal club, being a representative at meetings (e.g. Athena SWAN, departmental, Faculty etc… ad infinitum).

Service to the broader scientific community includes teaching on workshops, creating online tutorials, reviewing papers, being a journal editor, sitting on society committees, organising conferences/symposia/workshops, giving seminars at other institutions, organising outreach events, writing advice based blog posts, grant reviewing, organising cross-institution journal clubs etc.

There are probably many more, but this is what we came up with in half an hour!

As you can see it’s a pretty diverse job! Strangely we are mostly trained as PhD students and postdocs to do research, some service to the broader community and a little bit of teaching. This is worth bearing in mind when deciding whether a career as a professor/lecturer is right for you, as research is definitely only part of the job (at some times of year it’s very difficult to do any research at all!). However, many of the additional duties are really interesting and fun, and things like teaching and supervising students are really rewarding.

These are quite general things we do as professors/lecturers. But hopefully this is helpful if you’ve ever wondered why we’re always moaning about being busy! One final point – in general, professors/lecturers *do not* get the summer off work. My ex’s mother was convinced that I had the best job in the world because I only had to work from late Sept to June. If only that were true!

Author

Natalie Cooper
nhcooper123

Photo credit

Cuneo estate / Bridgeman Images
The Royal Institution

09/02/2015

Stress Busting

Inspired by recent reports of rising mental health problems in academia plus an acute increase in stress around the department this summer when many PhD students were writing up, we decided to run a “Dealing with stress” seminar at NERD club (ironically this session was canceled previously due to the PIs being “too stressed” to run it!). It turned out to be a really positive experience, and I’d definitely run something similar again. Here is what we found out!

What is stress and why is it bad?

Stress is an “adverse reaction to excessive pressure”. Short term stress responses can actually be beneficial, either for escaping angry bears or finding that last bit of energy needed to finish a manuscript, thesis or endless admin task. However, longterm chronic stress is really bad for you. Symptoms include headaches, nausea, digestive problems, ulcers, lowered immune responses, changes in appetite, altered sleep patterns, mood swings, lowered self esteem, negative thinking and more. All of these can trigger chronic mental health issues like depression and anxiety.

What causes stress?

Causes of stress are really varied; what stresses one person out has no effect on someone else. Some articles put causes of workplace stress into six categories: (1) too many demands; (2) too little control; (3) poor relationships with coworkers/superiors; (4) too much change; (5) too little support and (6) lack of clarity about your role. Unfortunately, as one PI pointed out, these six things define academic jobs!

We started our stress seminar by independently writing down everything that made us stressed/worried on Post-It notes and then placing these into a bin at the centre of the room (this was for convenience but I guess you could say we were symbolically throwing our troubles away…). We then shared these with the group. Unsurprisingly we’re stressed about similar things. I expect you’ll recognise some of the following:

Lack of structure/direction, pressure to come up with new ideas, balancing fun stuff with work stuff, the two body problem, struggling students, R, GIS, statistics, field work, risk assessments, paywalls, graphs, “the literature”, bad paper reviews/rejections, losing data due to a bug, forgetting deadlines, worry about not finishing PhD on time, feeling out of control, lack of public understanding of science, admin, pressure to produce outputs more regardless of quality, letting people down in and out of work, dealing with conflict/difficult meetings, saying yes too much, grant writing/rejections, public speaking, and, my personal favourite, how much coffee is too much???

We also had several things that everyone was stressed about. These were deadlines (aka having too much too much to do and too little time to do it), career uncertainty (sadly not something we can solve), and a lot of worries that fall under the category of impostor syndrome. The latter included worries about finding errors in data/analyses after submitting/publishing papers, worries about saying stupid things in front of people, feelings of inadequacy in relation to others and to your own potential, fear of failure etc. Generally the terror of being “found out” for being too stupid to do research. I think most of us found it quite reassuring to share these fears, including the PIs!

How can we reduce stress?

There are lots of suggestions online for reducing stress (including dowsing your house for geopathic stress – hmmm yeah…), here are just a few we discussed:

1) Talk about it.
Talk with family, friends, workmates or anyone really. If you’re having problems at work it’s a good idea to talk to your supervisor or line manager, or another staff member if your supervisor is the problem! Many of us also flagged how useful it is to speak to a professional counselor when problems get too big for you to handle alone (most universities offer free services to staff and students). An important point was that you shouldn’t be embarrassed – everyone feels stressed sometimes and it is not a sign of weakness.

2) Look after yourself.
Get plenty of sleep and exercise, don’t drink too much caffeine or alcohol, and try to eat a well-balanced diet (apparently chicken dippers are fine because BBQ sauce counts as a vegetable).

3) Learn to notice when you’re stressed and do something about it. If you don’t realise you’re stressed it’s hard to solve the problem, so learn the warning signs and symptoms and act accordingly when you notice them. It may help to keep a stress diary to work out what triggers your stress, and then avoid those situations and/or people!

4) Increase your productivity.
Many of the issues of having too much to do, or worrying about deadlines, can be helped by increasing your productivity and/or improving your time management skills. Check out the tips here for some ideas. The most important point here was to “work less but achieve more” rather than working ridiculous hours. Which brings us to idea 5…

5) Lower the bar!
If you come into work and have big plans for the week but don’t achieve them (for whatever reason), you tend to feel crap. Instead, set a lower bar. In fact, set a *really* low bar that you can hardly fail to meet. Even though you know your bar was low, you’ll still feel better having finished something! To help with this, try breaking tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks. For example, aim to finish the introduction of a paper rather than the whole paper. Oddly enough I finish things more quickly this way than if I work my ass off trying to achieve my grandiose aims!

6) Have a Plan B.
Although we can’t fix the problems with the academic career pyramid scheme, we did come up with some suggestions to reduce stress about it. Most of the PIs revealed that they had a Plan B (and Plan C) for if academia hadn’t worked out for them. This made them feel less panicked when approaching the end of contracts. Additionally, we decided we would look at our CVs and extract skills that would be useful in non-academic professions. PhDs train you for all kinds of jobs even if we don’t talk about them much. Knowing there are other options out there will hopefully reduce stress.

7) Dealing with impostor syndrome.
We spent a long time discussing this, and no-one really had a solution. Unlike many of the other problems which have external causes, this is an internal perception problem that is hard to fix. Instead focus should be on recognising it and dealing with it rather than eliminating it. Even the Chair of our department feels this way sometimes! Talking to other people should help (especially people you look up to), also trying not to compare yourself to others and realising that everyone has very different skills. A student with a lot of fieldwork shouldn’t expect to produce as many papers as a student working on an existing dataset for example. This is really hard in academia because there will *always* be someone out there who is better than you at something. But my favourite piece of advice on this is that people who never suffer from impostor syndrome are probably faking it, or gigantic assholes.

Hope some of this is helpful! Now go and lead less stressed lives!

Author

Natalie Cooper, ncooper[at]tcd.ie, @nhcooper123

Photo credit

wikimedia commons

23/01/2015

One body one problem

You may have heard on the academic grapevine that I will soon be leaving Trinity College Dublin. As with all moves I’m both sad to be leaving, but excited to take on new challenges. I’ll be around until the summer, but now this is common knowledge I wanted to explain why I’m moving on. And also to make something else really clear – I’m not leaving because I dislike working here! The School of Natural Sciences (and particularly Zoology where I’m based) has been a fantastic place to work for the last three years. The staff are friendly and supportive, the students are top notch, and the working environment here is energetic and collegiate. I’ve met some amazing people and I hope to continue working with them. I’ve also learned more than I thought possible in just three years.

Then why am I leaving? Mostly it boils down to the “one body problem“. We’re all familiar with the “two body problem”, whereby people in a relationship are forced to find ways to make their relationship and careers work at the same time. Sometimes this involves partners trying to get jobs in the same place, although it could be detrimental to their careers; other times people live apart so they can have more choices over which job to take. Either way it’s a crappy problem and I feel terrible for people in that situation. We talk less about the “one body problem” which also disproportionately affects women and minority academics, particular LGBT academics. I also believe it may be an important reason why these groups leave academia so I think it deserves more attention when we’re thinking about equality.

The “one body problem” refers to the difficulties single academics face when moving around for jobs. In its own way this can be just as bad as the “two body problem” (it’s often quite frustrating when people tell me how lucky I am to be single and free to move about). Arriving in a new place as a single person is daunting and, without the support network of a partner or friends, it is also extremely isolating. Making friends in a new place takes time, and the heavy workloads of academic jobs leave little time for friend making attempts. Added to this, academics are very transient so it’s not unusual to make a new friend, and for that friend to leave just a few months later (in Dublin even the non-academic community is fairly transient). This is particularly hard for international postdocs who don’t have family or friends living nearby to escape to at the weekends. The other issue with the “one body problem” is that eventually most single people would like to meet someone, even if they’re currently happy living an independent life. In some places this is next to impossible, for example, tiny college campuses in the middle of nowhere, and gets harder as people get older. Again this disproportionately affects women and minorities.

I’ve found this problem has become worse for me in recent years. I think this is partly because of my change in job status. As a PhD student and a postdoc I had far more free time to try and make friends when I moved. There were also lots of social events organised for students/postdocs where you could meet each other, and also form a bit of a community. This sort of thing is less common once you’re a professor. Also I’m now the one staying put as the postdocs and PhD students I’ve befriended move on to other places. It also reflects the fact that most people my age are married with kids, particularly the younger faculty here. We get on really well at work, but at 4pm everyone goes home. Eventually I realised that this situation was causing me a considerable amount of stress and unhappiness which was only going to increase as the friends I’ve made in the last three years prepare to finish their postdocs or PhDs and move on. So I’m leaving Dublin because I don’t have a stable support network here and in the long term that is not a good thing for me (or anyone).

If you have new single people joining your department I hope you’ll try and help them to settle in and don’t just assume that being single is the easy option for academics! Note that I’m not saying the “two body problem” is easier! Let’s just recognise that the academic lifestyle is hard for everyone and try to consider how to make things more equal for all women and minority groups, not just those with two body issues, and/or children.

Author: Natalie Cooper, @nhcooper123, ncooper[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit: “TheClashLondonCallingalbumcover” by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TheClashLondonCallingalbumcover.jpg#mediaviewer/File:TheClashLondonCallingalbumcover.jpg

19/01/2015

Pathway to PhD: should I do a masters degree or an internship?

With deadlines looming for attractive PhD scholarships such as the Irish Research Council, current undergraduates often realise that the path to a PhD is somewhat opaque, with many different ways to get there.

Finding a PhD is something we have covered already, but a question I often get asked is: do I need a MSc or can I go straight in, or what about an internship?

There is nothing stopping you going straight into a PhD from your undergraduate degree, but it can be difficult to be competitive unless you have a flawless academic track record, or have been singled out by a supervisor as an ideal candidate and its pretty much your PhD from the start. More usually, whether you are applying for an open post that has been advertised, or your own funding through a scholarships scheme, you need to out-compete your peers. To do so requires some non-algorithmic compilation of your academic grades, degrees, and academic experiences. Opting for a taught MSc is one obvious way to lengthen your academic training on your CV, as well as hopefully improving on your track-record. Its also a useful way for you to highlight your new skills and explain how they will make you a better PhD student than the rest.

It is important to remember that simply listing your modules or new skills in bullet-points is not the way to do this. You need to elaborate, and explain how your modules improved you as an academic, and how you interacted with the course to better yourself. Don’t just say “I took a course on linear mixed effects modelling”, tell us about how you realise now that this tool is important in ecology as a hierarchical data structure is a very common feature of research in this domain, and that you can now tease apart effects that manifest within and among groups. Give an example of how you applied this tool to answer an ecological question. The MSc projects are typically larger than your undergraduate ones, and ideally you would conduct a novel enough piece of research to allow you to write it up as a research paper – this is a great way to rubber-stamp your CV for PhD applications.

Of course, MSc courses tend to cost money, and last up to one year (or some are even two years these days). Another option is to volunteer as an intern in a research group. With the right match to your supervisor, and a bit of luck, this approach can be just as good as a MSc or even better (at least in my opinion). You might intern as a research assistant helping to run experiments or collect field data for on-going projects. Such teams are often in need of extra hands, and being involved can mean you learn lots of new skills and techniques. Ideally though you want to make sure you are involved enough, and have the chance to put enough academic input to the project to deserve and be rewarded with authorship on a research paper.

Alternatively, you might intern more as an individual in a group, and work on your own project much like doing a MSc project but without the actual degree. Again, you are looking to develop new skills, learn new techniques and apply them to ecologically or evolutionarily relevant questions. The not guaranteed, and by no means necessary, icing on the cake would be a research publication.

Ultimately, some post-graduate experience will really help your CV when applying for PhDs but only if you can articulate how your efforts have improved you as an academic. A research paper (or several!) would be the ideal outcome from whatever path you take as it is nearly indisputable evidence of your ability to do science as part of a team, to a high standard and to convey your findings to an audience.

I took a research assistant position after my undergraduate degree, and used that to explain how the overall experience had convinced me of my desire to pursue academic research, as well as providing me with new skills. I am therefore quite keen on the idea of internships or research assistant positions in place of the more formal and structured MSc courses, so it’s rather a personal thing for me. Take some advice from others though, as maybe the MSc route carries more weight for different people.

Author: Andrew Jackson @yodacomplex

http://www.tcd.ie/Zoology/research/research/theoretical/andrewjackson.php

Photo credit: http://www.quickmeme.com/Condescending-Wonka/page/1826/

09/01/2015

Career planning for PhD students

The Royal Society has published a new set of guidelines for managing the career expectations of PhD students in STEMM subjects (science, engineering, technology, maths and medicine). The publication was the result of a series of roundtable discussions held at the Royal Society with PhD students, supervisory teams and University careers professionals.

This blog post from the British Ecological Society provides a good overview of the document and discussion of how it fits into existing career development opportunities for PhD students.

With ever increasing numbers of PhD graduates and restricted academic jobs, academic careers are becoming the exception rather than the rule in many STEMM disciplines. The report highlights the need for PhD students to be realistic about their career expectations and goals and the importance of continuous professional development during their studies.

The document contains guidelines and recommendations for students, supervisors, career professionals and higher education institutions. It’s very encouraging to see that the training and mentoring of ecology and evolutionary graduate students at TCD already follows many of the principles.

This is mainly due to the success of NERD club, our weekly meeting of ecology and evolution researchers. The primary purpose of this group is to develop research projects and encourage new collaborations but many sessions are also devoted to career development. We have discussed academic careers advice and application tips but also non-academic careers and the transferrable skills such as public communication and teaching that can be applied to any career choice. As students, we’re very lucky to benefit from the mentoring and advice of enthusiastic and dedicated staff members.

One aspect of the Royal Society guidelines which I hadn’t considered previously is the recommendation that PhD students should seek a mentor who is not their supervisor for career advice. It’s an interesting suggestion, especially since many supervisors have limited personal experience of non-academic careers, and a good thing to consider for any PhD student.

Hopefully these new guidelines will encourage more students, supervisors and institutions to make broad career planning an integral part of every PhD student’s experience.

Author: Sive Finlay, @SiveFinlay

Photo credit: http://sironaconsulting.com/2009/10/29/my-top-10-funny-job-interview-cartoons/