Source Event

Last Friday was devoted to Nature’s science careers fair and conference. I was quite pleased to be invited to speak at the fair – some sort of recognition of what i have been doing here at King’s. Also some recognition of the role that professional careers advice can play in supporting the career management of researchers. Well done us – The Careers Group and King’s College Graduate school. 

Chairing my sesion was Tristram Hooley of Vitae. Tristram is moving onto head the Careers Research Unit at Derby University. So our paths might cross again in that context.

I went to session on bid-writing given by Tony Woods of the Wellcome Trust. Strongly recommend people to listen to the pod-cast: lots of very common sense points about bid writing. It reminded me of the sorts of things we say about CV’s. He reckoned that he could tell in about 80% of cases whether the bid would get funded within about 30 seconds; a bit scary if you think that it could take 6 months to put a bid together. Its all in the project summary. What is the research question, will the activities proposed answer that question. Use the classic SMART objectives.

A UCL lecturer gave a very personal account of the unpredictabilty of a Research career which in her case spanned a number of separate disciplines and roles and a many countries. She was a Marie Curie fellow.

There was a talk form Merck serono about Clinical trials management, and then a mad presentation by the brilliant William Bains. He had the audience in stitches though a couple of very strait-laced people did leave in the middle with very concermed looks on their faces.

The apparently rambling talk covered a steely analytical brain that was determined to have some FUN. We started with Isaac Asimov and electric trainsets, silicon, the cost of filing a patent (30 quid!), the importance of the confidentiality agreements, science as a personality defect (“How many of you are scientists?” Forest of hands. “Well half of you are wrong and the other half have my deepest sympathy”, how to lose 12 grand ( he did it his way). He is the Eddie Izzard of Biotechnology start-ups. He is that good.

Vitae Conference – canoes and canowledge

Fragment of memory: The natives of a small pacific island need to make canoes to fish and trade. They could make a canoe in a few hours, but they don’t.They take several days. They eat, they celebrate, they spin it out. You see, for them. ItS NOT JUST ABOUT THE CANOES.

I have just returned from a canoe making at Wawick University. It was good. I guess I bring back some knowledge, but mainly I met canoe makers, and now I know that I am not alone in my canoe. I have a paddle and I know how to use it. Each paddle stroke has the force of a 100 other paddlers, which is good because at my age my paddle stroke has been weakening, my fingers losing their power to grip.

There is a knowledge overload problem at conferences – loads of new stuff / too little time to process it. And for me, no processing means little remembering. I met some peope at session 1 whom I never saw subsequently – or perhaps I did but did not recognise them. And were the 2 facilitators both pregnant – or was that the way their tops hung over their tummies.

‘Plenaries’ is a lovely word and we had – new to me – half plenaries. Should that have been semi-plenaries really? Honestly, a classical education can ruin your life. Cavernous rooms where several hundred people sat around enormous circular tables. A great way to accidentally start talking to people, even though you fail to remember their names or what they said, or what you said, or what they looked like. Face recognition – is there anything I can do about it?

 

What about all this moving betwen classrooms frequently in the course of a packed day? What does it remind you of? School. That was what school was like. Difference being that in conferences they put fairly unpleant coffee at the back of the room and no-one misbehaved. Conferences are places for swots.

The social events are always a trial for me – being as i am in the bottom third of the networking capabilities population.

(to be continued….

Vitae Conference

Last week was the very enjoyable Vitae Conference. Lovely to spend time with colleagues who share the same pre-occupations and frustrations .

My stand-out moment was an address by George Walker on a project on how to improve the doctorate. It was not so much what he said as the way that he said it:- full of quiet humour and wisdom

Most attractive was his focus on improving ‘the doctorate’ by understanding it. What were the ‘habit of mind’ that were essential to researchers. Was there a pedagogy of research? Did ‘Faculty’ know and agree what they were doing with thier PhD students? Did they agree on the future of their discipline? (No).

Lovely phrases and ideas: Faculty are the ‘Stewards of their discipline’

They engaged in ‘Unnatural acts of self examination’ how resonant that is for those of us trying to get people to self-examine.

Scholarship segregated is scholarship impoverished.

One of the implications of interdisciplinarity is that you work with others whose knowledge you are unable to evaluate.

Notions of community – intellectual community. Students should not be apprenticed to a faculty mentor- but to several mentors.

I will be pondering these thoughts for a while – and they will help me in keeping focus in my training sessions this term.

Good session on the challenges of working with International staff.

Apparently, at Oxford 40% of academic staff are overseas citizens and <60% of PhD students. top country of origin at nearly 1500 academic researchers and teachers: China. USA surprisingly low at 510.

Newcastle seem to be developing a useful Careers Management framework for academic staff – Attendees at this workshop left in envy of the set-up there.

I went to a session exploring views on the assessment of skill devlopment training. Dubious but  -you know what they say: What does not get measured does not get done.

 

The senior civil servant got away with saying as little as possible a masterclass in the Sir Humphrey school of ‘opinion avoided’. That s their job, i suppose.

What else? Do we iunderstand the impact of digital scholarship form the OU? Answer: no.

The importance of continued research in non-research-intensive universities – a very political and persuasive case made here from Plymouth . 

The Peter Hawkins was OK -if you like that sort of thing which – on the whole I don’t. Squeezing balloons into a box might be a satisfying objective correlative – but it makes me feel uncomfortable.

Night mares – going into dinner with no special friend to sit with. I feel the fear and do it anyway. This tiem I avoided Stephen Tarling who has a wide array of party games and conundrums which make me feel extremely stupid ( a mirror or a distorting mirror?) though my King’s colleagues were on a table doing preciselty this sort of thing. They stayed long adfter everyone had departed.

Also the fear of blanking people whom I know well because I have terrible facial recall. Sorreeee

Failing to get a decent lunch on day 1. You had to mug the waiters to get a tiny pot of food. I now know what ducks feel like in ponds where breadcumbs are thrown.

Enough for now. These fragments I have shored against my ruin.

Working with PhD students

Kathy Barrett and I do the second of our sessions on this topic.

It feels quite nice and easy now – even though we had forgotten  what we did on the first occasion. We had 5 internal people and 5 from other universities – Roehampton, Surrey, Northampton among them.

Postdoc Career Management – or not

This is a very good summary by Denise Dear of Cambridge University staff development of the career management problem for postdocs. What oft as thought but ne’er so well expressed

 

Promotion procedures and pathways are limited for research staff who wish to stay in Cambridge and this is now the focus of considerable interest.  As you know, traditional academic roles have a defined promotion procedure  - lecturer/senior lecturer/reader/professor.  However, this is not a research route and I have found from a number of focus groups I have recently held with experienced research staff here, that there is widespread frustration at this fact.  Research staff are employed as research associates and may be promoted to senior research associates according to certain criteria ( available on our HR web-site).  After that, unless they continue to acquire competititve funding or manage to be taken on as a lecturer, they come to a sudden stop. Most senior researchers will have been doing research, managing and advising group members and will therefore have very little teaching experience.  They are therefore at a disadvantage in applying for lectureships.  In short, they end up in a career cul-de-sac.  We are currently working with this cohort to begin to work out possible future pathways for them, as they present an enormous resource that is in danger of being lost or wasted.  Many are the products of the short term funding procedures used in higher education, in particular.