EMBL – European Bioinformatics Institute Open Day

3/11/09 Notes

EBI is the Bioinformatics wing of EMBL the European Microbiology Laboratory

Voyage of discovery to the ‘Genome Campus’ at Hinxton just south of Cambridge. The site is shared with the Sanger institute which unlike EBI does have wet labs.

The day was mainly targeted at Masters students with a view to introducing and promoting the PhD scheme. Manchester University sent a whole group of students from their Bio-informatics course on the day.

We learnt about the way that Biology was changing with what was described as a ‘tsunami’ of data from studies not just of individual genes and enzymes but of entire biological systems and sequences. EBI acts as a depository for this data and is committed to making it freely available to researchers. They are guardians not owners of the data. Some of this colleaction is integrated with the peer review and publication process.

EMBL has 1400 staff – 1100 of them scientists on sites in Germany, France, Italy and UK. It has to bid for its funding streams (like everyone else). It is an intergovernmental research organisation (similar to CERN)

EBI provides services to the scientific community but also does its own research. There are 7 research groups and 2 new ones are in the process of setting up.

The interview process for joining the PhD programme lasts for 3-5 days – can involve travel between the various European sites – all of which is paid for.

65% of PhD alumni stay in science.

PhDs are successful in publishing at least one paper during their PhD and the average is 2.

The PhD is 3.5 – 4 years.

Application is by self-selection – you do not have to be recommended.

The key here is a relish for interdisciplinarity

Postdocs are recruited on a more ad-hoc basis though there is a programme of Interdisciplinary postdocs called EIPODs which recruits about 20+ annually. Career for life? No-one can work at EMBL for more than 9 years!

The Gendering of Careers Advice

Is Guidance just for girls? i have done quite a lot of student contact this week and most of that has been with females.

Monday: Time Management skills: of 16 students no more than 3 male

Interviews – 2 women

 

Tuesday: Careers Fair – could not really tell here but I am pretty sure women were in the majority.

Wednesday Guys: interviews – 2 women

Third year PhD induction: about 50 attendees – a ‘preponderance of Women’

Presentation skills training – 10 students – 1 male.

Thursday: Time management – 8 attenders – all female

IOP interviews 4 – 1 of them male

Friday interview: a female.

Is it the old adage: When a man wants to find the way he drives around till he finds it -  a woman will ask the way.

Or to put it another way, sisters are doing it with advice and guidance.

 

 

Who attends training?

Answer: the best trained people. I was talking to a consultant this week about attendance at RDP sessions. She observed that – from her experience – voluntary approaches to training mean that the people who really need the training don’t go. They do not know what they do not know.

I remeber seeing someone who had just delivered a presentation at his schools research showcase. He had not won a prize -which may be relevant – but he said: Its all bullshit, isn’t it?  Actually, this individual had pretended to know an answer to a question at the end of this talk – and had looked slightly foolish when this became apparent. So I thought ( but disappointingly didn’t say)  ITS not bullshit – but what you said WAS. This chap will not be doing presentation training- though he clearly needed it.

Forms of compulsion have been tried, but are rather a blunt instrument. Some Phd students are not really students at all but experienced professionals for whom the Phd is part of a broader careers strategy. Requiring these to do things appropriate to someone straight from their bachelors is probably not very smart. Nevertheless, you do see such people on the training courses; no matter how good they are they see the need to get better.

Feedback

Dear Terry

thank you for your seminar on PDP last Monday, it was really helpful and inspiring.

I never put negative feedback in my blog, but often put positive feedback. By contrast, in the dark recesses of my mind negative feedback makes an indelible imprint and positive feedback blows awy like ash in the breeze.

Freebie Training course

 We got two places on a new training programme offered by a new company who are hoping to train students interested in Investment Banking. We don’t really approve of money-making courses aimed at impecunious students – not a great business model either i can’t help but feel: “why not market this product to people who have no  money and large debts”

Any way the students loved it. See below

BHS Student

The IB session was brilliant. It was an excellent day course and I have learnt a lot, not just about the world of finance but what is expected as an interviewee. In addition, it was excellent knowing the wealth of experience, advice and backing there was. Not just from the teacher but his collgues who all work in specalist fields.

 

As I have a biological background, my knowledge of IB was very limited but over the course of a day my knowledge greatly increased.

 After the course I believe working in IB or management consultancy is the right direction for me to go.

 Thank you for passing on my name and helping me get on the course.

 

PSE Student

The IB session was brilliant – I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in finance. Thank you very much for giving me that opportunity.

 Thank you also for keeping me updated on the events (and if it’s possible, I’d appreciate the continuing support & information).

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.