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.

I do this; I do that

Most of my weeks start with a Skills Training session. Not this one – so a nice soft start. Have been confirming details of an employer presentation sessiontomorrow, and gathering students to my MBTI session on Wednesday – the first one I have done this academic year.

Also gathering students for the Science publishing talk next week. Despite mass e-mails and a graduate school blog entry I have only 12 expressions of interest so far. I really want to have at least 20 for this session. 

Also reviewing CV’s and application forms of students and staff – 2 on my desk now. Did one for a staff member applying for a PhD on Friday.

Group sessions

Am doing fairly regular ‘Careers Education’ sessions with PhD’s. I will have done 5 half day sessions in February. 1 on writing skills, 2 on assertiveness, 1 on PDP (personal development planning) 1 on Career planning.

At the moment about half the people who sign up, show up. and average atttendance is about 10. They seem to like the content mainly – there are always one or two who do not – and occasionally someone absolutely takes against it.

 

My method is to start with an icebreeaker introductions thing – nothing ‘creative’ just who they are and why are they here -  a sort of informal agenda setting. Then a bit of a lecture from me. I am moving more towards power point as its a good way of assembling diverse material and ensuring the structure is coherent and consistent for when I do repeat sessions.

At some point i will do soemthing practical – it may be a group exercises or presentatation of some kind – just to mix it up, stop them falling asleep and—– I guess I should say —- providing something for the kinetic learners.

There is sometimes an issue about integrating Humanities and Science students – though I think it is a good thing to do. One problem is that the Humanities people often come single and are outnumbered by the scientists. So getting the material right across disciplines  is a challenge.

I had this idea of getting careers colleagues involved so that they could have a go at delivering at least part of these sessions – but the staffing of this is difficult to achieve. And anyway, as soon as I identify likely colleagues they get moved on to different allocations in different colleges.

I would be keen to do more groups doing what we might call ‘Employability’ work. However I still do quite a lot of Guidance: 1-1 stuff. The trend here has been increased numbers of staff – postdocs, research assistants and administrators who come to see me.

RMA Research Student’s Conference

Kate and I did our talks to a group of about 30 Music PhDs. We followed up 3 King’s alumni who were taking different tracks: one a successful freelance composer, one an Arts Adminstrator for a small midlands music group and one a music academic.

I also attended a presentation on getting published with Vicki Cooper form Cambridge University Press on the history side, Sally Groves from Schott who published scores ( the ‘dots’ as she described it) and Christopher Wintle who had got invlolved in various publishing enterprises including setting up his own journal.

You realised that in all academic areas there are small specialist presses producing small runs of books for specialist markets. The new ‘print-on-demand’ technology meand that nothing now need never be out of print.

Vicki Cooper gave interesting advice on how to submit to a publisher like hers: A letter with an outline -possibly one paragraph per chapter; a chapter; the links to other books on the Publisher’s list. An assessment of the competition and an indication of how your work is differentiated from existing titles.  Vicki was interesting on the ‘products’. These are prodcuts that no-one needs – it would not matter if there were no more books on Mahler – nevertheless there is a steady and reliable demand for new works on composers- you just need to make the case about what is different about this book.

Writing skills

Did a session on writing skills this week. Never sure if its something I should be doing as a Careers Adviser. But my experience of doing the session over a couple of years has enabled me to develop some materials which are specific to PhD’s. i was happy with the session even though it was difficult to say what real progress students made during this 3 hour session. Had an observer from the language centre in and I got her to talk about what they offered, and also got Jenny Potter in to talk about her work.

Division of Imaging Sciences

Do a session over at the Rayne Institute. Nice group of PhD students – who actually seem to know each other. Bit of banter as they wait for me to start. Goes well I think, though one guy at the back smirked the whole way through. Was I really that ridiculous? Good questions -already someone has followed up for a 1-1.

Podcast on the Graduate School VLE

Michael Flavin and I do our first Graduate School pod-cast.  On my first attempt I spoke for some 4 hours on many fascinating aspects of my life and times. Michael suggested a briefer treatement might be appreciated more by the students. He is so weird! Consequently the first broadcast will come in at about 6 minutes – a mere scratching of the surface, a smear of anchovy paste on a Tuc cracker instead of the banquet I had envisaged. I confidently predict an overwhelming demand for the original 4 hour address, bootleg tapes, the involvement of shady characters, illegal downloads. Oh yes.

Wolfson Centre for Age-related Disease

Was asked by a student  – Christoforos – to do a talk about careers at their regular Friday afternoon meeting.  C said to bring a few figure on what happens to King’s Biomedical and Health Sciences PhD’s which I did. I also put a quote or two from the new concordat about career support for researchers in Universities.

30 miinutes of talk then they brought in boxes of hot pizza and a crate of cold beer. Now THATS what I call Graduate Skills Development.

Quite pleased today as I got my first confirmation of a speaker at my Autumn employer presentation programme. Sally Leevers who manages the post-docs at Cancer Research UK’s labs. She has agree to come and talk on December the 9th.

 

Division Of Cancer Studies – Presentations

This group put on a day of presentations by PhD students entering their final year. I was asked along to provided fdbck on the aspects of presentation skills. I also  sat in on a panel choosing one of the nine presentations to go forward to a King’s wide research day. Have not seen the tapes yet, but a number of the students are going to need some input. The best ones were done by clinicians. Unfair reaally since their medical training has provided a good foundation of skills and confidence.

The presentations covered a variety of disciplines – clinical, bench science, sociological, statistical etc. The group of academics assessing the presentations was from a similarly mixed background. It was interesting tht each lecturer only felt totally comfortable in their own area. I at least had the advantge of being ignorant of all the areas – for the first time this seemed like an advantage.

 

We agree a winner -  alovley Irish lady who probably gave little thought to presentation techniques because she concentrated on the interesting story she had to tell; and of course that is the best technique of all.

Gradschool Planning

Met up with the team doing this summer’s cross-London Graduate School. Itseems a little smaller than ones we have done in the past - a little over 30 students. Was pleased to be asked to contribute a session and get a sense of the  course team. My planned session should work well with Luke’s sesion on interviews. My plan is to talk about ‘how to manage your career’ underlining how the previous sessions on skills are relevant. Then to show how employers assess candidates for jobs on a skills basis.