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.

Graduate Resarch Showcase Event

I have observed 12 of this years presentations form students, noting down what they are doing – good and bad. This is to feed into my presentations training workshop. I thought I would try and get the DVD of Andrew Morris the keynote speaker who used some of the classic techniques like: Tell people what you are going to talk about. Vary tone. If you are showing a graphic / schematic – tell people what it is / why you are showing it.

 

The other purpose of attending was to build my knowledge of what scientific research is – and specifically what King’s research is. The presentations today and yesterday included: stair clinbing difficulties, gentic links and mood disordrers in obesity, how nurses develop professional skills, bone disease, the impact of taking intereron on kidney patients, the impact of PTSD on memory and the economics of stroke.

Patents Work – Careers Seminar

Ran this seminar for the second time. This time we had 2 associates from Mathys Squire – both very good – said some useful things: its a good profession to be in if you like an argument. Some similarities to publishing papers and dealing with colleagues who question your research methodologies and results. Interesting stuff too about work-life balance – possible to work part-time and return after raising children.

It was disappointing that we only got 6 students on the day despite 12 students promising they would attend. My colleagues Laura and Rachel were there to boost the numbers a little.

The specialist Careers Adviser

I thought I would put the draft of half an article about the growth of specialists in Careers advice – and whether this is a threat to the notion of the generalist. I am slightly stuck with it – but some of the thoughts in the first half may be worth reading. When I complete it I will probably send it to ‘Careers Adviser’ or Phoenix

 

Where is Careers advice going? This agency of the public sector, this adjunct of the education service, or the employment service; this process that perpetually disappoints both government and public and yet to which they both return hungry for solutions they have been unable to find elsewhere.

 

Where is careers advice going? Being neither a strategic, manager nor an academic I look for answers neither in policy nor theory but in my on work as a careers adviser. But I am not going to answer the question ‘where is Careers advice going’ because as Mark Watson the excellent Welsh stand-up would say –that question’s too hard. In stead I am going to ask ‘what have I been doing?’ to see if the answer to that gets me anywhere nearer my bigger question.

 

For 15 years or so my client group has been principally undergraduates, but in the last 3 years I have been working with PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. There is a small group of  Careers advisers scattered around research-led universities who have begun to focus on this group – often in collaboration with academics and with staff trainers. Parallel groups have begun to work with MBA students and with medics. Fancy that.

 

When I began working as a Careers Adviser I would have said that such people would have little need for the skills of the Careers Adviser. They were beyond Careers advice. Careers advice was a phase you went through in an indeterminate zone as you tipped out of the education system into the scary and uncertain world of the adult job market.

 

The careers adviser patrolled this splash down area looking for those in danger of drowning, then pulled them out for a quick lesson in survival tactics. Got them breathing and moving then threw them in again. It was a decent and honourable job.

 

Years later I am working with education’s winners. So successful at the knowledge game, they have stepped into the knowledge business. My clients are doing real research on real big stuff; unpleasant diseases that kill people, how to treat violent psychopaths, how to combat climate change and environmental degradation and the rest.

 

As intractable problems expand so does the knowledge business – more Phd’s are recruited – though the expansion in the UK is coming principally from overseas. However numbers of academic jobs are not expanding at the rate of PhD expansion –and some fields of commercial  research particularly linked to manufacturing are declining. This expansion has brought questions of overproduction of PhD’s. This sense may be more imaginary than real since quite a few London researcher recruiters have reported that it is really difficult to recruit ‘good’ postdocs.

Music PhD’s

Meeting with 2 current PhDs to plan a New Year session on Careers after the PhD.

Researcher Development Programme

The programme well under way. Inotice I am seeing fewer than in previous years – partly because the planning is a little bit more rigid and the dissemination and booking processes seem more ineffective. Yesterday was the presentations session and I was pleased with the way it went.

Unfortunately last weeks Time Management clashed with the IOP induction so I was unable to get down there -  alost opportunity. Problem was I was asked to do an extra Time Management course and I had had no specific invitation to attend the IOP event – though my guess was that it would be an efternoon thing – turned out it was a morning session. Jon Cooper very cross I could not make it.

Graduate School Inductions

We do not often meet up as the GS team, so it was nice to see everyone over in the FWB reception area. I did a couple of group sessions. It was nice to feel relaxed about these – in previous years I would not have done. Managed to get both of my groups to talk and interact. I sat with other support services in the graduate lounge and chatted to a few PhD’s – the whole thing seemd better than the 3 previous GS inductions.

Working with Scientists

All three of the scientists i have counselled this morning suffered in one way or another from poor communications within their workplace. One of them havd a really interesting insight. For her the endless shifting of plans was a nightmare. She really needed to know what she was doing. In MBTI terms a confirmed ‘J’. She noted that the postdocs in her lab were so laidback as to be horizontal, and that her PI was in her terms ‘vague’ . I said to her that it was precisely this lack of structure that appealed to some academics. Its often sena s the essential’freedom’ to pursue ideas. Of course it is not universal, but the observation was telling. The difficulty of advising unhappy PhD students is separating the inevitable indeed essential problems and dips form more profound issues which mean that the environment does not fit with a student’s long term needs. Of course one can never know, and cannot give ‘advice’ here. But you can get them to analyse the issues and guide them through potential modes of action and response.

Source Event

Friday was a day long stint talking about King’s College to prospective students and research staff.  Did manage to go to 2 presentations, one by a chilled dutch professor of Human-Computer Interaction on the subject of networking – it was the classic Nelson-Bolles model with some nice personal touches about how he had failed to network and got into the ‘wrong’ lab where he discovered several people he had graduated with – who could have told him it was not suitable.

The second one was by the equally impressive Matthias Haury who gave great examples of how and how not to set up labs, how not to pay over the odds for kit and how to avoid recruiting the wrong people. His best story was about his time at University of California in San Francisco where in a tower housing different labs on different floors there was some social event every day. He recounted how new dicoveries were passed round the research groups – informally -well before publication and they informed and stimulated discoveroes in other groups in the tower:  a truly productive period. He was a very serious guy but one who subscribed to the Jon Cooper ’science is fun’  philosophy. When 80% of all experiments in biology ‘fail’ you need a network to keep it all in perspective.

There was a great buzz about the event – a long overdue one for science careers. Slightly weird to be doing it in the Business Design Centre where I have done so many of the Careers Group Recruitment Fairs.

s.

Prospects Planner – a PhD student tool

Prospects Planner is probably the most widely recommended piece of Careers software in UK Universities. Like many a standard work it is seen as not very exciting.

I suggested it to a Philosophy PhD recently and was surprised at his positive reaction once he had completed it. It made me re-assess it. It is actually a very rich resource. The problem is that it requires a bit of patience and persistence to use it to its full capacity. I suspect that most students use it to generate a list of jobs that might suit them. Its really merit is in the stage beyond that where you can interrogate the precise match with a specific job title. I have heard many CA’s discuss its limitations and I have contributed to those conversations myself. For me its real merit is the way it trains students to think in this competence foocused way which can only enhance their job applications.