Category: Tea Break

The ‘Tea Break’ category are for fun, giving you a glimpse of what it’s like working in animal welfare science.

Totes Emosh

I don’t really know who reads this blog. I’m not sure what influence I have over edu-twitter. I am too tired and too emotional to write anything sensible or analytical here. I have many half-finished drafts. I’m not even sure what I’m trying to communicate here. I want to be insightful and witty. I want to be helping. I think I’m just venting.

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I have been crying a lot. Its the end of Week 3 of teaching, and I’ve had at least three big meltdowns and some smaller ones.

I’m one of life’s criers. I cry at graduation, at weddings, at birthdays, I cry at the thought of this advert and at the bridge of this song. Tears are my response to any strong emotion. I’ve cried in meetings. This is who I am. 

This week, I’ve had a lot of questions from my students. They haven’t understood some elements of the course. I haven’t been clear enough. Each time the questions come I feel the tears pricking. I’ve heard from some of them about the shitty year they’ve had, I’ve listened to their worries, and I feel just awful for not being better at this. 

In this swirl of guilt and sadness comes frustration. I’ve said this I’ve written this I knew all this would happen. I want to scream. I want to cry. I do cry. I walk away from my emails a moment and come back. 

I rewrite what I think I’ve said before. I try so hard to be kind. I film another round up video to try and put a face to everything that they’re getting. 

And my god this is taking up my time. Trying, and sometimes failing, to be kind is eating my time. I see the untackled jobs and emails mounting. And I will not answer emails after five. Unless you count the insomnia emails.

I don’t really know who reads this blog. I’m not sure what influence I have over edu-twitter. I am too tired and too emotional to write anything sensible or analytical here. I have many half-finished drafts. I’m not even sure what I’m trying to communicate here. I want to be insightful and witty. I want to be helping. I think I’m just venting.

Here’s what I’d like to be reading:

You’re doing the best you can right now. I know that this sucks, and the fact that you’re doing it at all is the victory. Remember that the students are stressed too, and kindness goes both ways. You have made some mistakes, but you know that you can learn from them. Mistakes don’t mean you’re stupid. What will you do differently next time? Remember, I’m asking what you are going to do differently. You only have control over a limited number of factors, which one of those are you going to change? 

One of the small factors I have control over is a bit of an audience. Someone to share this with. To say “hey, I’m finding this hard. I think you might be finding it hard too.” Maybe I can help us keep staff and keep students if I just remind people that at the other side of a screen is a human who’s hard a hard 7 months.

Most of all, I want to be told I’m doing a good job, and I want a pat on the head for getting this far.

That’s probably how the students feel too.

Data Literacy

Fancy getting a private blood test? I did . . .

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This post talks about my health in a somewhat vague way because the specifics aren’t important here. I want to preface the whole thing by saying I’m absolutely fine and you don’t need to be worrying about me.

For the past couple of years I’ve been dealing with an underlying health concern. It might be nothing, but it doesn’t feel right to me, and after a particularly bad time in late 2018, I asked for a referral to a consultant. Fifty weeks later, the appointment came through. 

Once I got a date for the appointment, I started collecting data. I used a (research-led design) health app to track my mood, my pain, my triggers, and my symptoms. But I also sent away for private blood tests. 

There are lots of companies now which will run a range of screening tests on your blood, spit, or whatever else you’d like to send off in a biohazard bag through the post. There’s also a lot of debate about whether this is a Good Thing or not. 

To me this is a question of data literacy. 

With many long-running conditions, healthcare providers expect individuals to collect data. I have spoken about keeping a note of Athena’s allergies before:

I recorded this data in a little leather notebook I wrote in every evening. The app I use to record my current symptoms is just a more advanced version of the same thing. Both will help a physician to make decisions about treatment. The rub is that the vet and the consultant have been trained for years to make sense of that data, whereas I, as a non-specialist, might draw the wrong conclusion. What is meaningful information, and what’s just noise?

We all know the danger of googling symptoms, such as that time you had a bit of a sore neck and then you discover you have neck cancer and you should get your affairs in order. Extremes are noticeable and attractive. We propagate stories such as that time an infra-red camera scan detected breast cancer, because they’re interesting – and because they’re unusual. I’ve seen lots of hot patches on people using infra-red cameras, and its never once been a serious underlying condition. Because as a screening tool, its not that useful. 

Screening tests are problematic. We have two measures that are useful when we think about screening: sensitivity and specificity. Let’s imagine we’d come up with a blood test that aimed to diagnose whether you were in fact a bit of a dick at times. A highly sensitive test would read ‘positive’ for everyone who had ever been a bit of a dick. A highly specific test would read negative if you had never been a bit of a dick. The issue is that sensitivity and specificity are not always related. You can have a highly sensitive test that rightly tells all the dicks they’re dicks, but if it has low specificity it will also tell a lot of people who are not dicks that they are, in fact, dicks. And this will upset a lot of nice people. Conversely, a super specific test will never frighten the good people with a wrong dick diagnosis, but it will also tell a lot of dicks that they’re good people. We want both sensitivity and specificity in our tests. 

Alongside the issue of how accurate the test is, there’s the question of ‘do you need to know?’ Here’s a great thread on the risks of DNA testing for cancer here by Rachel Horton. One of the lines that stands out to me is: “The scarier a result, the more likely it is to be a false positive”

The human body is not something that can be easily categorised. Our biology is a spectrum. Not only may a test be wrong, but you might just be tootling along quite happily with any number of potentially scary numbers attached to you. You may have a perfectly benign cyst in your brain. You may just live with low iron levels. In fact, many GPs are incredibly concerned about how these tests can worry people for no reason. 

Just like you’ve got that weird fleck in your eye, or the way your finger bends at an odd angle, there are lots of little oddities in your body that are perfectly fine. The body has such a great ability to just manage with so many things that don’t quite fit the concept of the medically fit person. 

So with all these sensible caveats in mind: why have I paid for the tests? Like I say, this to me is a data literacy issue. There are rightful concerns to these tests, and healthy people should absolutely not spend money on this unless they really enjoy looking at meaningless numbers (hey – that’s why I have a FitBit, no judgement). But they did give me more information. Specifically that there was nothing obviously wrong other than being highly deficient in Vitamin D like all Scottish people. 

As a semi biology-literate person, I did deliberately select the tests that would be likely to be affected by the health concerns I have, and deselected a number of the tests that I did not think were necessary (but that the company were keen on pushing). I also have a reasonable guess at what’s wrong with me from my GP, and that was later agreed by the consultant.

Personalised healthcare is fast becoming a ‘selling point’ for a lot of services. I don’t think we can stem that tide, so we need to think about how we create more data literate people in all sectors, so others can think critically about what’s being offered them. But health is also scary. The health of our loved ones is particularly scary. Can we ever really be objective or analytical when it comes to health? Is that what these companies are preying on?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but experiencing it myself has given me a new perspective. And I wonder if this is something we need to start teaching simply as a matter of course: how to deal with large amounts of your own personal data. Probably.

Oh – and after I went to the consultant? I was called to the GP for yet more blood tests.

24601

She works hard for her money . . . ?

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This week, in between trying to get through an email backlog from two weeks of conferences, I’ve been trying to write up a piece of research we’ve done looking at academic identity. Curiously, on Twitter there’s also been a provocative Tweet suggesting:

Which has incited discussion in my Twitter timeline about how much scientists should be investing in their career. 

In between those two weeks of conference, in between trying to work on this identity paper on the train, I went surfing for the first time. On Belhaven beach, in a borrowed winter wetsuit, I eagerly became A Surfer. I have none of the accoutrements (although I always find shopping the most fun part of identity formation), and I so far have only one lesson under my belt, but I am firmly convinced this was the identity I was born to carry. Sitting on a sandy white beach and wrapping up warm while I watch the waves is, at present, part of how I conceptualise myself. 

I pick up identities easily. For a while I was a diver (until I couldn’t face another open water dive in Scotland), I am occasionally a knitter, always a writer even when I haven’t written anything original in months, and for a long time now, I have been a scientist. 

During those two weeks of conference I was tired, and a little homesick, and grumpy about not being able to catch up with my workload on horrible trains. I was resenting every one of those 37 hours I’m contracted to work. I’m also a big proponent of taking conferences at your own pace, but at conferences number 3 + 4 of my year, I found myself pushing my limits to go to more talks, hear more about higher education, and talk to more people.

I care about my identity as an education researcher far more than I ever did about my animal behaviour researcher identity. This was a little surprising to me a couple of years ago when I went into this field. And it gives me very mixed feelings about the discussions regarding ‘science as a job’. 

On the one hand, scientists are more productive when they are happy and healthy – and we need to change the conversation around busyness and workload. The way we glorify exhaustion and working out of hours is doing our colleagues a great disservice. 

And yet, this is a job that I genuinely love and will work very hard to protect. Its a job that has a lot of benefits, and its a job that other people might want. Can I really say its ‘just’ a job?

In the end, I know that I can. I can because, despite my love for this job, I’m not here because I work harder or better than everyone else. I maybe work harder than some, but I was luckier than others, and I was in the right place at the right time. Beyond this idea that ‘real scientists work even harder’ is an even more pernicious lie. The idea that we get what we deserve. 

Academia is not a fair place. We are discriminatory, we judge people on implicit criteria, our metrics are meaningless. Peer review is broken and every way we recognise and reward success in a scientific career is much more about whether you fit the traditional academic mold, rather than any intrinsic value you have. 

I would caution all of us who love our jobs, who think that we work harder and better and faster, to just check our privileges. And just hang loose, bro.

If We Should Dress for Sun or Snow

Despite feeling pretty good about my work-life balance last year, I’ve been a little humbled by 2019 so far. My personal life has needed more attention than my work life, and I’ve been feeling guilty about shifting the focus.

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Before Christmas I got very into the Groundhog Day musical soundtrack, particularly If I Had My Time Again, which is my new favourite shower sing-along. I was also thinking a lot about academic workload last year, and how the varying pressures of the academic role can be challenging.

Despite feeling pretty good about my work-life balance last year, I’ve been a little humbled by 2019 so far. My personal life has needed more attention than my work life, and I’ve been feeling guilty about shifting the focus. It’s been difficult to keep on top of things, and I hadn’t quite appreciated how much I’d let things creep into the evenings.

There were two articles recently that my mind kept returning to. One is Dr Anderson’s widow speaking out about academic workload, and this article about email’s influence on workload. Particularly on Monday when I was attending an Echo 360 community meet-up about learning analytics.

I had good reasons for wanting to go to this community meet-up. I’m interested in analytics, and I’m the PI on our university’s evaluation project so a little networking is always valuable. I’m also in the rare academic position of having some spare money floating around so it all seemed worthwhile. Except there was a very west-of-Scotland sounding voice in the back of my head wondering if I’m worth spending that money on. Who am I to go to That London to talk to people? Shouldn’t I be slaving over a hot laptop?

On the other side of this, I’ve also spent a little bit of my evenings this week working on a Shiny app. Now I want to emphasise that ‘a little bit’ in this context literally means five or ten minutes here and there when an idea comes to me, but it’s still very much useful time. And yet I’ve been frustrated that I haven’t been able to spend more time on it.

A couple of months ago I had a devil’s advocate style debate with my good colleague Ian about how much these kind of extracurricular activities should contribute to our CVs. We kept circling back to how much the open science and open data analysis movements favour those people with the spare time to dedicate to this kind of work. If all your work is on proprietary data, you maybe can only contribute to things like a github repository in your spare time. And if when you get home you start doing the childcare, or can’t get away with not cleaning the house because you prefer to spend that time tweaking a package. What if all your hours out of work are spent on other tasks, and when you have that lightning moment of “ah – I should use enquo()!” you can’t immediately go to your laptop to check it out?

There are many people much busier than me who manage to contribute way more than me. Those people should be applauded. And we should definitely still value the amazing resources people put online. I think it is our responsibility as academics to support ourselves (and our managers too).

All this is a round-about way of saying that having a little bit less time to make-up for my business has highlighted to me how very important it is to protect time for the things that are important in your work. During one of our protected analysis times today I started a new package which I hope will be able to be incorporated into a shiny app I’m planning for our students. Tomorrow’s my first Writing Friday since before Christmas.  This is the way to do it. And yes, my emails have been slipping in the mean-time. Let ’em.

We should believe we are worth the time.

(And also I managed to go to work today wearing two different earrings and no one pointed it out. That’s not relevant but it amused me greatly.)

Clever Cat

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A friend recently asked me about their dog who was showing some unusual behaviour. The dog was suddenly acting fearfully around traffic, although there hadn’t been an obvious incident to spook him. I said “Sometimes clever animals get spooked by things just when they’re slightly ‘off’, they’re clever enough to recognise the pattern is wrong and start obsessing over why”

In some ways, this explanation is mainly to soothe the owner’s feelings. People like to think their animal is clever.

And I’m proof of this. Since having this conversation, I’ve been quietly re-evaluating some of Athena’s behaviours. Athena is a great example of a fearful cat, who runs away at the slightest provocation . . . except when Edinburgh had a brief but very welcome thunderstorm she sat by the window watching the lightning, completely calm. Living where we do, she has got a lot of experience with fireworks and other things that typically frighten animals, and she is utterly blase about them.

In fact, earlier this month we had a packed house, full of noisy family doing all the unpredictable things that Athena finds uncomfortable, and she still chose to join us, and to complain loudly about all the people sitting in her various spots. She even chose to sleep on the bed with our guest rather than on the floor with me (cow).

Like many people in my age and general middle class demographic, I greatly value intelligence. I want, very dearly, to believe that Athena’s general quirks are due to a very intelligent little cat mind that tries to understand a human world. And yet, as much as I want it, I still have to acknowledge this is a cat who regularly walks off windowsills and sofa edges because she’s too busy talking to me to watch where she’s going. 

I got very angry recently at a news article about the increased levels of unconditional offers being made to university. This was supposed to be bad because it would encourage students to take their foot off the gas and make them slack in the year before they got to university. There is a lot to unpack in that statement, which I may get in to another time, but I had also recently read this interesting blog post purporting that examinations make it easier for students with poor social capital to demonstrate their ability.

As an academic, I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that exams test intelligence. I can just about say that certain formats of them test knowledge and skill acquisition. When scientists try to measure intelligence, they get caught in whole heap of challenging research. There is, we think, a thing about some people’s brains that makes them perform better in the tests we give them (tests which we’ve designed are not unbiased). However, believing that intelligence is malleable seems to also make people perform better in these tasks. There are many ways in which social capital helps you perform better in many of the ways we judge intelligence.

What about Athena’s social capital? Daughter of a teenage mum, separated from her mother shortly after birth and raised in foster care. She was ill for a period as baby, and so was slow to gain weight. She was separated from her own kind and adopted by someone who then suffered a mental health problem. She lived apart from her own kind, as is the culture she was adopted into. She developed a long-term condition health condition that gives her pain and discomfort.

When I think about it that way, watching Athena study some loud, cheerful strangers from a safe spot beside me seems like a very, very intelligent response to something unusual. It’s just my measurement is bad.

Opinion Piece

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If I have a new year’s resolution for 2018, it’s to be more open to feedback. Feedback terrifies me, because it’s an opportunity to be told I wasn’t very good at something. And if I’m not very good at something, I have clearly failed at life. But I’m working on it!

I have to admit I was surprised to find that I get a lot of positive feedback too. It’s strange how trying to protect yourself from bad feedback also keeps the good feedback from sinking in too. Here’s something students say to me:

“I like hearing about your opinion, it’s nice to have the benefit of your experience.”

I get this when I’m talking about ethics, or how my personal ontology affects my research (which is a whole other post I have drafted, but is also talked about in my book – which you can still pre-order on Amazon, Waterstones , Blackwells and at the Publisher) It used to make me uncomfortable. I worried that students might take my opinion as fact, or think they had to follow my opinion to get good grades. So when I give students my opinion, I preface it with lots of wiggle words “it’s only my opinion”, “now this isn’t fact” . .  . why precisely?

I don’t want to create a horde of mini-mes when I teach. I’ve never been able to get that project past the ethics committee. But why do I shy away from my opinion? There might well be a gender bias there, and I try to soften my opinion to protect peoples’ feelings. But I think a lot of it is about the hard science bias. Try as I might, I can’t shake the idea that opinions (and those other icky subjective feelingy things) don’t have a place in real science.

But here’s the thing – students like it. They want to know what I think about these topics that they’ve chosen to study. Their studies are important to them. The people who teach them are also important to students. My research group is writing up a paper at the moment which explores aspects of the student-teacher relationship. Students want to feel respected by their teachers, and I think that (occasional) usage of opinion can be one of the ways to do that. When you share something like that with your students, you’re building trust with them. And it’s important to value their opinion too.

I absolutely love having ethics discussions with my students. I love exploring these concepts and sharing ideas. It shouldn’t be so surprising to me that my students enjoy that too.

Perspective

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It’s 1998

In a large, sloping theatre in the west of Scotland (that no longer exists), a teacher brings in their VHS tape of ‘Friends’.

There was always a vote – after half a dozen classes were assembled in theatre: “Should we watch ‘Friends’ or should we do our assigned class?” I wasn’t a fan, so I always voted for the assigned class, and inevitably, our teachers showed our year group episodes Season 3 Episode 10 (The One Where Rachel Quits) to Season 3 Episode 14 (The One With Phoebe’s Ex Partner) to distract us from . . . staff shortages? I’m not sure why we all had to watch Friends . . .

It’s 2007

In between shifts at an RSPCA wildlife hospital, I catch the first episode of Friends on E4. Over the next eight months I watch all 236 episodes of Friends. I had been vaguely aware of ‘Ross and Rachel’  as a concept, but watching from the start, knowing vague outcomes like “Monica proposes”, “it all ends”, “Rachel gets Ross at the airport”, my first honest experience of the legendary show ‘Friends’ was uniquely insular. My internet access was a weekly sojourn to the pub with my laptop, and I never thought to mention that I was watching a show that had finished three years ago.

In this virgin state I think that Ross is a manipulative arse, that Joey and Phoebe are feeble, that Rachel is spoiled, that Chandler is cute, and that Monica’s ethos echoes my own entirely.

It’s 2018 . . . just.

‘Friends’ is on Netflix. Since moving to Edinburgh and fulling assuming the mantle of ‘scientist’, a lot has changed. ‘Friends’ left UK television in 2011. For one, I now understand why my teachers thought a single hours of ‘Friends’ was preferable to teaching on a Friday at the end of term.

Ross seems sweet. Phoebe is an independent spirit. Monica is representative of my darkest impulses. Chandler, a manifestation of my fears. Joey needs protected and Rachel is just beautiful. Millenials find ‘Friends’ problematic says the Independent. Generation Z, I think, primly.

My time with the RSPCA is over ten years ago, my time in that auditorium in the early naughties is over fifteen years ago. It’s almost half my lifetime. I have a couple of GAP shirts that I wear over t-shirts when I can’t be arsed, but ‘Friends’ makes me think that I might be able to rock that as a ‘look’. Maybe when I’m publishing my book, I can hustle my friends out the door in black tie garb. I want a ‘Rachel’ haircut but I’m afraid of what my stylist will say.

Perspective is an interesting thing. ‘Friends’ has followed me throughout a career where I have conducted research and educated. But more crucially, while explaining to my cat why the ‘Marcel‘ storyline is no longer appropriate, I realised that Athena has been with me for 39 months. My PhD lasted a total of 39 months. Come the end of this month, I will have lived with Athena longer than I lived with my PhD.

Right now, Athena is telling me it is ‘bed time’. Her whole life is the same amount of time as one of the most stressful periods of my life. She is barely aware of the blog post that’s  been brewing in my mind about the importance of a teacher’s opinion to their student’s. She knows, vaguely, that I have been ‘busy’ recently. She dislikes my work laptop.

Over half my life ago, I did not know I’d be here, but I would watch ‘Friends’ and think these people were so cool. Today, I have no idea what the next fifteen years will bring, but I am quietly amused, wondering how ‘Friends’ will be shown to us then, and how I will remember those 40 short months of my PhD. Perspective is a fleeting thing, but right now, perspective is a memory of what was, and still laughing when Ross tried to explain the theory evolution to his friends.

The Academic Place

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Have you been watching The Good Place? For UK viewers, it’s on Netflix, and it’s a very funny and sharp comedy based on exploring ethical points of view about what ‘goodness’ really is. I love it. The latest episode focussed on the Trolley Problem, which I have a particular soft spot for.

I’m a utilitarian, as I’ve said many times on this blog, and for me the trolley problem has limited discussion value. It’s also one of my favourite examples of a flipped classroom (you can use my flipped classroom here on TES Blendspace).

I was really lucky with this classroom that I had great engagement from my students, and there are a few elements of this that have really stuck with me. One of them was one of my students who flatly said no, she could not pull the lever to move the trolley. She could not bear the thought of causing a person’s death. The class had a brilliant discussion, and a truly equal one as well, where I walked away from the class feeling as though I’d stretched my understanding of ethics as well.

The trolley problem hinges, in my opinion, on the fact you know your inaction will result in five deaths. When you know the outcomes, does inaction hold equal culpability as action? I firmly believe that it does, and this is partly an outcome of my atheism. I don’t believe there is a final tally of good acts or evil acts, and the only ‘worth’ is how much you helped other people. It’s my ethical position, and informs my actions, and how I value other peoples’ actions as well.

This brings me to a less happy topic. The #MeToo hashtag has been spreading over social media, a visible way for people to say they had experienced sexual harassment or assault. Eventually, I posted too.

There was so many feelings swirling around before I made that post, but in fact it was walking away from a student engagement event that made me think about it. I have said in our Digital Footprint MOOC that I believe my Twitter (and indeed this blog) are a way for me to widen participation in academia, to help engage the public and students with the kinds of science I do. The fact is, I have been sexually harassed in my role as ‘student’, more than once. My feelings on this are very mixed. I feel ashamed. I feel guilty that I ‘brought it upon myself’. I feel relief, and a sense of fraudulence, that these incidences of harassment only made me uncomfortable and shaky, and didn’t physically harm me.

Ultimately, I feel that if a student under my care came up to me and told me they had had a similar experience, I would be furious. I would not be asking them what they’d done to bring it on themselves, even though I ask myself that. I would support them.

Saying #MeToo was deeply uncomfortable. It was frightening. I know other scientists who chose to disclose, and others who didn’t. No one owes someone their disclosure. For me, I wanted to say something because I knew it had happened, and staying silent felt a little like not throwing the lever and changing the trolley’s tracks. As uncomfortable as it made me, staying quiet was worse. It’s my personal ethical stance, and I don’t demand that everyone follows me.

But there’s still more. With the news that Oxbridge is less diverse than it was seven years ago, and the mental health challenges associated with postgraduate study are a terrifying read. I fundamentally think that we are all in this together, and we have to talk about the things that go wrong. We also have to help the people who contribute to harassment, to the stressful culture, who make the choices about who comes in. We’re them too.

Changing an individual person’s behaviour is hard, trust me, I know. Changing a workplace culture is even harder. But it’s worth it. By having the conversations, we might just be able to make the Academic Place . . . the Good Place.

My Name is Jilly, And I’ve Been Book-Free For 1 Week

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Hello, my name is Jilly. I’m proud to say I’ve been book-free for one week.

Yes – it is true. Last week (in fact, Thursday 25th May), I sent the book off to the editors and received a lovely email in return thanking me for following the preparation guidelines so thoroughly.

Of course, the paper I submitted this week was missing a figure heading.

Writing the book has been an amazing experience. Even my PhD didn’t give me so much freedom to really dive into a subject and (forgive how academic this sounds) think about a subject.

So what happens when you write a book?

  • That quip about it being another, longer PhD on top of your full time job was absolutely true
  • You will lose all sympathy for PhD students, which is wrong, because you brought this on yourself.
  • You will swear you’ll never write another (and secretly really hope the second is easier)
  • The “I should be writing” guilt is real. It follows you around pubs and parks, a spectral apparition lurking at the corner of your vision of yourself hunched over a laptop.
  • It’s amazing how much more energy you have when the spectral apparition is gone – I suddenly feel capable of painting the living room
  • Somebody will publish an inflammatory paper before you submit your book. You will have a little cry.
  • The weakest part of your creative process (for me that’s always been editing) will improve – but it’ll still be your weakest part. By far.
  • You’re going to be really nervous about whether or not people actually like it – a nice email from your editor will make you burst into blubbering tears.

The next part of the process will take about eight months, I think, so expect to see the book early in 2018. I am very excited, and very nervous about how it will be received. I really hope people like it. I might even quite like the opportunity to do this again at some point (something about science literacy in general . . .)

But right now I’m really enjoying having absolutely nothing to do at evenings and weekends. This is fun.

Academics Supporting Academics

How can we support each other in science?

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If you hang out in the academic circles of Twitter or the blogosphere[1] you’ll find many frightening stories about the cutthroat and ruthless nature of the world’s self-appointed thinkers. Bullying in academia has its own Wiki page (don’t be too shocked, academia is also an industry that hosts regular edit-a-thons of Wikipedia), and is frequently the topic of thinkpieces in your favourite left-leaning media (again, don’t be too surprised, we’re also an industry that writes for a living).

Bullying in academia is a problem, and early career researchers are frequently left unsupported. But this is not the only story. I’ve heard tales from my own university that make my skin crawl, but I think it’s equally important to highlight when things work well. I have always been incredibly lucky to work in supportive teams, and I’d like to think I help to support my colleagues, so if you want to change the culture of your academic workplace, here are the things that work for me:

1. Ask for help

SRUC recently hosted Temple Grandin for a series of talks, and I was invited to talk about my research as part of an early career day. I’m not the kind of person who gets nervous about talking, but presenting your research, that you’ve just written a book on, to one of science’s biggest characters is not a normal kind of talk.

I asked for help.

My colleague, Jess Martin, pictured to my left in this Tweet, sat with me as we flicked through my slides. She gave me some brilliant advice on my slides, and then she gave me some tips for coping with nerves during presentations. I think it’s important to point out that these are skills I have, I win competitions (and book deals) on these skills, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need help sometimes. As academics we like to  believe we are experts, that we have irreplaceable skills. If we don’t believe this then everyone is our competition . . .

Here’s the thing, every woman in that photo could do my job better than me if they put their mind to it. We are a strong team, not when we scrabble for funding scraps, but when we sit down together to see where we can learn from one another.

 

2. Acknowledge your colleagues

She won’t thank me but I want to call Jess out specifically here. Jess is one of these people who will always have time to help you if you ask for it. Jess also uses peoples names.

In a meeting, when Jess wants to echo someone’s idea she says “Jill’s point was a good one…”. I’ve started trying to do the same. “I agree with Bob”, “I missed what Alice said, can you say it again?”

I often find myself in meetings where there is a spread of paygrades around the table. You and your fellow early career researchers will not be on the radar until you all start speaking about your achievements. Don’t push your own agenda at the expense of others. When Bob makes a good point, tell people it was Bob’s idea.

 

3. Think about wellbeing

I have another set of colleagues, Kirsty Hughes, Sharon Boyd and Jessie Paterson, who are very engaged with workplace wellbeing. They organise various sessions to get us thinking about things other than work. I’m going to be talking about video games for my team later this month. They’re not mandatory, but they’re there. Just before Christmas my boss was teasing me for me affection for glitter as we made some Christmas cards, and then we pondered our approach to one of my current projects.

Good bosses are very important here, and another place where I’ve always been incredibly fortunate. But even if you don’t have a supportive boss, think about how you and your colleagues interact. Working in Scotland my colleagues and I are big fans of the pub debrief, but there’s plenty to be said for walk-and-talks out in nature, for crafting sessions and opportunities to explore hobbies.

Hobbies teach skills you can bring into the workplace, my photography and videogaming are both things I can use in my role, but that’s not the real gain here. Work shouldn’t make you sick. It’s as simple as that.

 

4. Go home!

Don’t be part of the culture that normalises sleeping under your desk. Go home at a reasonable time. If you are sending an email to a colleague and you see their out of office is on, it’s very easy to delay an email so it gets sent when they’re back, and it takes very little extra effort on your part. Turn off email notifications on your phone, turn off your inbox’s ability to pop up every time a new email hits your inbox. If you have a short question why not visit your colleague’s office, instead of sending an email?

Don’t fall into the trap of saying “this is how it was for me, this is how it’ll be for my students”. I hope the future generation has a better life than ours.

 

5. Reflect on feedback

This is the one I find most challenging. I like to think of myself as amazing at all times, but I’m not. I do things wrong, I lack several skills, I have a long way to go. I found my Higher Education Academy application to be a revelation in this sense. I still struggle to take feedback on board, but I like to think I’m getting there.

Trying to hear feedback as about the work, and not about me, is not easy. On the whole academics are good at things and don’t like failing, but our work is always about failing. You’re never going to answer that question perfectly, you’re never going to be perfect. Let yourself be messy, let yourself fail, give yourself space to grow. How else will you know when you need to go to your colleagues for help, or when it’s time to stop bashing your head off the keyboard and go for a walk?

Self-reflection isn’t easy, but there needs to be a lot more of it in science.