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.
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.
Note: This has been sitting in my drafts for weeks and isn’t getting any more written, so here it is!
I’ve been meaning to do more ‘behind the paper’ posts whenever an article gets published, but I keep forgetting. Oops. One of my recent papers, Discipline Based Education Research for Animal Welfare Science has motivated me to start up the practice again.
This paper is somewhat of a Dear John letter to my former career. You see, as of 2020, I’ve been working in veterinary education research longer than I worked in animal behaviour and welfare. Moving disciplines from ethology to veterinary education was more than a little scary, and committing myself to work in a truly interdisciplinary space was a dive into the unknown.
DBER for Animal Welfare Science marks my sixth first author paper in education research, versus my four ethology papers and my one human-animal interactions paper. In terms of time and experience, I’ve been working in education longer than I was an ethologist.
I have a couple of reflections on changing disciplines from your PhD studies that I thought others contemplating a similar move would find useful.
The Deficit
There’s no way of getting around it – when you jump disciplines you have a massive knowledge/reputation deficit that you need to take time to recover. I’ve been exceptionally lucky in the team I ended up in, and I was supported during that year where my productivity dived and I was getting my teeth into some gigantic projects. I have two particular projects that I think of as my second PhD, one of which has also recently been published (here) and the other I’m currently writing up. The sense of scale on those tasks felt comparable to writing a PhD, not least because you’re doing them on top of the day job. You just don’t need to do all the ‘learning to research’ part of the PhD. You already have your workflows and your skills, and its just translating them to a new context.
Another aspect of the deficit though is progression. I ‘only’ made it to the Lecturer position in August 2019. My friends who stayed in the same field outpaced me in earning capacity relatively quickly. I’ve had many people assuming I’m further up the academic ladder than I am. Again, I’ve got a very supportive team around me who were supportive of me taking on responsibility before I was necessarily ‘supposed’ to. I did encounter the odd person who thought a Research Fellow shouldn’t be doing whatever thing I was off doing because I wasn’t ready yet. And I am the kind of awful person who gets bothered by that. I like being recognised for what I do. Know your value, and don’t be afraid to fight for recognition as an interdisciplinary researcher.
The Culture
Something I didn’t expect when I switched disciplines was the need to take a long hard look at myself. The cultural biases I had as an ethologist only became clear to me when they were smashed up against the norms of educational research. This was really useful for me in a lot of ways, but it was also humbling. I now sometimes find myself gritting my teeth when I hear ethologists repeat those biases. Although by the same token, I see what education researchers ‘think’ they know being spouted forward when I’m able to say “actually, in this other field we do …”
Of course you soon develop new biases and ways of thinking. Something that gets my goat very badly is how ‘interdisciplinary’ is bandied around very freely. I don’t think you’re interdisciplinary until you’re jumping across a ‘purity’ level. Two forms of biology no longer cut it for me. This makes me very fun at departmental meetings and wins me lots of friends.
I’m also so much happier in DBER than I was in ethology. This field always appealed to me, but felt like such a strange jump after I started investing in my career path. I started my PhD, not really out of any great love of the subject, but because it was 2009 and a paid job during a recession. I came to love it, and I don’t regret it at all, and more importantly I’m better at what I do now because of that time I spent in another field.
I truly believe that academia is going to experience some big changes soon. I believe that the old postdoc model is dead and careers like mine will become more common place. If you do find yourself staring at a frightening opportunity in the next few months, I can’t tell you what to do. But I can say that I have no regrets, and being interdisciplinary is the happiest I’ve ever been
I’m about to go on two weeks annual leave so this is an excellent time for me to drop this particular post. Thanks to MichTheMartian on Twitter for reaching out and making me realise I haven’t ever really summarised this.
This post addresses the following concerns:
Students will stop showing up!
It won’t help students learn!
There’s no way to introduce lecture recording ethically in the current HE climate / Policy is hard / The union says no.
Its too technically challenging!
We just don’t have enough evidence
It makes me uncomfortable
Students will stop showing up!
If students stop showing up, there’s a bigger problem than you recording your lectures.
Attendance at lectures is a complex, emotional and highly individual choice (1, 2, 3). Attending students may not necessarily be engaged in the teaching activity happening in front of them (4), and so anyone who is worried about students not showing up should be asking why their lectures aren’t ‘unmissable’.
In her presentation here, Emily Nordmann has some practical recommendations for how to make the most of lecture recording, and she makes some excellent points about attendance. https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/1_4k30iisz
Although it could well be moot as there is plenty of evidence to show lecture recording does not affect attendance (5, 6), and evidence which suggests an effect is mostly students saying they thought they would be likely to stop attending (and not observing actual behaviour, 7, 8), and oft-cited research showing an effect has a lot of flaws, see Susan Rhind’s blog here and Emily Nordmann’s blog here.
It won’t help students learn!
There’s a commonly cited paper showing no evidence for attainment with increased lecture use (8).
I think that paper’s probably right – for students who are otherwise grand, recordings don’t really help. I wouldn’t have used them when I was at uni. The case for using them is not about making everyone better, but removing barriers. I use the term ‘mainstreaming accessibility’ a lot. Having a recording policy removes some of the pressure from lecture recording (see Sarah Chinnery’s blog). If you have difficulties getting to class for any reason, knowing you can review the materials reliably is helpful, and stops you ‘outing’ yourself to your lecturer or your classmates. We have lots of example of this in our workshop (see below). Emily Nordmann (again!) has a lovely blog on why we need to start talking about the socially progressive case for lecture recording. It is a technology which helps remove one of the barriers to higher education. At Edinburgh, we have evidence suggesting that these positive impacts start in first year (9).
In addition, I have some current research ongoing which strongly suggests that students who use lecture recordings to facilitate their studies do so in a very active and engaged manner. This work is funded by Echo360 and you can keep an eye on my Twitter feed to see more about it.
In another project I’m involved with, we’re seeing some excellent secondary uses of lecture recording to help us think about what happens in classrooms and how that can help students learn. Emily has another great paper which we use at Edinburgh to support our students to study with lecture recordings (10) and we have produced open source guidance ourselves (11).
Related – here’s some UK sector-wide discussion on Widening Participation with Lecture Recording. This project is ongoing and you should keep an eye on it
There’s no way to introduce lecture recording ethically in the current HE climate / Policy is hard / The union says no.
A good policy is the key here. You need to engage with the policy consultations that come round, and policy makers need to be cognisant of the power a good policy has in helping support the introduction of these technologies. For me the take home messages are
The recording is a supplementary resource and should belong to the class that generated it.
Lecturers should have to opt in to saving that resource in any long term way
Each class needs to set its own expectations around lecture recording (I talk about this in the podcast here and also you can see an example of me doing this at the start of our last Collaborative Cluster on Widening Participation with Lecture Recording meeting)
Lecturers should be able to opt out of lecture recording whenever they feel the need to (linked to the class expectations – this can also support student learning, e.g. during ethical discussions. I talk about the practicalities in this podcast)
Richard Goodman talks about moving to an opt-out policy at Loughborough
Melissa Highton talks about working with the union to develop good policies at Edinburgh.
Its too technically challenging!
Aren’t you lucky that the University of Edinburgh has put together a completely free resource talking about Delivering and Evaluating Lecture Recording so you don’t have to start from scratch?
I walked through how you can run your own evaluation and included a bunch of resources with the QAA here:
It makes me uncomfortable
I know it does. Believe me, it makes me kind of uncomfortable too. I’ve been on television, on radio, on stage on the Lyceum, written a book, and I still find it slightly uncomfortable watching myself stumble over words and have a brain blank in front of a class.
But here’s the thing – students don’t care. They’re here to learn. And they want to learn. They’re not expecting you to be David Attenborough. They’re not expecting you to be perfect. And if you can use your mistakes to model good academic practice (jump to 5 minutes), maybe you can create better learners.
My research shows that lecture recording makes lecturers worry about getting things wrong, or being criticised, while students just view it as a tool (Show and Tool – or the free preprint if you can’t access that journal). This is a conversation you need to have with your students. Making mistakes is how we learn.
One of the big things I’d encourage you to make use of is the open source workshop we made available with the QAA (direct link to resource). Using this workshop we’ve developed new guidance on how to teach with lecture recording that will be getting printed and shared imminently.
But at the end of the day – you’re the teacher. You’re there to help students. After the conversations I’ve been having lately with certain academics, this feels like a revolutionary thing to say. I am salty. I am salty that I need to defend students’ rights to have access to materials. I am salty that I need to justify writing “students should approach their lecturers for support” in student guidance. I am salty that academics are putting their personal comfort over the needs of their students.
In 2019 I took part in the #100papers challenge. The idea is that you aim to read (fully) 100 scientific papers in a year.
Following @emilynordmann's example (cribbed from @sam_d_parsons I believe) I'm going to try and aim for #100papers in 2019. The idea is to make you read more widely – wish me luck!
As I understand it, the challenge was born from the #365papers challenge. Some fools well-intentioned folks aim for averaging a paper a day for a year, and others thought “I’ll be lucky if I manage a third of it”. With both #365papers and #100papers, the idea is that you’ll commit to reading more if you’re publicly tracking it, and maybe also read more widely. I knew that #365papers would not be achievable for me, but #100papers might have been within my grasp (spoilers, it wasn’t).
I really like setting myself challenges. I’ve done a variety of photography and reading challenges over the years. Tracking the papers that I read on Twitter is innately appealing to me. I also wanted to put a potted summary or key outcome from each paper onto my tweets to force me to read the papers instead of cheating the essence of the challenge by skimming.
I have a pretty good work-life balance. I set aside a day a week to devote to research and I manage to keep that day protected about 60% of the time I’d say. How many papers did I read in their entirety in 2019?
40. I read 40 papers cover to cover.
I have some thoughts about this exercise. Firstly, I don’t think this is The Way to read papers. Something I noticed about reading whole papers was how pointless it often is. I teach students to be selective about how they approach papers, and when I was trying to find out how someone set up a study or I wanted an overview of a particular field, I wasn’t sitting down to read a whole paper, I was flicking to the relevant parts of various papers. So my first big takeaway is that reading whole papers isn’t something that I would prioritise over strategic paper skimming.
With that being said, there is something quite meditative and indulgent about reading a whole paper. There were some very fun papers like Jenny Scoles’ one on messy boundary objects where the narrative itself is enjoyable.
Messy 'objects' can mediate and disrupt negotiations as actors generate their own reality (a very fun #100papers)
7. Scoles (2018) Researching 'messy objects': how can boundary objects strengthen the analytical pursuit of an actor-network theory study? https://t.co/X9n7uIVqvZ
(There was also this deeply enjoyable rant where you could feel the authors’ visceral hatred of the right-brain-thinking myth.)
And I also really liked having the Twitter thread of all the papers I’d read, and the ability to jump back into that thread to share with people was massively useful. Bauer et al 2017, alongside reading Invisible Women, has changed my research practice quite considerably this year:
For surveys two-stage gender identity questions are easily understood and make best use of data. nice paper #100papers
19. Bauer et al 2017 Transgender-inclusive measures of sex/gender for population surveys: Mixed-methods evaluation and recommendations https://t.co/Q62SphnYB1
The performative aspect of talking about the papers I’m reading online was also interesting. I think you can track what projects I was working on with this twitter thread. You can see when I started reading up on our Widening Participation cluster for example, and I like some of the conversations the spawned from the thread.
In 2020, I’m probably not going to do the challenge again, but I’ll certainly be posting a papers thread, maybe #paperswotiread or something along those lines. The target of 100 fully read papers is not feasible for me, and if its not feasible for me, I’m not comfortable advertising it to those academics who may be following me. I’ve been thinking a lot this year about how I model what I view as ‘good’ academic practice, and I’m trying to make positive choices. So I’ll be doing something like this in 2020, just without the targets.
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:
I think it’s more damaging to suggest it’s possible that anyone can do world class science in 38 hrs per week etc. This tweet will self destruct in …
Which has incited discussion in my Twitter timeline about how much scientists should be investing in their career.
Please RT if you are a scientist who treats science as a job.
Tweets like this are super harmful and perpetuate the stupid idea that you have to work ALL THE TIME. https://t.co/Brrluob7WK
— Dr Tara McAllister (@taramcallister4) July 18, 2019
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.
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.
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.
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.)
I’m often accused of being productive which I find hysterical because I have had to dedicate a whole cupboard to my unfinished crafting projects and my list of ‘started’ papers is longer than my list of actual finished ones, never mind just the published ones.
Some colleagues and I were discussing productivity on Friday and one of my accusers said she’d read that the key to productivity was focussing on the process and not the end product. When I describe my work process I often say that I hate ‘kidding myself’. If I’m not going to do the thing that I’m supposed to do I don’t sit staring at it, instead I do something else. For example, my NSS package happened when I was supposed to be addressing some reviewers’ comments for our assessment paper. And on Friday, when I was supposed to be addressing those comments again, I went home and played Assassin’s Creed because it had had been a bit of a difficult week and the freedom to say “bugger it” is one of academia’s greatest perks. (Never underestimate the power of ‘bugger it’ when talking about productivity). I don’t kid myself about the work I’m doing.
I have never considered my ‘don’t kid yourself’ motto in terms of ‘process’, but it might actually be a more useful way to conceptualise it. I like exploring different processes. I usually have a little chunk of something I’ve tried before – you want to know about ‘play’? Well one Monday afternoon I randomly did a lit review for the beginning of a paper, here it is. You’d like to know how to make an R Package, well one week I wrote a data package for fun. While there is an end product for these things, I don’t necessarily bother with them.
One of the greatest examples of this is NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated, National Novel Writing Month takes place in November each year and encourages everyone to write a 50,000 word novel. I love NaNoWrimo and have taken part several times, and finished only once. NaNoWriMo does not care about the final product. A common solution to writer’s block is to have ninja’s jump through the window, which will take at least ten pages to resolve before you have to get back to wherever you were doing. To me, this is the ultimate test of process.
I’ve been idly playing with my own idea for 2018 and I decided to announce the name with this blog post – I’ll be writing “Love in the Time of Elk Cloner” this year, and I probably won’t finish, given that November has a lot of marking for me, but that’s not the point. The point is that I will work on those skills, and exercise my creative muscles, and next time someone needs something a bit left-field written, I’ll be ready.
So, academics and technical folks – this is my recommendation for being productive like me – waste more time on stuff that won’t be finished, especially ridiculous novels with barely thought out premises. If you want to give it a shot, you can start NaNoWriMo with me this year. Follow me over there.
I have always felt there was a pleasing symmetry between the observer effect in quantum physics and the study of behaviour. In both cases, you cannot be sure your observation does not change the thing you are measuring.
I have always felt there was a pleasing symmetry between the observer effect in quantum physics and the study of animal behaviour. In both cases, you cannot be sure your observation does not change the thing you are measuring. When Athena realises I’m watching her, she moves faster towards the plate of toast I had negligently left unguarded.
But observations also only tell you what’s happening on the surface. I can make an educated inference about why Athena is rushing towards my toast and raking her tongue through the butter, but I can’t know. As I always say, Behaviour X does not always mean Motivation Y.
I’ve been ‘observed’ a lot this week. I asked one of my academic friends to review my CV. This friend is one of the cleverest and hardest working people I know. I live in fear of my boss ever meeting her, because I’ll be out of a job in a heartbeat. The friend commented “Gosh you do a lot, don’t you? I’m tired just reading this”.
Well, do I? A CV is written to make me as appealing as possible. Of course I look like I do a lot to that simple observation. Is that a real representation of me?
And then this week I had my first ‘opt out’ lecture recordings as part of our new Agricultural degrees. There was an interesting moment when out of the corner of my eye I saw the light go orange, and I knew I was about to be observed, not just by these students right now, but by other students, maybe other staff, maybe even you (I’m toying with the idea of making those lectures public as I really enjoyed them).
In a recent Teaching Matters blog I discussed some of the results of our lecture recording project, and the perception that being recorded will change your behaviour. I am really interested by this finding that the act of recording is transformative, and I’m looking forward to exploring it further. And I did change my behaviour when I knew people were watching me. I wrote my slides differently, leaving breadcrumbs for easier navigation, showing them R code so they could return to these lectures after learning R, and using a slightly different method of anonymous polling given the students would be watching it back.
I change when I’m being watched. Athena changes when she’s being watched. Particles may or may not change based on when they’re being watched, I’ve never quite figured out that part of quantum physics.
But this is not to say the first state, the unobserved state, is fundamentally ‘right’. It’s more an acknowledgement of our innately social states. One last observation (heh). I recently received some paper revisions, and it was on a journal that practiced open review. Someone I like and respect didn’t understand the point I was making in my paper. And because I knew who it was who was ‘observing’ me, I responded to that feedback a lot more positively than I usually do, and I thought “gosh, I wasn’t very clear there, how I can be clearer?” My original state was not better.
I want to tell you why I have chosen to join my fellow members of the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) in industrial action from the 28th February.
I consider myself incredibly lucky in my career.
I am lucky, because I only signed on once after my PhD, for a short period of time. Many sign on for longer.
I am lucky because I knew that signing on would contribute to my National Insurance payments, which had been on hold, or only partially fulfilled, for the eight years of higher education I took part in.
I am lucky, because my fixed term contracts ranged from three weeks, to three years, and so I have felt largely safe in my employment, as much as academics ever can . . .
I am lucky, because the bank decided to bend the rules on my mortgage, even though my contract did not qualify me for one.
I am lucky because I am not juggling academia with a young family, because I genuinely love both teaching and research, because I am not stuck with one of the bullies as my boss, because my visa is not threatened by Brexit, because I happen to work in a field that is strong in the UK, because I’m publishing papers that happen to REFable, I’m lucky because I don’t want to quit . . . unlike them, them, them and them.
I am an experienced researcher, I’m an interdisciplinary researcher, and at the age of 32 I will be one of the youngest people to age out of the ‘six years post PhD’ definition of an early career academic. I am managing to keep my head above water, and my career going, and I just about feel safe now. The proposed cuts will take £12,000+ per year away from my pension.
I am what it looks like to be lucky in academia. Take our pensions, and academia will be lucky to have any of us left.
For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a writer.
As a child, I filled endless notebooks with my stories. They were mostly stories about animals, or thinly veiled replicas of Lord of the Rings. I may even have tried my hand at the odd love story. At school, I kept a private tally of how often my essays were read aloud, or made a teacher cry. I love the written word.
When I was 29 years old, an editor approached me and asked me to write a book. That book, Animal Personalities, is currently available for pre-order.
Of course, when you achieve your childhood dreams, a weight lifts from your heart, a divine confidence settles in your soul, and you never again doubt yourself or your abilities. You become as happy as you always believed you would be . . .
I recently wrote a short case study about being a postdoc for Edinburgh’s “Thriving in Your Research Position” document from the Institute of Academic Development. In the case study, I talk about a spectral figure who has haunted me throughout my whole career: the Perfect Postdoc. She is always better than me. When I wrote my book, she somehow wrote a better one. She’s like a funhouse mirror version of me, and when I change, so does she. I’ll never be able to outdo her.
If you’re a long-term reader of this blog, you’ll know I’ve been thinking about failure lately. I explored my failures as an animal trainer, and meditated on how academia breeds an anti-failure culture. I’m also critical of the idea that all scientists have to be specialists – I’m not a specialist. I’m interdisciplinary and I love it. This leads me to another area of my academic life where the Perfect Postdoc is always one step ahead of me.
The Perfect Postdoc understands R much better than I do. I’ve spoken before on this blog about my frustrations while trying to learn R. While I have taught research methods and statistics for several years now, I’ve always hesitated to teach R. I’ve hesitated because, well . . . because I’m not brilliant at it. My code is ugly and often cobbled together, and I often find the community around R, places like stack exchange and stack overflow, are hideously unfriendly.
I’ve been lucky enough enrol on the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education’s woman-only Aurora programme this year. The first session was called Identity, Impact and Voice, where we explored how we can make a difference in our workplaces and communities. There were two-hundred plus women at the Aurora event in Edinburgh this month, and so many of us spoke about being afraid of ‘not being the best’.
The curious thing is, when I was listing my strengths, I never said I was “the best at [thing]”. My strengths are my communication skills, the fact I’m approachable, and my willingness to try new things. I firmly believe that in five years time anyone who doesn’t have R skills is going to find it very difficult to get a job in academia. Hiding my bad code means I’m not contributing to the R conversation happening right now. I have a voice. And I can have an impact too.
Hadley Wickham, who wrote some fabulous R packages, says:
The only way to write good code is to write tons of shitty code first. Feeling shame about bad code stops you from getting to good code
So with that in mind, I’m going to start sharing my own R teaching materials more widely. You can find my resources on Github (scroll down to find direct links to the exercises). The worst that can happen is that someone tells me my code is ugly. The Perfect Postdoc’s code is of course much prettier, but do you know what? Just like writing my book, writing that exercise was pretty fun.
Glory in your bad code. Glory in saying “I don’t know how to do that” in your local programming club meetings. Glory in your voice. There is nothing else like it.
