Developing resilience

The feedback tends to be very robust and if you become too sensitive about it then it will destroy you. So the point is it’s usually meant absolutely constructively. It’s still sometimes tough to hear that, because you think I’ve worked for months and months and months on this paper and this person is telling me three-quarters of what it says is completely misinformed. So that can be tough but so long as it’s constructively put you will end up developing not just the work that you’re working on but you’ll end up developing your skills and knowledge that will help your work on other projects. You’ll develop your own ability to identify when there are flaws in your argument. But no matter how senior you get you need that tough criticism which I continue to benefit from. I will show my papers to other people that I know and say ‘Can you comment?’ and they’ll say ‘OK, well there are good points in this little bit but this stuff up here just doesn’t make sense’. And it takes somebody else to point it out to you to actually realise it. You have to be prepared to sit and read and listen to the robust criticism which is usually much more robust than you’ve experienced before. It could be because if you’ve been working on a focused piece of research you’ve lived and breathed and eaten this piece of research for months, and it probably means a lot more to you personally than some of the projects that you worked on when you were in the profession.

I think one of the hardest things is to get used to your work being criticised. Because research often becomes quite personal, the criticism can feel personal. When you were in industry or practice, if there was something wrong with your work, it was about the work. But it didn’t feel, maybe, quite as personal. You got it very directly in a professional environment. Things thrown back at you. ‘Not good enough.’ ‘Do it again.’ It doesn’t come exactly like that, I find, in an academic environment. Trying to understand what feedback means can be difficult. Whether it’s encouraging people to say, ‘well I see that you’re saying, that my writing is not really sufficiently academic. Can we take a few examples so that I can understand what you mean? If you were to work with me, how would I re-phrase that?’ It’s when it happens having the confidence to ask. Rather than just, for students, to go out and say, ‘oh my supervisor is stupid and doesn’t provide me with enough specific feedback’. I see this with journals as well. New researchers, if they don’t get something positive with their first cut of a paper, will start to think, ‘Oh that didn’t go well and nobody helped me along with that’. Without seeing how they are getting supported and, sometimes, you’ve got to just keep going. So, I would say just try and build up the resilience but be ready to realise if you’re getting feedback that’s not always positive, don’t assume you’re not asking the right people. Sometimes, look at what you’re doing. And be ready to self-reflect and realise you should do some things differently.

I might be deluding myself a bit but I don’t actually have a problem with separating out someone criticising an idea with someone criticising me. Same for a journal article. If I got a rejection from a journal then okay yes, I wouldn’t be happy because I’d say they don’t want it, pity. But I’d like to think I’d be able to realise that they just didn’t want to buy what I was selling on those terms rather than they thought I wasn’t good enough as a person. But I see a lot of people that don’t seem to be able to make that distinction, that if they get criticised at a conference, they take it quite personally. And one thing I remember is presenting a paper at a conference and everyone saying ‘oh it’s very good. Yes, really, really good. Well done, very interesting paper’ and that’s pretty much all the feedback I got. And then I submitted it to a journal and they tore it to shreds. And I remember thinking really I’d rather it had been the other way around. I might not have enjoyed the process of standing at the front of the room getting torn to shreds, but it would have probably been a better paper after that. So the advice I’d give to someone is actually go and seek out criticism. Don’t hide from it. If you’ve got a journal article, before you take it to a conference present it to your colleagues in a department seminar. If you’re targeting a journal, take it to a conference, work out who the reviewers are for that journal and pay particular attention to what they’re saying in the conference. I’d probably tell people to get as much criticism of their research as possible so that, when they take it to the next stage, it’s actually a better paper as a result of that.

I don’t know if I’m speaking for more than just myself, but I think that an advantage of coming into academia as a more mature person age-wise and experience-wise is I’m very used to criticism and it really doesn’t bother me. I’m very good at externalising that whilst not dismissing it. So if somebody says something is wrong, I’ll try and look at it very factually and deal with it in a factual way. And I suppose that’s where the experience of dealing with students who’ve been upset or who are in appeal or who have said such and such person is rubbish, you get loads of feedback about a particular module not being right. You have to handle that obviously in a sensitive and rational way, and that has helped me, whether it’s complaints about other people or about myself, to deal with it in a balanced way. I would say all criticism is good, just like all publicity. I would say to try and take criticism in the spirit in which it’s intended, which is very positive, even if it comes across as negative when you read it. You can be crushed by some of the comments, perhaps, or some of them can be seen to be dismissing everything you’ve done. So I would say look at it very rationally, don’t be offended by it, ask someone else if you’re not sure. Go back to that person who’s criticised if you don’t understand, and I think you’d find out that they actually didn’t mean to be negative. It’s just the way it comes across and they’ll help you. Or ask a more experienced colleague who can also help. It’s good to have a mentor who you can bounce ideas off and bounce criticism off, and they’ll actually probably put it in context.

I had been through all of my professional exams and you know how tough they are. I had done other exams. All first-time passes. So, for me, clearly I’ve got the intelligence to do it. It’s just trying to do things in a different way. And one thing I didn’t appreciate I would take so personally was the critique. So, I don’t know whether it’s an academic thing but, for me, there is a big difference between critique and criticism and I am not sure whether I established that. It is not necessarily established academics that give the feedback, it’s people who perhaps are within their first five years post-doc. They’ve been through an apprenticeship. They had a hard time. And I think they want to do the same to us as well. Maybe it’s because I’m a little bit older. And a bit longer in the tooth. I am thinking, is this really what I want to do? Put myself through this type of pressure? But it’s coming along. It is coming along. So, it’s not that I am not into research. I know that if I want to stay in the career where I am, I have to get that doctorate. But it’s a challenge. It really, really is. It’s a bit of a rollercoaster. So, some days I love my topic. And it’s very, very motivating and empowering when I am just submersed in it and I do get that time to really think about it and take it a little bit further. But then sometimes, when you do get that criticism, that almost knocks me off my feet. And it’s almost as though I am going one step forward and two steps back. I am getting better at that getting back up and dusting yourself off. Now, if somebody had challenged me where I taught before, I would have kicked back at them straight away. And that would have been end of story. But the doctorate is so personal to you and you take more responsibility because it is your baby. And you are left to do what you want to do with your topic, within reason. So, you nurture it. You grow it. You’ve invested so much time in it. And then suddenly, somebody who is not a subject expert pulls it to shreds. And it is difficult. Some academics have actually never done anything other than in the context of the university. And for me, that doesn’t sit well in a practical area. I would hate a doctor not to have practised on people from a medical point of view. And similarly, if I was learning to drive, I wouldn’t do it just by reading the Highway Code. You couldn’t do that. And that’s something that I do find difficult to take. And perhaps I respond badly to that kind of criticism, coming from those types of academics.

To be honest, I hit a wall I really did; I started the first draft of my discussion chapter and my supervisor came and they said, ‘right, Margaret, this isn’t Ph. D level; I can’t tell you how to write it, but you need to go away and find out’. I was like, ‘oh, okay’. Then they said to me, ‘you’re taking that quite well because the last student I said that to, burst into tears’. I thought, ‘well, I’m not the sort that can just burst into tears’, but I’m like, ‘Oh!!’. For about a week I was just thinking, ‘I can’t do this’. I went to see my boss and I said, ‘I can’t do this’. They said, ‘you can, Margaret, you can do this’. I said, ‘I can’t’. And then I was talking to a colleague and I said, ‘I’m really struggling with this’. And I just talked it through with this colleague. Actually, I tried to look up some examples as well and I thought, ‘I wonder if I’ve now got to bring my theory into it’. And they said, ‘well try that’. So I re-wrote my first three pages again, I sent it to my supervisor and they then said, ‘it’s shaping up’ and I thought, ‘yes!!’ But there was about two weeks where I just thought, ‘I can’t do this’. That was the hardest part for me I think.

Well, it is a tough thing to deal with, I will be honest. When someone says, you can’t write at all. You’re illiterate. After having written never-ending amounts of reports and also publishing in conferences etc. within the corporate field. It is quite crushing. And I think the difference between academia and the corporate world is in academia people don’t pull their punches about how they deliver those messages. And are fairly insensitive to people. Ultimately, you have to take the criticism and step back and say, this is not necessarily a personal thing. This is the way that academia works. And try to identify what they are actually saying underneath the hard criticism. And then work with what the substantive issues are rather than perhaps the words they are using around that. Across the whole of academia I would say that there are people, quite often senior academics, who make a career of, or certainly make a habit of, ripping others apart. And the culture, sometimes, allows that to happen. So, it doesn’t matter if you are an experienced person presenting work or if you’re a year-one, post-MSc, PhD student. The treatment is often very similar. I think being more experienced, you can deal with it better, perhaps. I think you need to be aware that you are learning a new skill in a very specific field. And there will be ups and downs associated with that. And that’s normal. You have to suck up the criticism.

To me the most daunting thing is, is you cannot say you're a researcher until you have published. And to me that is the most daunting thing possible, to think that in some way I need to convince others. It feels like an exam, doesn't it? I need to take my paper, which I've spent my best hours or my darkest hours writing, and then it may get rejected. I mean the horror stories that I've heard about how many people have their articles rejected … to me that's quite daunting.

I find that part-time PhD students that work in Higher Education tend to be much more successful than part-time PhD students who work in a context where there isn’t an understanding of the time pressures. The professional accountancy training and ethos give you the tools to manage your time more effectively possibly. Doing a part-time PhD requires you to be quite ruthless. It requires you to ensure that if you set yourself a deadline you try to meet it, because the PhD is the longest-term project that anyone ever works on probably and it becomes fairly discretionary in the face of short-term pressures. I think that’s where the passion for it comes in. I think I had very little social life when I was doing my PhD. So although I was teaching 12 hours face-to-face a week I was probably doing that across two and a half to three days a week including preparation time. There were some weeks where I had no time for the research, I was busy marking, but again the discipline that you get in being trained to be an accountant helped me mark student work really, really efficiently. So to just sit down and get it done rather than procrastinate too long about it.

One of the things I’ve learnt is to try to shut off everything else so that, when I’m in the zone, I’m completely focusing on what I’m doing, and that’s what that person needs as a client. I think one of the things that you learn as a professional is to serve your clients and recognise that they couldn’t care less about what the other things are that you’ve got to do. They need to be important for you at that point in time when you’re talking to them. So I’ve got relatively good at shutting things out, compartmentalising things, so I could do things at certain points, and also finding there’s freshness in that. How I’d like to approach the PhD, and what I’m doing at the moment, is doing a few hours a day when I can manage it. And I’d like to formalise that a bit more.

Academia is ruled by what’s known as a workload model. Which is a kind of crude ABC costing type spreadsheet, effectively. Which sort of allocates your overall hours for a year, based on what activities you are doing. I have an allowance for activities that benefit society. I can’t remember what percentage it is but you get an allowance of a certain number of hours. So, I use that normally for my professional body activities. And there is a small remission for people undertaking further study and my PhD comes under that. Anything I do outside of that is really on my own time because my contract doesn’t have a specific research element, although some people’s will. Some of it is about what your priorities are, to be perfectly honest. And where you view yourself as contributing as a researcher. For me, at the moment, my number one priority outside of my day job is my PhD. So, I am devoting most of my research attention to the PhD. I think, for me, it’s valuable to get that finished and then get a couple of articles out of the PhD. I think in terms of credibility, it’s quite important. Whereas if you don’t have one, I think the feeling is it’s hard to bring the researchers on board. They will always say, ‘but you don’t understand. You don’t, you know? You don’t have the skills. You haven’t done a PhD.’ So, I think increasingly it adds to the credibility. And certainly, probably for me, moving forward, the types of roles that will be open to me will be asking for a PhD. Or some other form of further study.

Finding the time to study is quite challenging. To get my thesis finished, the last two years I took a lot of my leave to do that. I’ve learned for me taking a chunk of time is better than saying ‘I’ll take one day a week’. When I was doing my thesis towards the end I could manage to take a three week block in the summer and think, ‘right, that’s just going to be my time to work on it’. That helped me to not get too stressed about it because I knew I’d got that leave and I could take that time to do it. I know that might not work for everybody, but it certainly helped me.

It’s pretty much been my own motivation, to be honest. It’s very much a teaching-led university. What I’ve generally found is that the research is never the most urgent thing on the list in the sense that if you’re teaching, you’ve got a very immovable deadline. You’ve got to be in the classroom at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning and that can’t be put off for the day. And you can’t do it in three hours rather than six hours. You’ve got two seminar groups so you’re there for six hours. You can’t crush them both into one and do it in half the time. So the teaching element of your job becomes an immovable deadline. The management element of your job becomes an immovable deadline. So what happens is the research fits into the important but not urgent category. I made a decision to go for some quite big admin jobs in the university. So even without me saying, you can probably guess what that did to the time I was spending on research. I kept the research ticking over without actually being particularly active in it.

We have what they call a research day per week. So most of us use it more as a practice day, to be honest, or just a day to catch up with whatever you didn't get to during the course of the week. I really try to spend my time on research. So yes, in practice the university does give us ample time. But I think as with most things, it's a matter of priority, whether you make use of it. They do give plenty of study leave when you get close to finishing your Master's. And I know with the PhD as well, if you want. And our infrastructure is pretty good as well. Our library resources are really good. We have a full time person at the library who's dedicated to our faculty, to assist us with research. So there's no lack of resources and time to do your research. I think the bigger challenge is probably the mind-set or just whether it's a priority for you to do research. Yes, I wish I could be doing my research in a more disciplined fashion. I tend to spend a concentration of time, for a couple of days a month. And then there's this flurry of information and ideas, and then I write a little bit, and then I get busy with teaching again. And then, for example now, for the next two or three days I'll be able to spend a whole lot of time. If I could have done it differently, in a more constructive way, or just on a regular basis, if you can put it that way, I think I would have loved that.

Well, it’s very challenging to find the time for research. I’ve been told off for trying to juggle too many plates and I do have sympathy with that viewpoint. I’ve been working on some research with a senior colleague who is incredibly understanding. So when I say I can’t do that because I’m doing all this teaching or I can do it in six weeks’ time, he’s very experienced and we just pass the baton really. So I have periods where I work intensely and he has periods where he works intensely and I don’t do anything. We kind of make it work. And I feel like it’s good to have somebody else involved because if it was just me I might let it drop, but I know there’s someone else involved. So I say I will do such and such by this point. And even if I can’t quite make it by then, knowing there’s somebody expecting me to do something does create a bit of discipline around that.

I couldn’t find the time to develop as a researcher on my current contract. My contract is teaching-intensive. Again, you’ve got this balance because to me, the most important thing right now is to make sure that I’m technically, absolutely, up-to-date. I think, in order to become an established researcher, I would need to convince my line manager to move on to a teaching and research contract. But then in order to do that you’ve got to publish and I’ve got to be doing some research. The people that do well in academia, I would say, are those that are heavily involved in research. But there are also people who, and maybe this is a little bit unfair and very generalistic, but there are people who actually put their career first and are quite selfish, and will get their papers published. And at the expense, I feel sometimes, of students and actually looking after them and giving them a good experience. Almost the advice I’d give is if you want to get on an academia, you have to think of yourself. You have to put yourself first and you have to put your research first which I personally don’t like. I think we have our own duty to students to encourage them, to help them to learn. If you want to be a success in academia, you have to put your own interest at the forefront. Look at who’s made it to professorship on a fast track... and it is research-intensive people that you never see at student events or they never really engage a lot with students.

I decided that to get into academia I’d take a step down. So, I took a job as a senior lecturer which was fine. Well, I thought I was fine with it but then realised very, very quickly that I missed the management side of things. So, initially, because promotions are very difficult within an academic institution without having a doctorate and papers and what have you, I took on various admin responsibilities and I was then promoted to a senior management role. But I don’t do myself any favours because it’s an incredibly busy role. It’s probably the busiest role in the department, because everybody wants a piece of you, and it probably doesn’t fit with doing a doctorate at the same time. I think to get a doctorate done in the timeframe you do have to be quite selfish in a way about prioritising. You protect your time and a lot of the staff do. They protect that one or two days’ research time that they have a week and that works for them. Whereas I feel, because of the role that I have, that it’s more difficult to be selfish. So, I am my own worst enemy. I do know that. I feel that in order to do the job properly, you do have to give people the time that they want. So, my door is always open. People can come in whenever they want. But that is time consuming. It eats into other priorities. We’ve got exams next week. I’ve told all of my students if you need me, just email. They’ve all got my mobile number. I say give me a call. Because I don’t want these kids sitting through the summer, thinking, I just don’t have a clue about whatever it is. Half an hour phone call. Or driving to the university and going to see them for half an hour, or an hour. It just makes a difference. And, at the end of the day, it’s the students that are paying our wages.

Because I’m a teaching-focused Teaching Fellow, as opposed to having the three-legged contract with the research, my first barrier is time. And I’m not really sure how I’m going to fit in any sort of research. We’re not really given that sort of time. I think it’s also around passion and I think the more passionate you are about your topic area, the more you’re going to enjoy doing the research. I don’t really want to do the research for a tick-box exercise.

I don't know how long everyone else spends in lecture prep. Although I don't have any time allocated to research, I feel that if I find the burning desire to do so certainly if I dropped a couple of the other things that I do, I would definitely have the time to do it.

You need to be quite resilient and you need to be quite a self-starter because no-one will say to you ‘we think you should start research’. Certainly, within academia, that has to come from you and you have to map it out. They will be quite happy for you to sit at the bottom level, as a highly qualified professional doing good teaching and there wouldn’t necessarily be encouragement. It’s up to you, as an individual, to manage your career, if you want to have a career and make progression. And that’s different from the corporate world, where people will actively help you manage that. I would say I have probably been quite a self-starter although I wrote the first paper with a colleague. They sort of took me on and showed me the writing ropes and how to get through the review process.

It’s a combination of managing my own time, being efficient with the workload allocation I’ve got and trying to find time within the workload allocation. I got quite good at time management when I was bringing up my children because it’s not a nine-to-five job; it’s a 24-hour job. And I would not be particularly precious about finishing at five and then I don’t do any more work. You work when you get the time. So when the kids are having a rest, when they’re little, you can perhaps do some work then. I would get up early to do marking, do a couple of hours before they went to school. So I’ve got quite good at managing things in pockets, and also being able to separate things out.

I think one of the things that you learn, wherever you do your training, is that time is money. And that’s an idea that, from what I can work out, actually seems to be quite alien in a lot of universities. Whatever I spend my time doing, I can’t then spend my time doing something else. So I think that that probably gave me a skill set that was quite useful not only in research but also in university management and teaching. I think that’s the skill-set that you don’t necessarily develop if you have that traditional academic career of an undergraduate degree followed by a Master’s, followed by a PhD, followed by a Post-Doc, followed by a Lecturer.

I wouldn’t say I enjoy marking particularly. I appreciate that the marking is flexible so having done teaching where you have to be in the lecture at that time, when it comes to marking I can just do it at home, I could do it all night if I wanted to. I appreciate that flexibility just after the rigour of having to be in a certain place at a certain time. So I wouldn’t say I particularly enjoy marking but I don’t find the marking load too onerous.

The thing I really struggled with is a complete lack of direction that you get when you join academia, or at least in my experience. It was… ‘As long as you get a good profile of grades, and the students are happy, then you can do what you want’. I found the whole experience utterly overwhelming. I found myself at first procrastinating during the summers. Then I found I wasn't even procrastinating, I was trying to do work, but I just had no context in how to work in that environment. What really forced it was when I was about to give my teaching I spent probably five days writing a one hour lecture and then suddenly realised that the entire summer had gone, and I was in mid-September, and I needed all of a sudden to write lots of lectures very quickly. I suppose the other thing for those new to academia is, within the realms of making the teaching good, make the teaching easy on you. A lot of my colleagues design wonderful assessments, but they are insanely hard to mark and administer. I'm not saying everyone should do a multiple choice test, because I think that's not appropriate. But it's the type of job where you can make a rod for your back if you want to, because the university will let you make a rod for your back. And then it will be there forever. Whereas, as long as you receive positive feedback, and you receive a good range of results, if you teach in a really efficient way, you're still doing your job. And I guess that's what I also do. I try and teach, and assess, and administer in a very efficient way, because it gives me all of that other time and energy to do other things.

Sometimes I try to keep whole days for research rather than try and fit it in, in the odd couple of hours. I don’t find that a very productive approach. I do find it quite hard to switch between teaching and research. I find it quite hard to switch my brain into the different mode. I’ve been doing some things first thing in the morning when I feel like my brain is fresh. So I’m thinking about when I do things to make that time the most productive it can be.

I wish I was doing more research. That’s my major regret at the moment. I wish I’d been a little bit smarter as the pressures came with the increasing management roles I was getting. To be a little bit more selfish about some of my time. I do a lot more management things in the School and I don’t have as much time for research as I would like. My research has really struggled in recent years, with time for a whole variety of reasons and I resent that. But, then, I have to keep saying to myself, if I now have a goal to get to doing more, I have to take some responsibility about how I’m going to make that happen. I can’t keep saying, ‘well it is the way it is’. I have to go back to being proactive about managing how I get to there again. When, at times, I’m getting frustrated with some of the roles I do here, I think, ‘oh yes, but, soon, I’ll get back to more research’. I see it as it’s going to be this panacea of when I move back to research, that it’ll give me a different sense. I associate it with a sense of freedom. In my everyday stuff that I do here, they are all things that are time-sensitive. They have to get done. But, sometimes, I worry that my role in them is if they don’t get done, rather than it being positive about them being done. Research has lots of frustrations, too, but I’m looking back, in that rose-tinted way, at the satisfaction that comes when you get some good output from research.

We are given a time allowance but to be honest I find that it’s very difficult on a weekly basis. If something has gone wrong and classes need to be covered, I can’t say, ‘sorry, today I am researching’. I have to go in and sort it. That can be quite a challenge, trying to manage things. Quite often it’s a case of saying, ‘right, I’ve got to wait until Christmas or now, in the summer’. I am giving myself mini-sabbaticals of time so I catch up. The way my brain works, I can’t pick it up for an hour here and an hour there, because then I feel as though I am going back to square one all the time. I spoke to some of my colleagues and obviously different people have different coping strategies. One of my colleagues specifically spends the first hour of every working day purely writing something. She finds that works quite well because she says you haven’t forgotten what you’ve done because you’re in it all the time, but that just doesn’t work for me. I need to try and block myself out, away from the university, and really get into the nitty gritty.