Developing your networks

I’d encourage those new to academia to go to a relevant conference. If you don’t feel confident, just go to attend it. Because it is very supportive … a couple of my other colleagues went and they said, ‘oh, it’s really interesting and it wasn’t like we thought’. I think they thought they wouldn’t feel part of it somehow, but they really enjoyed it.

I think that perhaps earlier on, they should be going to maybe one or two conferences and starting to network a little bit and just finding out what is out there. I wish I’d started coming to Conferences much earlier. And not waited until I’d been a Teaching Fellow for several years. But when I did this was off my own bat and I had to find the funding to do it. And, there was no encouragement and no-one talked about it. So, I wish there was more support and more encouragement.

Academic conferences and the networking at conferences are really, really important because you will meet people who may become really influential in your career. I’ve worked very closely with particular academics, probably for a good few years, both of whom I met at conferences. And probably met having a beer at the conference rather than met in the formal part of the conference. So if you want to share it in the academic world you go and talk to people at conferences about your research. The purpose of making a presentation at a conference is to get feedback on your paper. It’s not to tell the audience about the research that you’ve done though you obviously have to tell the people about the research you’ve done in order to get feedback. I’ve witnessed time and time again with people at conferences, both junior and senior academics, who have a half hour slot and they spend twenty-five minutes talking to people about what they’ve got in their paper, about the details which often go above people’s heads because people can’t take in that level of detail, but they then leave virtually no time for getting feedback on the paper. My consistent advice to people is less is more when it comes to presenting at a conference. You identify clearly what help you want through the conference, or what insights you want from the presentation in helping develop your work, present a few points around them, then leave plenty of time for discussion afterwards, because that is what you will benefit from.

The first conference I presented at was probably one of the most terrifying things I ever did. Because much as I had got very used to teaching and I always loved that from the beginning, presenting in front of your peers and that sort of personal exposure of your research was definitely a scary experience. I didn’t anticipate being nervous about it and it turned out, I was. It’s where there’s a degree of doing something different. And, actually, I learnt from it. Because I then realised as you went through your academic career, as part of promotion you often had to present in front of peers or an external panel. I knew to be ready to feel nervous about it. Prepping really well to be ready for that nervousness meant I had overcome it before I got in there. So I always could perform the way I knew I could. But it came from that research exposure in the early days. Again, I suppose I was lucky because my colleague was interested as well and we started going to those things together. There’s something lovely about breaking into new communities when you’ve got a side-kick. So do get out there. Try and go to conferences and just be broad-minded. I have people who come back who will say, ‘Oh I went to that conference but I got no good feedback on my paper. I’m not going to it next year.’ And I think, ‘well that’s a very closed way to think about it. Go to other sessions. What about the chats you have?’ There’s so much more. See your research as not just about a project but as an opportunity to enrich or develop yourself and get involved in a broader set of things. Go to different conferences. It’s that idea of just getting used to feeling a little insecure in those new environments, initially. But just going with it. And not having initial reactions and, maybe, pulling back.

I would say to not be put off by the conference circuit because it can come across as a bit matey, a bit of an in-crowd, a clique. And if you don’t know people, you can be a little put off by that, but I would say, give it a go; apply for funding because you don’t have to pay for them yourself usually. The university will support you, and you might think why should they support me? Well, give it a try; you’ve got nothing to lose. And when you go there you can find, as I did, that it’s a very supportive environment, people are very willing to talk to you. It’s a great way to try out new things, to put forward new ideas and to hear people’s opinions. I think it’s a really good idea because it’s low stakes. It’s a really valuable environment in which to try new ideas and also to network with people. What was a real surprise to me was the number of contacts I developed from my first conference. People who just came up to me saying ‘will you interview me?’ and that’s absolutely brilliant because I’ve followed up with them since. They’re now on the database of people that I’d like to talk to for the PhD, so it can be really valuable for your PhD. Going to a conference feels scary, but it’s not for a very long period of time. Obviously, you need to practice so you actually know what you’re doing, what the requirements are and when you’re supposed to present and all of that. So don’t underestimate it, put the work in that you need to do to get the most out of it. Also, it helps with your confidence and helps you to see that there are loads of people in the same situation as yourself, just as lost and confused. And you can share ideas and get a bit of confidence from it.

With the paper that I’ve had published I shared my findings by presenting at a couple of conferences. Within the academic world, the normal route to sharing your findings is to do so via conference presentations. And it is a good way to start to network within whatever your particular niche is going to be. With my PhD work, I have presented some early parts of it at both niche conferences and slightly more general conferences. And this is part of the gaining feedback. Checking that you are along the right lines because the audience will be possibly the reviewers for your paper with whatever journal you then submit to. It’s good to air it a bit. So get on the conference circuit. It’s important. There are a couple of big conferences each year that are quite general which are widely attended. And you can get papers into them that are almost in development. I think it’s important to get that experience and hear whether you really have an idea, and how you might frame it. If you’ve framed it in the best way and then to start to make connections with people who are interested in the same types of things. Because they could be your collaborator or your mentor through the process. I think it’s healthy to have an external network.

I think Twitter, potentially social media, are good ways for dissemination. But I also think going to conferences. At first perhaps going just to watch but fairly early going to do something. Now whether that is a full paper, I’m not sure. But conferences with things like poster sessions, break outs, the sort of rapid fire presentations, something really to give you a chance to talk about your research even if it’s only for five minutes or standing by a poster because you will gauge the level of interest. And you will potentially meet people who you might collaborate with. Although social media is a good channel I don’t think there’s a substitute for going to meet people in person and be at a conference. My colleague who I started researching with suggested that we took a paper to a conference. He spoke but I went along to the conference which was great, because I got to experience that particular group. It was an international conference so it was a good one to start with. It allowed me to be there but not have the pressure of speaking myself. Actually we both answered the questions that came from the room because I was introduced as a co-researcher. So that gave me confidence. We did a joint presentation on the more recent paper and that was very enjoyable and I felt like it was the right time. I felt confident enough to do that presentation and I wouldn’t have if it had been on the first paper.

So to me the start of sharing research is pure, pure networking. Attend the conferences, and then from there on, try to meet the right people, even if it's just shaking a hand, knowing a face. And hopefully through time that will progress. It's a little bit uncomfortable, because it's like going to a person and introducing yourself.

I’ve been told that even if you’re just rocking up at a conference once a year, that puts you in the top third of academics in accounting for being research active.

Informal dissemination, for want of a better word, is actually quite valuable. The most engagement that I get with the research community is when I go to a conference and present a paper and get questions on that or listen to other people presenting their papers. I think that dissemination, understood in the broadest possible sense of the word, so not just publishing the article but attending conferences and networking with people, is actually a key part of the researcher’s identity. In a way you can see a conference almost as a celebration of research. And to be honest, that’s the good part of the job, isn’t it? That’s the fun bit.

I think doing research and presenting at conferences opens you up to meeting other people who share similar interests. I think that’s good, because you can then talk to them and learn from them and possibly identify people to collaborate with, people who have got valuable insights. It makes it more interesting to have an external network because universities or departments can get very, very insular. And you start to think but, oh, this is only within our area, or our department, or our university. When you start talking to people in the wider environment, sometimes things are normal and sometimes, they are completely not normal. And it’s important to know that. Particularly if you are new to academia.

There's probably four ways that you can share your knowledge. Either through publishing papers, or through conferences, presenting. Then in some way, getting your message or your research across to the public or to practice. And then fourthly through what you teach, if your research is relevant to the field that you're teaching.

The first network will be, and it’s already becoming, people who are working in my research area. And it’s really interesting because when I’ve spoken to these people, they are very, very keen to talk, which is great. So I feel like it’s an untapped resource, and I’ve got to be careful that I frame the research questions in the right way so I get the right information from them. There are other people researching similar areas who I’d like to get in touch with and build up as a network.

I would say a lot of sharing your research is about people, in terms of who you collaborate with. In terms of making the links especially when you think about how to increase profile of your research and get it out there. Perhaps that aspect might be underestimated. Certainly, I didn’t really get that aspect at the beginning. In terms of publicising the project which we’ve been working on, there are so many opportunities to speak about it in quite high profile gatherings and also to blog about and be very savvy in terms of social media coverage. So that’s been great.

The academics that I have spoken to elsewhere have been fantastic with me. And whether it’s because they are subject specialists or whether it’s because they are more established in their academic careers I don’t know. The approach seems to be much different but it may well be because they speak my language.

I applied to do my PhD and the person who I’d applied to supervise me phoned me up and said ‘Yes I’d be interested in talking to you about a PhD but have you heard about this network? They’ve got a conference on in two weeks’ time. I think it would be really helpful for you to go to’. That developed into a really strong and mutually supportive research community and the very small number of researchers in that area were really enthusiastic about the subject area and wanted to get more people involved. I think when you talk to people in the world of policy and practice you need to learn to put things into bite-sized chunks and not to bore people by going on too long about it. You need to strip out the jargon. I have a particular bugbear, within and outside the academic world, which is acronyms. This crystallises for me a lot of the issues that I have about academics who don’t put things in plain language. I think the main function of acronyms is to exclude people from debate and discussions because you’re either in the club or out of the club if you don’t know what the acronym is. One of my most frequent comments when I referee academic papers is you need to use words rather than acronyms. You’re probably adding a hundred words to the paper by just spelling it out rather than using an acronym but someone once said to me ‘If in doubt, spell it out’. I apply the same thinking when I am talking about my research to people who are not in the same academic sphere as me. I try to put it in fairly straightforward language.

If I was going to get involved in research, I would try and seek out a mentor who would make it easy for me… not easy in terms of doing the work, but easy in terms of trying to have a link into a pre-existing network. Where I am now that's really easy, because a lot of them have very well developed networks. Put your research out there to conferences, or special interest groups, or something like that. Put it out there. I think the other thing would be to use your professional body. Volunteer within your local society, because you don't know who you'll meet. That, again, is just an opportunity to expand your network.

I have found that being associated with a professional body has allowed me to speak to people that perhaps might not have spoken to me otherwise.

It might sound a bit vague but I had no idea how to go about writing, or how to think about publishing, a paper. I think I’ve been really lucky with the mentor that I’ve got because pretty much the first advice she gave me was sort your journal and aim for that journal. Because she said otherwise if you try to just write a paper, it’s harder then to try to rework it for one particular journal.

Journals hold it up as a kind of badge of honour to reject 90 odd percent of submissions and that process is incredibly difficult. Really, until you’re in it, it’s hard to appreciate quite how tricky it is. So try to seize those opportunities and find people who are willing to hold your hand through that process, at least the first few times, because it is a difficult process. The timescale is almost open-ended which is strange. Even once you have got your perfect article written, if I take the piece that I had published, even from the point that you submit it to the journal, it can be three months before you hear anything. And even if you hear back relatively positively from the journal, normally you get major revisions first. Sometimes you might be lucky and get minor revisions straight away although I think that’s quite uncommon. Very occasionally, you might have some sort of fast-track to being accepted when you send it in. But the timeline to hear back is maybe three months. Then if you’ve got revisions, you need to address them in detail, each single one. And then re-submit. So, it can be another three months. Even from when it is accepted, because of the backlog of articles within a journal, it can be quite a significant time until it actually hits publication. So, probably, start to finish, two-, two and a bit years, from the day you have your idea to the day it’s actually published, assuming quite a smooth journey.

My colleague is a journal editor. So his wealth of experience is not just in the writing aspects but in the getting published aspects. And so we’ve just had a ‘revise and resubmit’ from a journal and we received it and he said to me, ‘it’s not too bad, we don’t have a lot to do’. Which was my conclusion when I read the comments. But he said ‘look, we can’t be seen to do it too quickly because it will look like we haven’t taken it seriously’. He’s obviously got a lot of that tacit experience over the years around this aspect of journal publication as well as having published himself. So very useful. I couldn’t have done any of this on my own. I have done one or two smaller projects by myself. But I enjoy more working with one other person, several other people. So where it might be a bit more difficult to coordinate when you’ve got a team, I think the benefits outweigh that aspect, the benefits of that experience.

I think if my networks were better, then I think it would have been a much bigger, and a quicker impact because I still need to build let's call it a reputation. I still need to build a network. For me, the most daunting thing is to get to a place where someone is just willing to read my paper, or whenever I'm going to do the paper.