Engaging with others

So I think if you are a brand new academic, coming into research, I think the most important thing is to have a support structure. Get a mentor, get a group of people who can support you, and start working on your research knowledge, what you need to know to do proper research.

People in academia are very open. I think everyone does help each other out. You just need to ask. And that’s quite nice and refreshing. And again that’s different to the corporate world where I don’t think people are out to help each other as much.

I think it’s really difficult developing as an academic, whatever route you come through, unless you have the support of senior people to do so. The job of a Professor is to help develop the emerging scholars and I think a lot of younger academics seem to me nowadays almost reluctant to ask for that sort of help from the people who can provide it, which is crazy. The majority of more senior academics recognise that they have benefited enormously from the mentoring they’ve had earlier on in their career and they’re very, very committed to helping develop a long-term sustainable academy which they recognise you can’t do if you don’t have good mentoring for junior people to take them up to those more senior levels. I think you manage [the transition into academia] much better if you talk to people frequently about what you‘re doing. So you realise you are not alone in this endeavour and you’re not alone in having to get to grips with the longer-term targets and less frequent feedback. The networks that you build up, the academic links that you build up are really important so you can approach people and say ‘I’m working on this. Can I come and talk to you about it?’ Or ‘I’m developing this paper, would you be willing to read it for me and give me some comments?’ Like many Professors, I get emails completely out of the blue from people I’ve never met before saying ‘I’ve been working on this paper, can you please comment on it?’ They’re virtually asking you to drop everything and spend a couple of days commenting on their work. And I don’t have time to do that. So I tend to prioritise doing that for people I’ve met and had discussions with.

My advice I think would be that the topic is not as important really as the people that you want to be working with. And it’s trying to find a team like that first team I worked in who were happy and secure, didn’t feel threatened by somebody coming into their team, were very accommodating and very willing to share and to share their experience. So my thought would be that the first project I would say the topic doesn’t matter too much. There is obviously a risk that you get into a particular topic area and you might get stuck there and not particularly find it interesting and not be able to move out of it. But I don’t think that risk is really big at the start of someone’s research career. And I think that finding the right fit with other people is probably more important than the topic, at the end of the day.

The notion of trying to start doing some research now doesn't fill me with dread, because I know the skill set is there. I think that the major thing is, if you're being challenged to deal with research for the first time, how do you go from zero to your first paper? If you get some guidance from other people I think that would be really, really valuable.

So, with a colleague, before I ever started doing my PhD., we started on a small research project. So, I sort of learnt by doing it in a collaborative environment first. So I’d somebody more experienced. Somebody who I got on very well with. And we could chat it through. And, I suppose, that became a sort of key part of the way I did research for an awful long time. For the time when I was in a senior management role my colleague was here as well so we kept a really good profile of research going. She’d keep saying, ‘oh we’ve got to move this on’. So, the peer pressure to keep my end of the bargain up, kept it going.

The parameters are different. It’s a different game. And it’s about learning the rules of that game. And sometimes having someone show you the rules of the game. Because in academia, I think they might be a bit more implicit rather than explicit. And I think if you can identify a good mentor who is willing to devote some time and energy into helping you, I think that’s probably a good thing to do.

So while you are establishing your career you need to find a mentor who can give you regular feedback on the work you are doing which I think helps in terms of not waiting till the end of the project, with the stress that can cause throughout the project. Thinking if I get to the end of this project and I’ve spent six months or a year doing it and other people are saying it’s not making a contribution, it’s not going anywhere.

It’s helpful to have someone who you can bounce things off who isn’t a Supervisor, who is completely independent of your particular bit of research. I don’t know how you set that up. It’s got to be someone who you trust and someone who, again, isn’t going to get offended. It’s really useful to be able to have that clear exchange of ideas without the fear that someone is going to go off and be offended and not want to speak to anyone.

I’ve got a mentor who’s from a different faculty. People who are in very different disciplines at first sight have been very supportive.

I’ve got a mentor and I’m trying to aim for a three-star publication, which may be a bit ambitious, I just don’t know. I’m looking at publishing something from an aspect of my thesis. And I’ve found having a mentor really helpful. I’ve been singing their praises, but also I’ve been sharing some of the advice that they’ve been giving me with colleagues as well.

So when I first started I wanted to change this and change that and do this differently and it was the person who’s been a really good mentor to me who was saying well just change one thing next year, then one the year after. Have a three year plan. And that kind of thinking really helped me.

I've been very lucky to have good mentors throughout. And again, I'm quite cheeky. When a very senior academic took on a new role in my department, I knew they had a long inbox, but I asked whether or not they would be my mentor. And that's been quite useful in understanding the priorities of the university, trying to understand academics a bit better. It's been quite useful in helping to shape how I make quite rapid advancement in academia.

If you have a good mentor, or a group of people that are research orientated, to me that's the single largest difference. So the beauty of where we're at is that because we see ourselves as pretty novice researchers, all of us are very open to share ideas, to talk about it, to encourage each other. So there's no real competition in the sense that there's so much research to do. There are no toes to be stepped on. So you always know that there are people that've got the same struggles as you, or they've been through it, and this is how they've dealt with it. It's not just you who struggled with this or that. I think that's fantastic.

So, I have a number of colleagues who potentially have gone through a similar journey. So, have come through from a practice background. Who haven’t been natural researchers. Who have taken the knocks. So, they are the people I would go to when I am feeling down.

While I’m doing the PhD, I think there will be quite a lot of sharing through articles, external conferences and research groups within the university. So hopefully, I can talk about it, share it with colleagues here and that will be helpful. Maybe get a bit of enthusiasm so more people want to be involved, which will be good.

Most of my learning has been as I’ve gone along. Learning from other researchers that I’ve been working with. The person that I’m working with on a joint paper at the moment is a very experienced researcher but specialises in another field. So it’s quite nice working with someone that’s got the experience of writing papers there because we can both play to our strengths.

I’ve had a lot of help on Google Scholar from a colleague and that’s helped me a lot. I didn’t even know how to read papers, to be honest, when I started at the University. It’s how to read papers and to record what the paper’s saying that relates to your own research.

I think the only way that you can build your profile, is first to build your networks, even if it's just on an informal basis. It's all about building legitimacy. And then people start mentioning why don't you try to attend conferences? So that's how I ended up doing so. And I must say, since then it feels like a snowball effect. It starts small, and grows bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

I want it to be more integrated generally between the teaching staff and the research staff. And I can play a part in that by just simply asking people how their research is going. There isn’t always a lot of sharing of what’s actually going on, but I guess that works both ways. You’ve got to go and find out rather than them coming to you. I’ve got colleagues who I never ever see. I know they’re researchers; I haven’t got a clue what they do. It would be great if, occasionally, we got together and they presented their work. Some colleagues are in the process of setting up a research centre. That’s not something we’ve had in the past, so I see that, hopefully, as a forum where both researchers and non-research staff can go to, to share knowledge and share ideas.

Although you're surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of people on a daily basis, teaching can be a really lonely job. Because you go from an office environment in practice into a single office, or dual occupancy office where people are quite bookie, and they don't socialise to a great extent, and they're away for a lot of the summer, or away for a lot of the Easter break. And yes, that can be quite lonely. So I sort of had to guard against that in terms of making sure that I go out and meet people and go out for lunch and stuff like that. And I guess my main downfall probably, while I was so obsessed with trying to get a promotion, is that I didn't reach out and make many bridges internally. And that's something that I am definitely going to be working on a little bit more this year.

In terms of outside the academic world, it’s putting yourself in positions where you meet people who will potentially have common interests and only a small percentage of those interactions will actually bear fruit in the long term. But the more people you talk to about your research in the world of practice, the higher the chances are that you’re going to come across somebody that is interested in your research.