Academics Chat Thread

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I believe the old Chat thread has fallen off the front page of this section, and I thought it might be time to reinstate it. I know it's only sporadically useful, but sometimes it's nice, right?

I am a lowly postdoctoral English Lit type. Finished my PhD in 2014, teaching associate for a couple of years, and now part-time while DD is a baby. I'm currently working frantically to get my book manuscript to the publisher by my deadline (October), and also trying to regain enthusiasm for the job market.

Who else is lurking around here?

Congrats, marasme! I'm sure you can do it :)

i m not sure what i ll do. What is one supposed to put in a 15 minutes ppt presentation with zero indication :/

i hate doing the bullshitty "vision"

imposter panic attack :/

Is it for a specific research area? Say how you'll advance that area maybe? Are you KEF/REF liable?

I’m a group leader in a research institute.

Do something on the background to your research - one slide - talk about how ground breaking it is. List a few key grants won etc and big papers. Talk about how you will develop in - list collabs with people in the institute, and which mega grants you will target.

At the end say something about all this making you excellent in teaching x area and so on. They won’t care about teaching

If it’s a big research institute in the uk you will need to show you are world class in your research area or on a trajectory to be so. 4* papers and so on. Tell them all about it -don’t be shy! Toot your own horn 😂

Woo-hoo! Go for it!

god, the paradigm shifting lingo. Barf.
i can flaunt my REF tastic self (barely) but bigging up what i do makes me want to vom.

I am also a gp leader in a not at all bad uni... but people know my brand here (sarcastic and pragmatic!) - i find bullshitting really hard and hate that kind of culture.

Yes, me too. But if you don’t do it the men will and they’ll be believed

the bloody men indeed.
Paradigm shifters and ground breakers, that lot.

I had two today at my seminar asking "more a comment than a question" questions and gloating about their achievements - zero shame. I sometime admire these guys for their total lack of self consciousness

I had that yesterday too! It was a "why didn't you use the technique I use" question when said technique is very outdated. It was phrased in a "I know you think you know what you're doing little girl but let me tell you a thing or two" type way

Good luck, @marasme.

The bullshitting just makes you cringe somewhere deep in your soul, doesn't it? I'm currently reading a fellowship application for a friend and gleefully stuffing it with buzzwords and bloated self-confidence. So much easier to do for someone else.

THANK YOU

i do the same for my friends too - so much easier and also weird fun

Good luck. If it helps, we appointed a head of school recently who was the least bullshitty and boastful of the field. I think people can see through that.

My long (old lag) experience of selection committees, is that people are themselves. They reveal themselves - this can be a good thing, or a bad thing. But bullshit which is not grounded on real achievement won't get you anywhere (well, certainly not on the many many committees I've been on or chaired).

@Marasme

THANK YOU

i do the same for my friends too - so much easier and also weird fun

It is, isn't it?!

I hope your interview goes well this week.

@Marasme -- tap into that part of you that knows you can run that group, that project, that lab, that team and that is keen to empire build. That's the side of you that they want to see. It must be inside you or you never would have applied for the job.

@bigkidsdidit that's a great summary of what to put, thanks! I've copied it to somewhere safe for future reference. If only all the career workshops we get were that succinct

Instead of starting a new thread, I thought I'd join this one and ask how well you know what is going on in other (related or not) disciplines?

I'm > 10 yrs post PhD in my current field and feel like the field is a bit stagnant these days. I think this is partly because we've become so very specialised in our narrow topics and 'world-leading' experts in it which is all great, but to rejuvenate and inject new ideas we need fresh, new insights and that may come from other fields. This is already beginning to happen to some extent, since we work with 'big data' so there is naturally an overlap with machine learning/artificial intelligence.

Anyhow, one of my resolutions this year is to learn more about other fields - ofcourse this will be at a superficial level (T shaped individual and all that). I've always been very intrigued by other fields and do a lot of reading around those, but usually in the form of popular science books which only skim the surface. So the aim is to do much more of that and dig a bit deeper.
However, there already aren't enough hours in the day to keep on top of my own research, so it's difficult to know how to strike that balance without feeling guilty.

So I wondered if others are doing this and to what extent.

Interesting question. My field feels fairly lively to me - I'm enjoying it anyway - and is quite interdisciplinary. I'm sure some of the new ideas are a bit pseudy and others probably don't quite work for some other reason, but I suspect that'll always be the case.

I work in lit/history but I'm interested in history of medicine, trauma studies, philosophy, etc. etc. etc.

Not so interested in big data.

When I want to draw in insights from another field I usually try to make sure I get a conference paper out of it, so it's low stakes because if I talk utter bollocks for 20 minutes my colleagues will be kind, but if it sparks something useful, I can budget more time.

Paper accepted today!
As a scientist I'm quite keen to learn more about humanities, partly stemming from my stalled-at-GCSE lit crit ability (more like junior school frankly). I'm vaguely thinking of doing an OU module actually.

Congratulations on your paper!

Congrats on your paper, worst!

user - That's literally what I've just done this last year - spread out to some other fields, including collaborations with the humanities and social sciences. Also in a 'big data'-adjacent area. The way I've done it is rather than searching out stuff myself, chat with people. Then we wrote PhD-funding proposals, still not with deep understanding what the other side did entirely, but with enough excitement that we could see there were ways we could help each other. Now I've got 3 PhD students working on the practicalities of it :) (if I'd known they'll all be funded, might not have put in so many applications...)

@murmuration how far out did you go? English>history, geography>geology level or full on physics>psychology? My field has a lot of subfields which would possibly make more sense if they were classed under another field (e.g. you could easily move medical imaging out of medicine and into physics or engineering sort of thing). I've never broken out further than the obvious overlaps though.

stodgystollen - for some, seriously far out! I'm in STEM, and I've a PhD student joint in literature right now... Learning all sorts of things, including different standards in fields for stuff like references (I have had to learn how to use the 'footnote' feature in Word...). I declined a really interesting connection with a philosopher this year just because I couldn't manage more PhD students when I'd had such a pile this year - maybe we'll pick the idea up again this summer. Others are more close, for example my foray into social science is much more connected with other work, we just slid from related medical ideas, into social health-stuff. I find it really exciting to learn about how other fields do things; it makes things feel "fresh" again.

very interesting replies from some folks - yes, it really does make me feel more alive, less stale etc. I'm in the sciences but interested in so many other things; evolutionary biology, quantum physics/biology/chemistry, evolution of religion, etc etc. I want to know how we came to be and why we are the way we are (big, lofty questions like this :)), there are SO many interesting things going on in other fields and I'd hate to live through life not knowing about them. Right now it's more of a hobby but I'd love to be able to connect these to my research and make it part of my day job. I've recently started something that means I can do some more of this 'exploratory' research, which is the most exhilarating in my opinion.

It sounds like some of you are already doing this - in my field, there aren't many people venturing across disciplines.