I’m driven to ponder this question by some remarks written about me recently. An interview in our local newspaper (the Cambridge News) described the room that I inhabit as a ‘quaintly chaotic office’. (I can’t post a link to this since, as far as I can judge, the interview was deemed interesting enough to take up 2 pages in the newspaper but not interesting enough to be put online. That seems a bit strange, but no doubt they understand the reading habits of their clientele).  I can’t say that I think this description is unfair, or at least I understand the chaotic bit although I’m less clear why it is also described as quaint. Perhaps because they feel that this is what an old-fashioned professor’s room ought to look like. Whatever, it has caused me to think about the way I operate.

I blame the REF – don’t we all, for everything!  But the truth is that, right now, I am stuck in the midst of trying to bring together the various bits of documentation and the necessary number of these ‘bits’ is depressingly large. I have the unenviable task of chairing our ‘unit of assessment’s’ REF panel and so it is my responsibility to keep track of everything. Being a large unit, encompassing both the Cavendish Laboratory itself (the Physics Department) but also the Institute of Astronomy, we have around 16 impact cases to submit, which are each going through multiple iterations. I keep meaning to file them neatly, but that requires a clear stretch of time to sort through them that so far my diary has not permitted. So they simply pile up on the table, along with spreadsheets of who we are entering and what their outputs are, plus drafts of the necessary impact and environment statements (again in various annotated iterations). As I say these are sitting on my table, the table that is supposed to be kept clear so that students are able to spread out their results (on laptop or on paper) when they come to discuss them with me.

My office this Sunday afternoon, as I battle with the mountain of paperwork that represents the REF to me.

But, easy though it is to blame the REF, that can only explain away the piles on the table. My desk, the other ample surface in my room, no, that is my responsibility and is customarily little better. So what is my excuse for this? As a child I was a floor dweller. I used to do my homework on my bedroom floor and I always knew which pile of books corresponded to which subject. Once a week I had to pick them up and place them on some surface so the floor could be vacuumed, but immediately thereafter everything would return to their proper place on the carpet.  Unfortunately, that is not a sustainable way of working in an office environment. Nevertheless, I still try to work by piles – the separate piles corresponding to papers associated with different research topics, for instance – but, since they are on my fairly large desk and no one dusts its surface, they never need to get moved.  Then there is the post (not much of that these days, but still some) that I’m always going to answer but since I haven’t worked out what the answer is yet, it can linger on my desk a little longer. Indeed, each letter or invitation can linger there until it’s past its sell by date and when I next encounter it I can throw it away with a clear conscience. There’s the teaching material, the stuff I’ve come across I want to incorporate next year or lists of tweaks I want to make to existing slides; these notes can sit around from the end of one course to the start of its successor a year later. Finally, there are the papers associated with committees. These do get moved along quite fast, since I have to take them to the committee meetings and then they can get either shredded/chucked or filed, depending on circumstances.

What this indicates, of course, is that I haven’t caught up with a paperless office. I am still trying to adjust to using an iPad for committee meetings, as previously directed, and having tried for a year or so I am firmly of the opinion that I can’t operate that way when I am chairing meetings.  I can’t switch fast enough between the different agenda papers when they’re virtual, or keep track of where the agenda is going. Some committees likewise haven’t caught up with the electronic age and insist on sending papers in envelopes. Emails I can usually handle without generating any paper copy. Unless, that is, I want to remind myself of their content on a train (when 3G may still not be sufficiently reliable to permit instant access) in which case they get printed out for ease of reference. I still prefer to annotate student papers and draft theses in hard copy if I can, so that is another form of paperwork that spreads around. Paperwork that I’m going to work on during that next trip to London accumulates in its own happy pile, although not for long in this case since my trips are so frequent.

So what’s the moral? Is the problem that I am just irredeemably untidy, or that I’m trying to juggle too many balls? Is a clear desk policy, beloved of some organisations and meant to indicate that each task is successfully completed by the end of every day and no potential privacy issues can be breached by material being left accessible (in my locked office? Hmm.) really the ideal I should be striving for? I have always felt a clear desk is symbolic of nothing going on that takes more than a day to complete. Nothing in my life feels like that is an accurate description. I am sure a tidy office is a new trick this old dog can’t be taught. I’m sorry if visitors find it chaotic (even if quaintly so) but for myself I can’t imagine another way of working despite now being armed with an iPad.

Let’s start with outreach, a topic that many students and postdocs get involved with out of sheer love for the subject, but then start to worry it will make them look as if they’re not serious about research. Unfortunately there are PIs who will reinforce this anxiety, wishing their team to be, metaphorically, chained to the bench/computer or whatever. Nevertheless, this position should be resisted. I have written before about a couple of recently-appointed lecturers who were told that their outreach activities were viewed very positively when they were being considered for posts. I believe outreach develops some of those transferable skills so valued by employers outside higher education but perhaps less visibly so by a fraction of my research colleagues. Being able to explain your work simply to the public ought to be part of research training and, it should be remembered, should also stand you in good stead at any future academic interviews when, let’s face it, those who interrogate you may not themselves be specialists in your immediate field.

Later on in your career outreach may retain an anxious question mark in your mind, but in all probability there will be other issues that niggle or leap out at you at you as you contemplate your CV. This is where your university’s mind set, culture and promotion criteria become important. These are issues Cambridge’s Gender Equality Group has been wrestling with – we’ve been looking at the outcomes of various consultation exercises carried out across the university –  so that we can make appropriate recommendations, although these issues are undoubtedly not gender specific.

One trouble is that what a department may want of individuals and what is in the individual’s best interests given the academic structures may be poles apart. A department may think it is totally splendid if one of their staff members devotes much time to going into local schools, or mentoring its junior staff, overhauling practical classes or sitting on every committee going and doing the donkey work. But the individual has to determine whether such a path of devoted service is the optimum course of action for them. What is ‘optimum’ of course is not an absolute. It will depend on many factors including individual taste and degree of ambition. Regrettably, though, the selfish in the department may decide optimum for them means being an awkward cuss, refusing to sit on any committee whatsoever and neglecting to set the promised exam questions. The argument that I have heard used, that ‘the best thing I can do for my department is to concentrate on my research’ and by implication therefore, not waste time on the fripperies of life that are teaching and service to the greater good, needs to be stamped on swiftly.

The issue is likely to become gender-specific when it is a question of higher-level committee work; this was the context of the recent discussion with which I was involved. How do you demonstrate your leadership potential to the powers that be if you have never been exposed to and involved in decision-making processes at departmental or above level, or if you have never served on some national committee of significance such as for a Research Council or a professional membership body? These things take time and energy, taking you away from your research group and grant-writing activities. There is an interesting balancing act to be had, with probably no one obviously to hand to proffer advice either as to which committees may provide useful experience or how many is wise.

For women there are even more twists. You may be asked to join a committee to make up numbers, to fill some target and/or to make the organisation look good. Such a request may be intensely irritating, that sense of only being asked because you are a woman not because those doing the asking actually have any confidence in your abilities. Nevertheless, you shouldn’t necessarily reject the invitation out of hand. It may provide just the impetus you need to raise your profile and enable you to try out your wings in a new sphere. On the other hand it may equally be a deadly dull, useless sort of committee where you are merely expected to be a speechless makeweight. The wise thing to do when a request comes your way is to ask around so that you can establish which of those two scenarios apply.

So far so good. But of course if your organisation is actively seeking to fill its committees with a moderately respectable number of women, you may not simply get one invite – particularly if you turn out to be a half-way decent committee member. You may suddenly find there is a deluge of requests. Then it gets difficult: which to accept? Perhaps the first one that came along wasn’t the most interesting or desirable one but you don’t want to turn down the others so you have to work out how to extract yourself gracefully….again, seeking advice would be wise. A thoughtful Head of Department or equivalent, ought to be willing (but won’t necessarily be) to engage in this debate.

The alternative scenario is an organisation where little thought is given to the composition of the committee, or that many of them are filled ex officio by, for example, heads of institution who all just happen to be male. I hear tales in Cambridge of how our 30-strong Estates Management Committee was, for just that reason in the not too distant past, entirely male but apparently is so no more. In any organisation where gender composition is ignored, as I alluded to earlier the women may never get an opportunity to demonstrate their skills. This oversight happens all too often but should be a source of significant worry to the leadership and a prompt to change their processes.

Career progression should be on the minds of the leadership as it thinks about succession planning and the pipeline all along the route. Having the interests of all members of the organisation at heart as committees are filled should be a no-brainer, but it isn’t necessarily the way it pans out.  A committee on committees should consider which committees are good places to bring on young talent, whatever their gender, to make sure that the less obvious names are considered and not just the usual suspects. Equally, for those contemplating their CVs, if there are obvious gaps beyond research excellence they should take note. Research excellence is all very well and may be a sine qua non when it comes to promotion, but it ought to be a case of ‘necessary but not sufficient’, as the mathematicians say.

So, what looks good on that CV beyond the hard-hitting papers and the grant income? A little bit of everything is probably the right answer. Remember if you aspire to be a leader of some sort ultimately, you must not simply keep your head down and avoid all committee work or you are hiding your light under a bushel and no one will notice what you’re doing.

Firstly it is worth pointing out the failure rate is tiny! The expectation on the part of the examiners (at least in science subjects; it is possible this isn’t true in arts and humanities) is that the thesis will have had a good going over by the supervisor and is likely to be acceptable. So, the primary point of the viva exam itself is to check that the student has done the work and understands the words they’ve put on the page, not just copied them from elsewhere.  Those two statements are not trivial. I have participated in an exam where it was clear from the outset that the work was not all the candidate’s own. The internal examiner (not me) knew the background and so knew that a significant part of the work – some computer simulation – was based on a computer programme that the student had had no part in writing: they were merely using it. In itself that was no big deal. That the student took the best part of an hour to admit that they were using the work of others without attribution was the problem. Once they’d made that admission, and agreed to make this fact clear in the text, we could move on.

‘Understanding the words they’ve put on the page’ is even more frequently an issue. If your thesis is about X-ray scattering and you can’t explain the basic principles, you can expect a good going-over from the examiners. If your key experiments use NMR and your description about precession or relaxation processes is woeful, expect problems at the start of the viva. The candidate may believe the exam should be about the work they have done; many will be prepared to discuss the minutiae of their experiments until the cows come home. They should realise the examiner may not be an expert in some of the techniques described but be anxious that the student can place their work in context and explain it. In my experience, those of my students who have had a hard time at their viva have suffered at the start of the exam because they can’t do this clearly for the basic ideas or have never actually sat down and read the primary literature they quote so glibly. Be warned!

So, what’s the best preparation for the big day? Firstly, don’t worry about what you wear. The examiners don’t care as long as you turn up looking like you’re taking the exam seriously. I would not recommend a T-shirt and jeans, nor would I feel a 3 piece suit or a little black dress is a requirement (unless in Oxford sub-fusc is still required; I don’t know about that). Smart and comfortable are probably the watchwords. Secondly, undoubtedly read your thesis carefully. If there’s a gap between submission and the viva, which may often run to some months, you have probably forgotten details which you need to get stuffed back into your brain. Additionally, do think where the obvious ‘big’ questions are. I’d include in this category

• Why you did this work?
• What were the most important things you found out?
• What are the basic underlying principles?
• What would you have done differently if you were starting again?
• What do you think are the next experiments that need doing to follow up on your work?

These questions are all pretty obvious, but can still flummox people. By the ‘underlying principles’ I mean all those basic ideas about the techniques, as I mention above, but also how thermodynamics, genetics or whatever is relevant. In my field, if discussing polymer mixtures, for instance, you need to understand concepts such as entropy of mixing. Even if the phrase barely appears in the text, you should be able to go back to first principles. Often students can’t. They’ve taken the basics as read and can be made to feel very uncomfortable.

Examiners try to set candidates at their ease, but if the first questions asked – why did you do this piece of work and what are the key things you learned – cause the student to go red in the face and mutter ‘I don’t know’ the viva gets off to a very rocky start. But  by and large examiners do not ask trick questions. I have never yet been paired with one who is simply out to trip the student up, look aggressive and display their own brilliance. On the other hand I have, not infrequently, been paired with one who talks a lot about their own work, thereby giving the candidate little opportunity to open their mouth. I find this sort of behaviour frustrating, but it may make the examinee’s life easier since if they don’t open their mouth they can’t put their foot in it.

I suspect the most common reaction to a viva is in fact a sense of anti-climax. Was that it? After all those months of slaving away, it’s all over in a couple of hours. (When I set out, PhD exams were customarily more like 4 hours and often more; the average time seems to have plummeted and the guidelines my own university offers examiners make this expectation clear.)  Maybe you will come out of the viva feeling like Groucho Marx:

I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member

Certainly I recall one student quoting that to me after his viva, but as he is now a highly successful professor I doubt he actually meant it. Some students feel cheated they weren’t given a harder time of it, I’ve heard that view expressed too, but then there are at least as many who come out sweating about the errors that were uncovered or the pressure they had felt under.

So what do I think the point of the process is? Definitely to establish that the work is the student’s own. If substantial plagiarism had occurred, I think it would readily become apparent and that has to be a crucial component during the examination. It is also important, I believe, to get an external objective view to help the student put their work in context. That is why, at least in general, the supervisor is not part of the examination process although in some universities they may be physically present in the room. It is useful to get an outside view as to whether some new hypothesis or interpretation looks convincing and to check there are no glaring errors or omissions (what, no error bars! That omission I’ve seen too often to count). It is unusual for there to be no corrections to be made, from basic typos, to missing citations, to something more fundamental. In general these tend to be easily fixed. You shouldn’t feel bad if you’re given pages of corrections to be made, that is pretty much the norm.

What if you yourself discover an error before the exam? Turning up with a list of the typos you’ve found is often to your advantage: it saves time and looks as if you’re taking things seriously. But if the mistake you’ve found is more fundamental – perhaps you’ve screwed up your statistics or misinterpreted a line in a spectrum – then being open about it, preferably in advance, is a good idea. Send the examiners a note of what the problem is, whether it makes any difference and a statement of how the problem can be sorted out (even a completely rewritten few pages you’d like to replace in the text) means that the difficulty can be faced head-on without embarrassment. These things can happen, but they shouldn’t be too serious – unless of course it undermines the whole thesis. I have never seen that happen.

Vivas in other countries can be very different from the UK. They are often done in public and are much more of a formality (in The Netherlands requiring full academic dress in my experience), less of a serious conversation about the science. I have found that quite frustrating myself, as it becomes a performance for all parties rather than an exam. In the UK I would say they should be regarded as an important staging post but not an anticipated nightmare that makes you sweat for weeks in advance. Probably few people (on either side) actually enjoy them, but they nevertheless can stimulate an interesting debate about your research of a kind you may never get again.

Between writing and posting this blog I came across a post entitled ‘Are PhD examiners really ogres?‘ from entomologist Simon Leather. Its angle about vivas is rather different from mine, in that it concentrates on how examiners behave rather than what they might expect, but it also covers some similar ground: your viva should not be something to fear.

Most of this is comparable to what happened in the RAE, although with some shifts in the emphasis and detail required. What is different is the new section on ‘impact’. Impact in the sense of something rather tangible coming out of research carried out in the previous 15 years. It isn’t sufficient to say that a patent was forthcoming unless that patent spawned a spin-out or a product on the market. Simply having done a lot of outreach isn’t going to count unless you can show somehow the outreach led to a measurable change: a fiendishly difficult challenge to link attendance at a splendid school’s talk or an evening at an observatory to an upturn in astronomy degrees awarded, for instance! So, impact in the REF sense is very different from impact in the RCUK sense of ‘pathways to impact’. REF wants impact signed and delivered, with a stress on both ‘reach’ and ‘significance’; RCUK grant proposals only require the alleged promise of impact tomorrow.

I chair my local Unit of Assessment’s REF panel and my summer will be consumed, I fear, by sorting out the details of our submission. I guess it makes a change from the summer I spent reading everyone else’s outputs because I was on the RAE panel itself, but I’m not sure it’s actually an improvement. I had thought that summer of 2008 was difficult (it also involved some extraordinarily wet stays in the Lake District where our panel meetings were all held. I couldn’t savour the location because the location was constantly shrouded in low cloud and horizontal sheets of rain) but this time the weight of responsibility feels very different, indeed even more substantial.

Recently, what has struck me forcibly is what the passage of years can do to transform acceptable behaviour.  I am currently reading a rather old (1992) book by Jan Golinski called Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain 1760-1820. The first main chapter discusses William Cullen  and Joseph Black, two early professors of Chemistry in Scotland during the 18^th century. Both were determined to be free of any taint of ‘projecting’, a word in its day associated with the sordid practice of making money, doing nefarious deals and taking out patents.  Projecting was seen by many as something associated with the mercantile class rather than as an appropriate activity for men of intellect; the kind of dodgy deal people associated with this sort of action might be exemplified by the South Sea Bubble, clearly a distinctly dubious operation. Nevertheless it is striking that these early professors of chemistry felt their reputations would suffer if they did anything that could smack of projection. Despite the importance of chemistry for fields such as agriculture, dyeing and bleaching, all very important to 18th century commercial activities, it was not regarded as comme il faut to get too close to these practical matters. Projectors were not gentlemen and could not expect to receive aristocratic patronage, important to impecunious academics, so the practical side of Cullen and Black’s research had to be played down, to be made to look as if it was less useful than it was, so that their standing was not damaged.

Golinski says the following of Cullen

‘Practical achievements were highly problematic, and a maladroit insistence on the relevance of chemical theory to practice could be taken for arrogant projecting or self-serving puffery.’

As I read the book, it must have been a very fine line to tread between being thought to be not-quite-a-gentleman who was at risk of ostracism, and actually doing something useful with the subject. For chemistry, a discipline that was barely taught in English universities (i.e. Oxford and Cambridge) at the time, the usual emphasis was on chemistry as relevant to medicine – something that was of course acceptable although extremely empirical.

Times have changed radically. Now we all are scraping around trying to prove, not only that our research has potential for the future, but that we already have done something significant with it. Not everyone will view it as a badge of honour to have produced a tangible outcome from their research, as comments on this blog make very clear. It is, however, something likely to find favour with a head of department in the current climate. Even more so if it is an outcome worth quite a bit of cash – whether that cash is for the originator/inventor or someone else. Funders also are putting a high premium on such matters, because they see the demonstration of impact of funded research as a powerful argument with Treasury, rightly or wrongly. It is of course the case that I doubt any academic worries over much as to whether they are considered to be gentleman (or ladies of course), so that particular pitfall has ceased to be relevant. But the attitudes of the UK powers-that-be to doing something useful has been totally transformed into a world view where utility may sometimes seem to override any other consideration.

Last week’s post about preparing Athena Swan applications over on the Guardian HE Professional blogs by Cardiff’s Paul Brennan sparked some debate on Twitter, probably far more than the tweets I actually saw myself; I thought I’d chip in with my own thoughts about the importance of the awards.

There are 3 points I’ve heard raised I’d specifically like to consider:

1. It is a tickbox exercise for a department that actually makes no real difference on the ground.
2. It is difficult for a department to do things different from the central policies, so it’s hard to make a convincing departmental case.
3. The problems for women aren’t down to the University, but inherent in the nature of an academic’s job.

If you/your department thinks these awards are merely tickbox exercises you’ve either not read the submission template or you’re setting yourself up to fail. Maybe you’ll get away with it this time, but if nothing changes before you apply for a renewal things will go pear-shaped for you and the award will be removed. This is already happening to departments so the evidence is there. A submission requires an analysis of statistics at every level from undergraduate to professor: how many women do you have at each grade and how has this changed over recent years? Out of these numbers should come some suggestions for where trouble spots or bottlenecks are and that should inform the action plan that needs to be produced. If undergrad numbers are healthy but perhaps there are practically no postdocs – why not? Thought needs to be given to what can be done. Sometimes it’s the little things that make significant differences: induction to settle newcomers into a department and thought given to the timing of seminars so that everyone feels welcome coupled with inclusive social events. Some things take more time and energy: setting up appropriate mentoring systems and a work-load model may be quite labour intensive for someone but have pay-offs down the road. Each department has to think what needs to be done to eradicate their own particular problems. It’s most certainly not one size fits all.

Presumably those who complain it’s a tickbox exercise imagine that some HR person can simply jot down a few ideas and get the Head of Department to sign it off without any intention of seeing the action plan through. My experience within Cambridge suggests very strongly that committed academic leadership is crucial and that if it is only administrators who get stuck in then change will not happen. In that case the submission should fail; if it doesn’t fail the first time it is hard to imagine a convincing case could be made 3 years down the road that the action plan had been carried out leading to improvements in culture, so a renewal should be out of the question. The very fact that the template requires thought to fill in, means that – unlike a benchmarking exercise when you are simply asked something like which of the following do you already do/intend to do – a tickbox mentality will get you nowhere.

The second point above was one I saw on Twitter and one I now find a little strange, although I can recall a time when I thought like that too. In Cambridge we have central bodies and committees that make policy decisions: these would cover items such as parental leave, rules about applying for part-time working, how additional circumstances like having young children are to be factored in promotions applications and E+D requirements for members of departmental REF panels. These are not department-specific actions but university-wide policies, all of which can be made more (or less) beneficial to women. These are the sorts of things that would be entered into the University submission for an award. At the departmental level actions should be planned that reflect what local policies are likely to work.

I mentioned the timing of seminars. It might be possible to have a University policy that no seminar can occur after 4pm, but it makes more sense for a department to work out timings that their staff find convenient. The type of support that may be most effective is likely to depend on the make-up of the workforce – lots of postdocs or practically none, for instance. If there are lots of postdocs, local policies should make sure they get appraised, informed about training opportunities and given some career advice. Those sorts of issues have nothing to do with central ‘policy’, all to do with considering what members of the department, including undergraduates, find good or bad about the specific place; a local questionnaire might be a good place to start in order to find out.

Turning now to point 3, this is perhaps the most subtle of the list. I think that what the person who raised this is implying is that an academic job is basically incompatible with things they value, such as work-life balance, or possibly being a mother (but presumably not with being a father). That may indeed be the way many places operate. But need it be? What does ‘excellence’ mean? It shouldn’t simply mean being prepared to work all hours of the day and night, travelling insane distances just to prove that you can stand up in all the continents of the world during a single year to give conference presentations and building up a team of PhD students you have no time to treat as more than bench monkeys. A neat phrase I heard expressed at a meeting recently was that ‘you shouldn’t use airmiles as a proxy for excellence’ and I agree with that. No more than you should use a journal’s impact factor (groan) as a proxy for the quality of the papers published therein.

If a department/university is to be serious about improving the working environment for everyone, but particularly women, then careful thought needs to be given to promotion criteria to ensure that someone who works less than a 100% contract, for whatever reason, is judged on the work they do in that time, not against some notional norm of the over-committed. If someone has caring responsibilities that mean travel is difficult, then that should be able to be stated; perhaps as an alternative to physical appearances at meetings, invitations received could be counted. If someone is particularly good at pastoral care or outreach then there should be an appropriate value put on it, relieving them of some other ‘chore’ or administrative task or by reducing their teaching load. Let’s face it, many individuals don’t want to take on pastoral care (and some shouldn’t be allowed near it). It isn’t a task that should be regarded merely as an optional extra but as a positive benefit to a department; those that take it on should therefore get appropriate recognition.

The meaning of ‘excellence’ leading to progression needs to be reconsidered at a senior level, moving away from the traditional narrow definition to something more all-encompassing. This will not only be to the benefit of the individuals concerned, but also to the long-term benefit of the department. That stage of being sucked dry by young children (or elderly parents) is usually only short-term; on the other hand the benefits of supporting individuals through that stage will be felt for years thereafter. Staff members relegated to second-class citizen status and made to feel unwelcome and sub-standard because of a short-term reduction in productivity will be likely to give up. Then their worth, as well as their sense of self-worth, will be correspondingly reduced, to a department’s detriment.

If an individual can be made to feel that a department is supportive but the needs of the job make progression impossible, then something is sadly awry. I suspect this is just another manifestation of the deficit model: fix the person not the system. Athena Swan applications are just the moment to challenge this mind-set, and should be used to push for change. However, there is no doubt that change will only happen if the senior leadership are really committed to it. It all comes down to that, at the end of the day.

(By the way, for anyone who is confused, my name is Athene and I have nothing whatsoever to do with the awards. The similarity of name is an unfortunate coincidence, although it’s fooled some eminent people into thinking the awards are somehow ‘mine’. Nor have I ever sat on any of the judging panels, so what I’ve written above is my personal perspective having been involbed in the process in my own university and department, as well as talked to others elsewhere about their submissions and aspirations.)

Here I list some headings of danger areas that can affect anyone, but particularly the inexperienced.

1 Pronunciation

One aspect of practice is to make sure you can actually pronounce the words you are familiar with from reading. It is surprising how even standard English words can suddenly become a minefield. My own bête noire is phenomenology; long, long ago I had a student who always tripped over the word anisotropy – which was very unfortunate given that the word was fundamental to his field of research. But practice may help, though in my case it doesn’t seem to have cured the problem reliably, and at least you needn’t be caught unawares. This also applies to the case of famous authors whose work you want to quote, but whose nationality may be very different from your own with correspondingly unfamiliar syllables in their names.

2 Nerves

Nerves can afflict anyone and probably will. Making sure you have the first sentence or two of your presentation clearly mentally organised in advance may help. But if you are shaking, the use of a laser pointer can be a real give away, particularly if the screen is large and every nervous twitch/shake gets magnified many times for everyone to see. My solution to this is to hold my wrist with my other hand. It has an excellent stabilising effect without being particularly noticeable. Of course, that presupposes that you’ve found the laser pointer: it’s a good idea to try to locate that in advance.

3 Animation

When powerpoint presentations first became common, it was not infrequent to see every slide being animated in extreme ways, with phrases or figures dashing in from all directions in a way that was bewildering or irritating (or both). Mercifully, that sort of animation has calmed down and what is left is usually helpful or at least not distracting. But there is another kind of animation that matters too, the animation of the speaker. You can be perfectly audible but speak in a dull monotone, that doesn’t feel as if you’re projecting or wanting to engage with the audience. In this case it is the lack of animation which is intensely irritating. Inaudibility is always unforgiveable, but it ought also to be unnecessary since any large room/lecture hall should be provided with the necessary microphones. (It is just unfortunate that smart women’s clothes frequently don’t come equipped with pockets in which to seat the mike – and attaching the base unit to one’s waistband can so often end up being undignified, as experience tells me.)

4 Fonts and Colours

When it comes to colour schemes, there are many that work – and even more that don’t. Be aware that a significant number of people are red/green colour blind and eschew pairing those particular colours. The important thing is that your slides are visible, and on figures make sure that different colours are not merely subtly different and hence indistinguishable. I am no fan of fancy fonts, although I can’t get very worked up about the sans serif arguments. But what is undoubtedly necessary is that the size of the font is adequate. Think about this before attempting to squeeze too much information onto a single slide. If you want lots of words to help you remember what you’re trying to say, write yourself notes; the audience doesn’t need to be bombarded with anything other than the salient facts. Which leads me to a common and tiresome phrase….

5 …I know this is a busy slide…

Does it need to be? Do you really need 26 tiny diagrams that no one can see, a table with a dozen columns containing invisible numbers or a bar chart with so much data on it it’s incomprehensible? I think the answer to all those questions is no. If you have a lot of data there are probably simpler ways of representing it, plus a reference to the paper/thesis/report where the full data can be found. What message are you trying to get across that needs all the data to back it up? Typically the audience will not be experts in whatever is your field, although you should always try to establish in advance the likely make-up of the audience. A generalist audience is likely just to want to get the gist of your arguments. Save the detail for group meetings with collaborators, who can appreciate it properly.

6 Timing

Once upon a time, when I was young, inexperienced and overenthusiastic about just how wonderfully interesting my results were, I gave a seminar that lasted an hour and a half at a major research lab. I look back on this episode with shame. Someone should have stopped me after an hour, or at most a few minutes past the hour. If a seminar is scheduled for an hour, that’s the maximum it should last (although I appreciate there are disciplines where longer talks are the norm, that certainly isn’t the case in my field). This is one place where practice really does help, because you can see how long those slides you’ve prepared are likely to take to present. A dry run time isn’t always accurate, for reasons ranging from nerves making you talk fast (or slow) to the talk provoking so many questions as you go along that timing goes out of the window. But, you ought to know roughly how long your material will take to present and, if that vital practice run-through shows you that the material you have is either inadequately short or tediously long, you have a chance to do something about it before inflicting a mismanaged talk on your audience. I wish someone had given me that advice all those years ago to save my embarrassment.

7 Questions

Handling questions improves with practice. Experience will teach you how not to look totally discomfited or dumbfounded by some obvious objection to your analysis you’d failed to think of in advance (though a good supervisor should protect you from this failing by taking you through potential pitfalls); experience will also tell you how to handle the person who has spotted the flaw in your arguments that you did know about but hoped no one would latch on to.  In my experience the worst questions to deals with are the ones you don’t really understand and you cannot tell if the questioner has completely missed the point of the entire seminar, has some bee in their bonnet that you don’t know about or genuinely has some deep concern that you’ve failed to appreciate. Sometimes they are simply asking the question in imperfect English quietly from the back of a large lecture theatre, which makes it difficult to understand however hard you try. All these situations are very tricky but often the best solution is to suggest you discuss it all later over the tea break. This is also the case if some long-running argument is dug up again.

9 Eye Contact

The speaker who stares at their shoes or only looks at the screen is not going to engage the audience. I’m not proposing that you should make eye contact with any specific individual in the audience (unless you’ve agreed this tactic with a friend), but I do think you should look in the general direction of the audience. I find looking at the back wall works quite well, so you don’t have to stare at anyone in particular, but you might fool the entire audience into thinking you’re looking at someone else as long as you look at an appropriate height. You just want to look as if the audience actually matters to you; you may even want to gauge whether they’re nodding and smiling at your jokes. But staring at the floor because you’re frightened you might see someone dozing off or frowning will only make them more likely to do so.

10 Know your slides

Above all, make sure you are familiar with your material. To be honest, I think this is more of a problem for the experienced speaker than the novice, someone who has given a similar talk before, perhaps many times and simply cannot remember which particular slides are included in this particular version. You may think you’ve got that clever schematic to explain a tricky point later, only to find that you’d ditched it for the sake of time and you end up looking wrong-footed if not actually stupid. Even worse is when you find you’ve inserted a slide, perhaps borrowed from a colleague or nicked from the web, that you suddenly can’t remember anything about. Perhaps it uses a technique you can’t explain, or you’ve forgotten the details of the sample. If you get caught out like that all you can do is laugh it off, but it doesn’t look very professional.

There are other pitfalls it is hard to prepare for.  GMP has recently published a post on her blog  where she discusses problems with lecture theatre lay-out (where should you stand relative to screen and computer?) and the dangers of having to speak into a fixed mike if you like to perambulate. These are things it’s very hard to prepare for, because you won’t know the set-up till you arrive and they are concerns I share.  All you can hope is that if you’ve got these 10 potential disaster areas happily sorted, you will have energy and confidence left to cope with any remaining but unknown problems that may turn up.

However, apologising for the dilatoriness of my responses to colleagues (or possibly apologising for the woolliness and unhelpfulness in any responses I did make) is not the point of this post. What interested me was the way my brain’s behaviour took on a life of its own. Normally I have enough self-control to mean that when I start writing a reply to an email I can usually manage to finish it and send it off. Not so last week. I would start reading an email and consider what I wanted to say in response, but before I’d managed to put that down in black and white my brain would go off at a tangent. I would find myself hunting out another email, or checking what I’d said to someone else 6 months ago on something vaguely relevant; maybe I’d even start chasing up some reference on the web. Half an hour later the original email was still unanswered and I’d forgotten what it was I wanted to say. I’d like to think this was a temporary condition brought on by my body temperature having crept up a degree or two, nothing drastic, just enough to make any sort of efficiency go out of the window.

It was a strange feeling. Although I am as capable of wasting time on the web as anyone, usually I am also able to concentrate if I try hard enough. In the state I was in, that was hopeless. My brain was just not going to play ball for a few days. Usually, one takes one’s brain for granted, familiar with the way of maintaining a balance and getting what one wants out of it. The only other times I am aware of my brain circuitry going astray is after a (classic) migraine attack. Although I find sumatriptan almost a wonder-drug in stopping the pain and nausea of the episode itself if I swallow it fast enough as the aura first strikes, I still get left with the after-effects once the headache itself has stopped. This, apparently, is called the postdrome and during this stage it is as if I can mentally visualise all those electrical signals trying to course through my brain and getting stopped at some unexpected barrier (maybe genuinely a synapse, I’ve no idea, I can only discuss what it feels like from inside). So, when trying to solve some problem I feel as if I can take a solution so far and then wham, I hit a brick wall, even though I know when fully fit that wall would not be there. This is particularly trying when attempting to teach familiar stuff: you know you know the answer but there’s no way you can retrieve it. You can feel the whirrings of the cogs in the brain and they are going nowhere. It is bizarre to know that your brain has simply gone on strike, although outwardly all is well. I appreciate that neuroscientists are probably appalled by what I’m writing but since as far as I understand it, the underlying biochemical cause of migraines remains a mystery, I guess I’m entitled to discuss it in non-scientific terms, just in terms of the symptoms I experience.

But back to the state of fever. What I realised when my brain was not behaving as I expected it to was the interesting light this cast on creativity. I wasn’t able to be dutiful and painstaking, but the flights of fancy and the way my thoughts darted about if I gave them free rein, allowed me to make connections my more disciplined brain would probably not have allowed. In full health, when is one at one’s most creative? In my experience it is not necessarily when one is fully concentrating on a task in hand but (inconveniently) as you drift off to sleep – and then wake up completely, fully alert as you try to capture that great thought; or (a particular favourite of mine) when sitting through a boring seminar. At times like that you are not consciously thinking about the seminar material, but you are also not being distracted by the boringly domestic (what should I cook for supper?), the frustratingly political (Osborne said what?) or the resolutely practical (if I catch the 0815 train I should arrive in time). So the mind seems to be receptive to random forays into interesting niches, bringing different familiar facts together in new ways. The single real Eureka moment I can remember in my whole research career certainly occurred in that way. There I was, sitting through a student seminar at a time when I myself was a research fellow, idly sketching some possible curves for the way polymer failure might occur as a function of temperature (written up here) when suddenly I realised how my collection of data made sense. But even without shouting Eureka, one can be productive by not concentrating– at least some of the time! – and creativity is such an important part of how we do science.

Creativity is, unfortunately, not necessarily something the average member of the public associates with science. The Blakeian view that ‘Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death’ is too often implicitly accepted, wildly wrong though it is. That view presumes that scientific discovery is a linear process, knowing where it is going to end up when a set of experiments is initiated, allowing no deviation into interesting offshoots and diverging paths. In other words, no room for creativity.

When I appeared on Start the Week a couple of years ago, the producers were, somewhat desperately I thought, trying to find a topic they felt the others round the table could relate to (I had been invited on because they’d spotted I was giving a talk on ‘Alzheimer’s Disease and Yogurt’ – a title which clearly caught their fancy). We agreed on the subject of creativity, as you can hear, but it is something I feel that scientists should bang on about a bit more as being a crucial part of our canon.

Creativity, lateral thinking of the kind provoked by a brain not quite under control, is more commonly associated with the drug-induced writings of someone like Aldous Huxley or the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I am most certainly not advocating the (ab)use of drugs or alcohol in the laboratory, but I do think we should recognize that creativity needs to be loudly reclaimed by scientists. For ourselves we need to work out how best to find that wondrous, passing state, where unexpected ideas can suddenly come from nowhere. However minor they may be, they may adventitiously flash into the mind and make sense of apparently incompatible experimental results or rationalise confusing data. In an ideal world we should be able to find this state, not only without recourse to dangerous substances, but also without being rendered otherwise useless by a virus.

Much is made of the practical difficulties of combining a career and a family for women; this is often proposed as the major reason for women leaving science, but I think this is too simplistic. Indeed, academia is probably an easier place – because of the relative freedom we enjoy to work at times that work for us and not just clocking in and out – than some other professions for flexibility around caring responsibilities, for both men and women.  Perpetuating the view that the combination is well-nigh impossible (without exploring, as Ottoline Leyser’s excellent book did, all the different ways women have found actually to manage to do it), is probably only discouraging and disempowering in itself.

But the evidence – gleaned from study after study in the social sciences and related literature, which many Deans of Science or Heads of Science Departments are probably not reading – seems to point to the range of subtle ways in which we, collectively, reach conclusions on others which, all unknowingly, are influenced by gender and stereotypes.  At the bottom of this post I list some of the papers I have come across in the past year or so, not all of which I have comprehensively studied and which I am unqualified to assess in terms of their (social sciences) methodology. I do this for the interested reader in the hopes that this may facilitate their distribution to decision-makers in their institution (some may be behind paywalls depending on institutional subscriptions, so I just link to the abstracts).  In this present post I would like to pick out just one which, like the much-discussed PNAS paper by Moss-Racussin et al, identify some disturbing aspects of the way we all – these failings affect women as well as men – reach conclusions about the work of others and then act them out (I’ll use another post to discuss a very recent paper by Wang et al on an analysis of choices boys and girls make about careers).

Unconscious bias can only be dealt with by making it conscious, by ensuring an instantaneous assessment is backed up by evidence and not just by one’s unthinking gut. Now that overt discrimination is relatively rare and explicit sexism of the sort that says ‘women can’t do this’ rarely annunciated, we need to move on to a situation where the playing field is genuinely level and not just free of gross peaks and troughs. It behoves us all, particularly those in decision-making roles but also those at the receiving end, to consider the myriad and disparate ways in which subtle cues can trigger different reactions according to the gender of the individual under consideration.  This isn’t simply a case of differing ways of reacting to actions, as in the conjugation ‘he is assertive, she is aggressive’ and equivalent pairings. It is also a case of reading between the lines of letters of reference (as I’ve talked about before here and here) or metrics (see this article) and citations (here).

Scientists may like to form judgements based on quantification, but what is emerging from the literature is that our collective reactions invariably seem to imply a systematic disadvantage to women by the use of such metrics, even though it looks like something as gender-neutral as citations may be being studied. The most recent study I came across, entitled The Matilda Effect in Science Communication: An Experiment on Gender Bias in Publication Quality Perceptions and Collaboration Interest  looked at the responses of ‘243 young communication scholars’ when asked to rate some (carefully manipulated) conference abstracts. (The Matilda effect was a phrase coined by Margaret Rossiter 20 years ago to describe the systematic underrecognition of women in science.) The abstracts’ topics and authors were varied to see how the readers reacted and to test a series of hypotheses relying on ‘role congruity’. This theory says that a group (or in this case, an abstract) will be positively evaluated when its characteristics are recognized as aligning with that group’s typical social roles. So a paper written by women about a subject ‘appropriate’ to their gender, such as the effect of media on children (remember this was a project involving science communicators), will be more highly rated than one written by women on an ‘inappropriate’ topic such as political communication.

Their hypotheses were largely borne out; on average the papers written by ‘men’ were perceived as of higher quality than those written by ‘women’, and even more so if stereotypically male topics were being written about. The respondents were also more likely to want to collaborate with the males on stereotypically ‘male’ topics and with the women on those topics associated with women. These trends were the same irrespective of the respondents own gender. The differences in evaluations were not large, but as earlier studies have shown, small effects multiply up over time; this is true of salaries and it is true of less tangible attributes such as recognition or collaboration opportunities.

Somehow we – again I’d stress this seems to apply to both men and women – react differently when we see a name on a piece of paper (let alone when we meet the individual) and are less likely to cite a woman or want to collaborate with them. This reaction is apparently so in-built and rapid that it can happen without even noticing that one has taken in the gender of, say, a paper’s author. I have always believed I don’t look at the names at the top of papers – including those for job applications – and so am unbiased. This latest paper suggests that, whether or not I have taken in a name sufficiently to be able to recall it, I may still be being influenced, so I will have to work harder on this.

I have frequently heard calls for reviewing (eg for grant applications or jobs) to be done blind, i.e. with the name removed. I am not convinced, certainly within a country as small as the UK, that this would be meaningful. You cannot remove details of the field being worked in, the papers cited, or the list of publications attached, so how would an anonymous refereeing process actually work? Surely one should keep names in and remind everyone, constantly, to be on their guard for their own hidden biases? But doing the latter is hard, and cannot be dealt with simply superficially.

To illustrate this let me finish with two linked anecdotes (I know, this isn’t data). The first is from a woman who enquired about how unconscious bias was dealt with at a research council panel. She was told ‘any funny business is stamped on pretty quickly‘. Now, what did the official mean by this? That illegal discrimination was spotted and dealt with, or that anyone who has lurking unconscious bias is hauled over the coals? I think it’s easy to see which was intended. But by way of a specific example of the dangers of bias, of the sort that could turn up at a research council panel, let me cite statements from two recent references I saw (edited for the sake of anonymity) for a male and female applicant of roughly equal standing – the woman happened to be a year further on in her career but had taken time out to have a child – both with stellar credentials.

Woman A

‘ a consistent output of more than a dozen papers per year, despite a period of maternity leave and currently working less than full time; more than £2M of current research funding held as PI….however she is still at a relatively early stage of her career and this makes me uncomfortable about recommending her….’

Man B

‘I should comment on the fact that all but 3 of B’s recent publications do not include Y [his mentor, still in the same department] as a co-author. However for about half of these B appears to be the senior author, and presumably the intellectual driving force behind the work….my overall view is that…he is highly deserving…’

I expect you can see why these two references, in juxtaposition (and with A and B in competition) made me so angry. OK, they weren’t written by the same referee, but in one case the woman is damned with being too early on for serious consideration despite overwhelming evidence for her independence – through grants and papers – explicitly being presented. On the other hand, when it comes to the man – whose independence is being queried with the referee only using weak words like appears and presumably regarding what B has achieved – there seems no doubt in the referee’s mind that B is ‘ready’.

The panel I was on read these comments and dealt with them appropriately in my view, but not all panels may be so sensitive to seeing this manifestation of the Matilda Effect in practice in letters of reference. Is this a form of ‘funny business’ that needs to be stamped on? I think so, but there is no guarantee that it will be. This is why unconscious bias has to be teased out and discussed at every opportunity. Please distribute the (links to the) papers below as widely as possible, and add more to the reading list. It would be nice to think progress could be made.

Reading List (in reverse chronological order; this is bound to be very incomplete, as it relies on papers that have happened to cross my path rather than a systematic search, and only covers the last year or so; additions to this list would be welcome).

 
Not Lack of Ability but More Choice: Individual and Gender Differences in Choice of Careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics by M-T Wang, JS Eccles and S Kenny published online March 18, 2013, doi: 10.1177/0956797612458937 in Psychological Science http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/03/18/0956797612458937.abstract
The Matilda Effect in Science Communication: An Experiment on Gender Bias in Publication Quality Perceptions and Collaboration Interest by S Knobloch-Westerwick, C Glynn and M Huge published online February 6 2013 in Science Communication  http://scx.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/01/24/1075547012472684.abstract
Is publication rate an equal opportunity metric? EZ Cameron, ME Gray and AM White Trends in Ecology and Evolution 28 (2013) 7-8 http://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/abstract/S0169-5347%2812%2900275-3
Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favour male students CA Moss-Racusin, JF Dovidio, VL Brescoll, MJ Graham and J Handelsman PNAS 109 (2012) 16474–16479 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3478626/
‘I wouldn’t say it’s sexism, except that … It’s all these little subtle things’: Healthcare scientists’ accounts of gender in healthcare science laboratories V Bevan and M Learmonth Social Studies of Science 43 (2013) 136-158 http://sss.sagepub.com/content/43/1/136.abstract
Penalties and Premiums: The Impact of Gender, Marriage, and Parenthood, on Faculty Salaries in SEM and non-SEM Fields  K Kelly and L Grant Social Studies of Science 42 (2012) 869-896 http://sss.sagepub.com/content/42/6/869
The academic jungle: ecosystem modelling reveals why women are driven out of research KR O’Brien and KP Hapgood Oikos I21 (2012) 999–1004 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0706.2012.20601.x/abstract

Dr Energetic

Dr Energetic paces up and down the lecture theatre, their arms waving wildly as they try to put an important point across. Not for the sleepy student who wants to be permitted to doze quietly at the back of the lecture theatre, Dr Energetic will make a quick kip after a hard night’s drinking hard to come by. The advantage of a lecturer such as this is that even boring or turgid subjects may come alive enough to render them intelligible. The disadvantage is that strident tones and histrionic actions may merely irritate not inform.

Dr Inaudible

Dr Inaudible’s offering is very different. They may be the most intelligent person you will ever meet, with a solid grasp of every fact they are trying to convey and a neat turn of phrase to illustrate difficult concepts, but if they are not audible beyond the first two rows in the lecture theatre (and disdain being wired up with a microphone), all this is in vain. Alternatively they may be inaudible because they totally lack confidence in the material they have been assigned to teach and want to be unheard and unremarked. Dr Inaudible needs a stiff talking to by those in charge of teaching, plus subsequent follow-up to check that instructions to use a mike have been taken to heart – as well as a check that their lectures are indeed comprehensible as well as audible.

Dr Dusty

I am of an age to have once been lectured to by a gentleman in a gown. I was exposed to only one such example, I hasten to add, by someone then already close to retirement. The dust – chalk dust- was obvious. For others the dust may be less visible or more metaphorical, but, many lecturers look as if they have been curled up in a corner for many years and are only let out on license for their annual lecturing duties. What they do the rest of the year may be a mystery (in Cambridge of course they can hang out in their college rooms, and may be assiduous in teaching generations of students there). Closely related is Dr Dry-as-Dust, old in character if not in chronological years, probably pernickety and dull, these characters do tend to take their lecturing duties seriously, indeed teaching may be their lifeblood (if not in a style attractive to many) and may be all they wish to do, not least because they aren’t interested in research and possess the leadership and administrative skills of a baby mouse.

Dr Absent-minded

Dr Absent-minded has a reputation for forgetting to turn up to lectures. One such I encountered myself encouraged me to come and find him if he didn’t show up, although that was something I found too embarrassing to contemplate. They may also turn up with the wrong lecture notes (a sin I myself once committed, although the class was amazingly tolerant) or forget to keep an eye on the clock and run over the stated time, despite the audible collective rumblings of the audience’s stomachs. They may be an irritating class of lecturers, but they can also be excellent value. Their failings are in their personal organisation not their teaching ability.

Dr Ultramodern

When the world was using blackboards, Dr Ultramodern had progressed to the overhead projector. As their colleagues caught on with this they were already contemplating the joys of Powerpoint (or should that be ‘joys’?). Dr Ultramodern is never satisfied with the current teaching tools and no doubt will now be dropping in Audioboos to enliven the lecture theatre, relevant or not, and eyeing Google Glasses with interest (will the teaching budget run to them?). That is the trouble: in an ever-changing technical landscape, this particularly lecturer is more interested in showing off the latest technology than mastering the actual content and delivering it with clarity, a failing that can become tedious for the audience.

Dr Famed-as-Charismatic

Word of mouth commentary amongst generations of students is ubiquitous, and a lecturer who starts off as wonderful – enthusiastic, accurate, charming and comprehensible – can notch up a stellar reputation. This can be unfortunate if they start to rest on their laurels, no longer sweating over their lectures to make them first class, but relying on their reputation and a wing and a prayer to get them through, year on year. This is of course particularly disastrous if the teaching admin are so mean as to give them a new course to prepare. What, they have to start from scratch, mug up some new jokes and prepare new slides? Their reputation may take a rapid nosedive after such an unfortunate turn of affairs.

Dr Careless

Dr Careless may have an excellent grasp of their subject, and be hard-working at getting a good course structure with illustrative examples and clear explanations. But where they go wrong is in all those irritating little details – in physics, minus signs incorrectly placed are a particular bugbear; I hated this sort of sloppiness as a student myself, but again I’m ashamed to say it is a sin of which I have not infrequently been guilty. In handouts or in slides these little errors regularly lurk, to the students’ frustration. They do not want (although it may be good discipline for them) to have to check through every equation to ensure that all subscripts are present and correct and factors of 2  or p – as well as those minus signs – have not gone AWOL.

Dr I-don’t-want-to-be-here

This person believes they are too important to have to lecture, and they are going to make this manifest. They look down their noses at the scruffy audience they have to address, to convey the fact that they are Important Personages who are conferring a favour merely by turning up. Their style of lecturing is peremptory, unenthusiastic but probably efficient enough. But they are never going to convey a love of the subject to the lecture hall because their love is for themselves first and foremost, and they would vastly prefer to be furthering their ambitions by jet-setting around the world than by being chained to the lecture theatre dais.

Dr I’m-not-here

This one is the ultimate manifestation of Dr I-don’t-want-to-be-here because they aren’t, in fact, ‘here’. The students turn up only to find that their lecturer has indeed got on that plane and vanished, without troubling to find a stand-in (let alone notifying the powers-that-be that they were heading off so that they could find a replacement themselves).  Their diary is too full of opportunities they deem more important to permit them to fulfil their lecturing responsibilities; their lack of a sense of duty is such that it never crosses their mind that their own self-importance should be subservient to their obligations to the student body. This one is a hard nut for a Head of Department to rein in, but vital that they should.

The sea was in a fury of white foam, layer upon layer of froth as the waves beat at the steep shingle bank we stood upon. The foam was also constantly blowing up and onto the beach and onto our clothes. Why was the foam so long-lived? Irritating to find myself trying to answer that question; I was NOT there to think about colloids! I do not believe the sea is now so jammed full of detergents (as sometimes one sees when a river gets frothy due to local pollution) that the foam is permanently stabilised by Fairy Liquid and its cousins. Whether the fury of the waves was sufficient, or whether there are saccharides or other molecules excreted by marine organisms contributing to a lowering of the surface tension, I don’t know. And to be honest, when on holiday, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.

Waves is the subject I’ve been teaching to 400 eager (and not so eager) 1^st years in Cambridge for the past few years; I’ve also taught it previously (in more advanced form) to second years, and I have therefore had professional occasion to consider the nature of water waves, and seek out examples of how they behave.  Shallow water waves and deep water waves have different dispersion relationships and hence behaviour, but I’m quite sure neither representation would have been adequate to describe the turbulent water that seethed at my feet.  When I first started lecturing this material some years ago now, I came across the idea (and traditional images) of a tsunami, without having any idea of what such a thing was. I thought it was some obscure Japanese folklore. Of course, since 2004 (and again in 2011), no one could possibly have any illusions about the importance of this phenomenon, even though it still doesn’t feature explicitly in my course.

There wasn’t a proper sandy beach, no shells or crabs, I saw only the remains of cuttlefish (calcium-rich aragonite, if you’re interested, and a useful and controllable buoyancy aid for the marine creature as long as it doesn’t go too deep, where apparently the gas-filled chambers of the bone implode under the pressure). The shore mainly consisted of shingle and marram grass, but there was sand a-plenty, much of it being blown into my mouth or smothering the esplanade: Lewis Carroll’s seven maids came to mind, although there was only a bulldozer which might have been attempting the same task. And where there was an accidental layer of sand covering, it had interesting ripples. Again my physicist’s mind went into annoying overdrive: what determined the periodicity of the ripples? No doubt, as with any similar instability, there is an optimum/fastest growing wavelength set by a balance of two factors, probably involving the distance the sandgrains have to migrate to build up the peaks and something to do with windspeed and how the peaks affect the local forces on the grains due to the wind. I reiterate, I was on holiday and I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO THINK ABOUT THIS….I want to switch that part of my brain off. NB this means I’m not looking for a detailed analysis of the problem in any response.

Of course, battling the power of the wind could hardly fail to remind me of the possibility of wind as an alternative energy source, and towering over Kessingland where we were staying were two large wind turbines rotating at speed. The figure I had just read in the book (Project Sunshine) co-authored by my friend and long-term collaborator Tony Ryan flashed into my mind. This book, an impressive, sweeping overview of our energy problems past, present and of course future, claims the outermost tips of the blades whizz round at 200mph. Do they? I refused to try to check that mental calculation out; I wanted to head for the pub. There weren’t any offshore installations that I could see, despite what felt like a good opportunity to extract some energy from the ferocious wind, but I have been to this part of the coast when all is still and, as both Tony’s book and the earlier Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air, by my Cavendish colleague David Mackay, now CSA at the Department of Energy and Climate Change make plain, storing energy from wind turbines and other sustainable energy sources is a major, unsolved challenge.

I had come to this part of the Suffolk coast with two aims. The first I had failed at badly; I hadn’t switched off from the day-job as well as I’d hoped, as the anecdotes above will make plain. My other aim had been to come to make my peace with this particular part of the sea. Some years ago I’d visited Southwold at a time of turbulence and upset in aspects of both my professional and personal life. Whereas, throughout my life, I have found watching agitated and tumbling water to be a powerful source of peace, grounding and wonder, on that occasion I had found it simply moved me to tears with no accrued benefit. It was almost as upsetting then to find that wave-watching no longer restored my spirits as to suffer from the underlying distress itself.

To return to the same part of the coast and feel, once more, the joy derived from the unceasing and unpredictable motion of inky, churned-up water, was the true benefit of the break. It was good too to remember just how far I have been able to recover from what had seemed to be an encounter with an unassailable brick wall. If that recovery hadn’t occurred I could never have started this blog; so this seems like a good moment to remind the reader of a truth I have discussed before, that no one, however outwardly successful, is unlikely not to have been kicked in the teeth on more than one occasion. Equally they will have found some mechanism to use that to their advantage, to find a way round the immovable object blocking the way or at least to bury the bad memories so that they no longer impede daily life.

This same stretch of coast, a bit further up near Great Yarmouth, was home to that Dickensian family of Peggotty who lived in a boat on the shore – I was reminded of this as we walked past over-wintering boats dragged high up on the shingle. As it happens, I’m just reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens. It is not irrelevant to the previous paragraph that he suffered in his youth, notably from his period in a blacking factory, and yet, as she puts it

‘What is most remarkable is the strength of the image he had of himself ,his belief in his own capacities and potential, justified by everything that came after, but quite uncertain then.’

Additionally, the vulnerability he felt in the factory found its way into many of the children he characterised in his novels and provided fertile experience for him. However, few of us are likely to have quite that degree of self-belief and robustness Tomalin attributes to Dickens, particularly as at the time under consideration he was around 13 years of age. Nevertheless, it is healthy to remember that today’s catastrophe can (although it most certainly won’t necessarily do so) blend seamlessly into much more happy circumstances, with the accompanying wisdom of experience and accrued toughness. A small nugget to try to hold onto if your world appears to be crashing down around your ears.