The Viva Experience

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Athene Donald

I’ve seen a few posts around recently from anxious PhD students approaching their vivas in fear and trepidation or discussing the experience in the immediate aftermath. For instance, here is @hapsci discussing things after the event in a state of post-exam exhaustion and fellow OT blogger Erika Cule sought advice from her OT colleagues over twitter and posted some of the responses here. So what’s it like from the other side of the desk? I thought I’d pass on some thoughts from the point of view of someone who has examined a good few theses in different universities, even in different countries, as well as across a range of disciplines.

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.

 

 

 

Posted in Research | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Once Absence of Impact used to be the Fashionable Thing to Claim

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Athene Donald

Up and down the land, academics from Vice Chancellors down are sweating over 3 letters: REF. This dread acronym, standing for the Research Excellence Framework, must be absorbing a fantastic number of hours of time for many people and it is not something to be taken lightly. Many millions of pounds are at stake, as well as departmental honour. Some aspects merely require simple metrics – such as on PhD student numbers and grant income from different sources – but others are much more challenging to construct. Long narratives are required about the environment in which we work and how we ensure it is an appropriate and supportive place for everyone. HEFCE guidelines make it very clear that they want to hear about diversity issues this time around and have acted sensibly (in the end) about reducing outputs for women who’ve had time out on maternity leave. We need to describe our strategic plans and how well we’ve accomplished what we said we’d do in 2008 during REF’s predecessor the RAE (Research Excellence Framework). Staff have to choose their ‘best’ 4 outputs, without using journal impact factors as the crude measure of what makes ‘best’ – although not everyone is convinced that institutions are abiding by the rules on this one (see here and here).

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 18th 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.

 

Posted in History of Science, Research, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Changing the Departmental Mind-set

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Athene Donald

Another bumper batch of Athena Swan awards have just been announced: ever more universities and departments are participating. With the hint of financial consequences looming from RCUK funders for those STEM departments that don’t demonstrate commitment to improving the climate for women (indeed, regarding diversity in general) to add to Dame Sally Davies’ unequivocal statement regarding Clinical Schools, the increase in engagement is unsurprising. Nevertheless, fewer than two thirds of the HEIs with STEM courses are signed up. But does an award really mean a department has its culture sorted? And what does it take to get an award?

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.)

Posted in Science Culture, Uncategorized, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Practice, Practice, Practice: Getting that Talk Right

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Athene Donald

As my last post noted, my mind is inclined to go for a walk during seminars if I’m not careful. Recently these wanderings provoked me to consider all the pitfalls of seminar-giving – by young and old alike. Experience doesn’t necessarily bring wisdom and the best-laid plans can go astray for all kinds of reasons. Nevertheless, the advice to those just beginning to learn the art of giving talks must start with the words ‘practice, practice, practice’ – go through your talk as many times as it takes to feel comfortable. It won’t cure all the problems, or cause the fear to evaporate, but winging it as a novice is never a wise tactic. Indeed, it has to be questioned if winging it is ever a wise tactic but with experience at least comes some modicum of knowing how to pick yourself up when you’ve lost your own train of thought or found the slides weren’t exactly as you’d thought in either order or content.

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.

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Feeling Feverish

Posted on April 13, 2013 by Athene Donald

Last week I was hit by some nebulous virus (I assume) that left me feverish and under the weather without actually confining me to bed. My brain turned to mush and even answering simple emails felt a challenge, a situation rendered more serious by the fact I’d just come back from a week away from my computer so the email mountain was particularly large.  OK, to be more honest, the email mountain had been building up steadily since around the start of March when my diary had got severely overfull due to a plethora of London meetings and a trip to Brussels. The pressure of knowing that there was a horrendously large number of urgent emails, carefully colour coded in my Inbox to indicate their relative criticality, did nothing to improve the functioning of my brain as I stared at my laptop screen.

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.

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