Advice from the Great and Good

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Athene Donald

Not so long ago I stumbled across a very enthusiastic review of a new book by the renowned entomologist EO Wilson. The book was not about ants as such, his speciality, but its content can be deduced from the title: ‘Letters to a Young Scientist‘. With such an elegiac review to encourage me, I bought the book (to read on my iPad) and looked forward to profiting from his words and admiring his wisdom. A man who has been so successful himself in his chosen field should be a good guide for those setting out (and those further down the road), I assumed. My memory told me that many years before Peter Medawar, a biologist of great distinction noted for his work on tissue rejection, a Nobel Prize winner no less, had written a book with a rather similar title. This book too I purchased (it turned out to be called ‘Advice to a Young Scientist‘ and was published in 1979; I clearly should have read it at the time). In the end, for reasons I will give below, I read them both in quick succession over the Bank Holiday weekend.

Wilson is famed as a writer (he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book On Human Nature, coincidentally published the year Medawar published his book of advice) as well as a naturalist. His style is easy to read. However, there was much in the book that irritated me. Firstly, although he tries to pay lip service to the idea that he is writing for ‘scientists’, he really isn’t. He is very much a naturalist observing and recording the (mainly ant) world and from his observations deducing hypotheses and models. He hasn’t the experience of building experiments in the laboratory, or even, in some senses, constructing experiments in the field. The advice he gives may feel of limited use to a condensed matter physicist or synthetic chemist, for instance, because the examples of how to set up problems and then solve them will feel very remote.

Furthermore, although the book is broken up into short chapters that look like they are going to convey pithy words of wisdom, frequently they serve as no more than window-dressing for stories of his ant-hunting life. Stories, moreover, that prove his cleverness; vehicles to demonstrate his perspicacity and wisdom. It is a very Whiggish kind of book, full of how careers (at least his) progress in an almost unbroken chain of successes. Again, this may not be recognizable by all young scientists! His advice is clearly to live a life as he has, a life where implicitly ambition (not simply curiosity or being driven to find out more) is a major driving force. His view is that ‘Very often ambition and entrepreneurial drive, in combination, beat brilliance.‘ One feels he says this with approval.

This self-congratulatory, explicitly ambitious tone was not of the sort I felt at one with. So I quickly turned to the Medawar book, out of curiosity but also by way of comparison. I thought maybe it would feel dated, being written more than 30 years ago. In fact, aside from some remarks about presentations when even slides (that’s 35mm slides, of a kind never seen at a lecture these days) were regarded as dangerously modern, the book felt entirely up to date in its tone. It also felt very, very different. From the book I picked up some interesting philosophical and historical titbits but nothing about the massive achievements of Medawar himself. There were no anecdotes about how clever he’d been in this or that situation, but wise words about how best to interact with those around you by being courteous, ethical, thorough and other good things; what is and isn’t meant by the scientific method and how one should tackle one’s research, all written in a very personal style but without self intruding.

When it came to ambition, Medawar made his position very clear:

Ambition: Considered as a motive force that helps to get things done, ambition is not necessarily a deadly sin, but excess of ambition can certainly be a disfigurement. An ambitious young scientist is marked out by having no time for anybody or anything that does not promote or bear upon his work. …The ambitious make too obvious a point of being polite to those who can promote their interests and are proportionately uncivil to those who cannot.

I cannot imagine Wilson having written those words, nor even believing them if he’d read them. For Wilson ‘Real scientists don’t take vacations’. They also ought to get out of all administration work and, according to him: ‘Make excuses, dodge, plead, trade‘ to get out of this drudgery, but he does concede you may need to take weekends off ‘for rest and diversion‘. I suspect the scientist Wilson most admires might equate with some of the jerks I’ve written about before with disparagement. Medawar, on the other hand, himself headed one of the major UK Institutes (the National Institute for Medical Research from 1961 for 8 years, until he had a stroke). He was a very influential leader of research, an effective communicator with politicians and first-rate spokesman (and writer) for science. Not for him dodging and pleading to get out of that line of work.

I did wonder to what extent the difference in tone between the two books might also lie in their different country of provenance. It is possible that Medawar is a typical self-deprecating stereotypical Brit who resists the brash naked ambition of the colonies exemplified (again if I may stereotype) by Wilson. I can imagine that distinction has some weight. Wilson’s book, albeit women feature, is also a very macho book (he writes approvingly of a female PhD student of his who was ‘audacious’, indeed he devotes a whole chapter to her story). Medawar, on the other hand, has a whole chapter dedicated to ‘Sexism and Racism in Science’ at a time when such topics must barely have begun to feature in most scientists’ minds. It is written with great sensitivity and awareness of the challenges that minorities faced (and face) in science and still feels apposite today.

So my advice to young scientists would be to get hold of the older classic text. It has far more genuine, dispassionate advice and less personal anecdote of how one particular scientist/naturalist made their way. If you want a signpost about the do’s and don’ts of how to get on in (academic) science, peppered with historical context, a little Baconian thought and some useful epigrams I recommend Medawar. If, on the other hand, you want the brave Whiggish story of one’s man adventures with ants around the world – Wilson is the man for you.

Posted in Book Review, Science Culture | Tagged , , , | 13 Comments

Impact for Women

Posted on May 24, 2013 by Athene Donald

Next week I am due to share a platform with Dave Delpy, CEO of the EPSRC amongst others, discussing the ‘Impact of Impact’. This is an event organised by a new student body, the Cambridge University Science and Policy Exchange. I will not (I am rather pleased to say) be discussing that controversial topic of impact as implied within Research Council walls – I’ll leave that to Dave to defend. My role is to discuss how research funding can and should impact on gender issues. If the money is tight, as it is, why should we use any of it specifically to support and promote women in science? As I’ve been pulling my ideas together, I’ve come across a recent article written by the US-based astronomer Meg Urry, who always has interesting things to say about gender issues. Although her piece deals specifically with issues in physics education, much of what she says resonates more broadly.

Perhaps we should start off by asking, what happens (and has been happening) when we exclude women from science, or at least deter them from pursuing science actively? There is the simple moral argument that this is wrong and it is indefensible to make life difficult for 50% of the population, but in the context of ‘impact’ we can go much further. It may be hard to quantify the value of some of the statements that follow, so I’m not going to put a pound sign against them, but the arguments at a qualitative level ought to be pretty compelling.

In the Board room, there is increasing evidence that a diverse team leads to higher profits. Why? Because different viewpoints permit a richer picture to be built of up of markets, consumers and hence of products that may make money. If the only viewpoint that is factored in is white, middle-class middle-aged men (for instance) then many potential customers may be left unsatisfied. Advertisers have appreciated this for many years (hence the use of focus groups targeting different groups to explore possibilities); it seems senior managers have been slower to appreciate the benefits of a multi-pronged approach to a problem.

Specifically in the area of innovation there are some very specific gender-related issues that may need to be considered when designing new products: ideas such as, what is the size/weight of the person for whom it is being designed or around whom the design is being configured. This applies, for instance and as I have written about before, when working out how safe cars are. It is not sufficient to use a standard male-sized crash dummy to work out safety features, the fact that women and children are also likely to be in a typical car must be considered. Yet for years this simple fact was overlooked. Much more on these issues can be found at the EU sponsored Gendered Innovations  website.

In science as in innovation, it is not one-size fits all. Having a diverse workforce, research or management team will, on average, be likely to lead to more creative solutions, whatever the project. Many projects need big teams to cover different aspects of a problem. This may mean diversity in discipline, an obvious example being the LHC. But diversity more broadly may, as in companies and in product development work, equally be beneficial in creativity and seeing problems from many directions.

What does this have to do with the ‘Impact of Impact’? Why should research funders care about these relatively intangible ideas? The answer to this is obvious. At the moment, despite girls getting good grades at school and frequently better than the boys on average, despite many courses (though not in physics or engineering) having equal numbers of boys and girls or even a majority of girls, the women aren’t sticking with the disciplines higher up the ladder or (even worse) they are being filtered out for reasons other than simple excellence: the atmosphere may feel inimical, working practices less than favourable and the challenges of achieving an attractive work-life balance may seem insurmountable. So, at the top of the academic heap, as well as other STEM professions, the numbers of women remain pitifully low. Yet, for the reasons I’ve just given, this is (economically) likely to be bad for science and the nation. Hence, there is a clear justification for spending hard cash on interventions to support the women who start off in the academic race and thereby encourage them not to quit.

An inimical workplace may not readily respond to mere injection of cash, but there are interventions that are relatively cheap yet demonstrably beneficial. As a specific example, consider the use of funds to facilitate returners from long term leave (typically maternity leave) getting back up to speed. A recent pilot ‘returning carers’ scheme’ in my own university has funded things like airfares for an additional person (be it nanny, the other parent or any other member of the family) to accompany the recipient to a conference or field trip so as to provide childcare. By enabling a young parent to attend a conference and so maintain an international profile in the first vital years of a child’s life, one of the perennial challenges for young mothers can be overcome at modest cost. The L’Oreal/UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowships in the UK are another source of funds which can be applied in an incredibly flexible way that wouldn’t normally be allowable on a standard research grant. Perhaps Research Councils might wish to consider this.

Or, to cite another example of issues that can hold people back, particularly women, how about running workshops on confidence-building to facilitate making that application for promotion? Again, this is something Cambridge has tried out recently (and not just for academic women) finding it to be something for which there was a huge unsatisfied appetite. A little bit of money goes a long way on workshops and many individuals can be reached simultaneously. At an individual level one to one coaching may become valuable to train the leaders of tomorrow, but is obviously far more expensive.

Finally, if interventions are successful in keeping women in science – not just academic science although that is the context in which the above examples are given, but other settings as well – then we will benefit far more, as a nation, from the money invested in their education. To train so many young women who then walk away and end up unable/unwilling to utilise their hard-acquired STEM-based skills is illogical and wasteful. It makes no economic sense. We should do better.

Posted in Science Funding, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Muddled Mess or Merely Work in Progress?

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Athene Donald

What do our surroundings say about us? If we choose to work in an office strewn with bits of paper, open files, journals and other debris, is this a testament to the fact our minds are on higher things and we are misunderstood geniuses? Or does it simply indicate that our parents didn’t berate us enough as children to keep our rooms tidy? Here I’m not referring to an office full of decaying banana skins or mugs decorated with interesting strains of bacillus. That’s just unhygienic and only indicates slovenly habits. I’m talking about the office with piles, neat or otherwise of ‘work in progress’.

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.

REF desk2

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.

Posted in Research, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Will This Look Good on my CV?

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Athene Donald

This is a question I was asked recently in the context of outreach work (I answered yes), but it applies across the board. For those climbing the academic ladder specifically, it perhaps amounts to ‘does anything other than research count?’ I would again say yes. So what follows are some thoughts on career progression provoked by a variety of recent conversations concerning different levels of seniority.

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.

Posted in Equality | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

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