Balmy Beginnings, But What Comes Next?

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Athene Donald

Cambridge – like much of the country – was bathed in sunshine, hot sunshine this weekend. It was that weekend when our roads are cluttered up by cars full of suitcases, assorted bulging bags and guitar cases, and with bikes attached to the roof. It would normally have been the weekend when the railway station was heaving too, except that Railtrack (presumably) decided to select this particular weekend as the one when there were no trains to and from London so that a new footbridge could be installed. This bridge will serve the additional platform that is currently being built to enable longer trains to serve the city.  One hopes the consequence means trains will no longer have to lurk outside the station waiting for a platform to be vacated – to the enormous frustration of cooped-up commuters in a hurry.  In due course this all sounds like it will be a marked improvement, but for the irritated undergraduates reduced to buses for the last stage of their journey, I am sure it did not feel like one this weekend.

Yes, the new academic year has arrived even in Cambridge. Freshers will have consumed vast amounts of caffeine and alcohol (do they still offer sherry at the various start of year functions for the plentiful societies, or is it tepid Chardonnay these days?) and be getting used to college food.  They will have met many new faces, some of them who may be friends for life, some of whom will rapidly irritate the hell out of them when they play loud music next to their bedroom in the small hours (or conversely be the neighbours who complain about their own behaviour if guilty themselves of this act). Maybe they will be hard at work trying to network, to guess who might be a future cabinet minister or CEO of a multimillion pound business or indeed the person who will show them the light in some less academic way or other. Or maybe they will be more reclusive and just want to be able to think and be stretched by a regular diet of lectures and supervisions, once they have worked out what a supervision is. They will be trying to get to grips with when and where their lectures are, probably not helped by Directors of Studies feeling a bit lost now that the official Cambridge University Reporter  containing the Lecture List is no longer produced in print form but only on the web.  Even when they know where the lectures are, they still have to find them, weaving their way uncertainly around the streets on unfamiliar bicycles. There is something fairly terrifying about watching the undergraduates from Fitzwilliam and Girton speed down Castle Hill in their serried ranks at a few minutes to 9 on the first day of lectures which, logically in Cambridge, falls on a Thursday.  Do they know the rules of the road? Have they checked their brakes work? There are few places where brakes really matter in Cambridge, but the crossing of Castle Street with Chesterton Road is undoubtedly one of them.

As they have walked around the city centre, unnaturally bright and hot for October, they may be misled into thinking everything they have heard about Cambridge weather coming straight from the Urals is wrong. In a few weeks they will reconsider, as icy blasts of winds face them as they battle to get to lectures on time and the wonderfully historic windows in their old-fashioned rooms rattle but do little else to prevent the cold air entering their bedrooms.  They will be counting their blessings that their education is still regarded as a public good, unlike their successors who will face a much more uncertain future.  I am sure my university will not be expecting to find the supply of first rate applicants drying up, but we may well expect hiccoughs over our admissions, particularly in terms of those from socio-economically deprived areas, however hard admissions tutors and others work to get the message out their our admissions policy is not weighted against them and generous bursaries really are available.

I would like to think these new undergraduates (and indeed those returning for later years’ study) will take a minute to read our response  to the Government’s HE white paper. University Council has not pulled its punches. As the THE described  it, Cambridge ‘savages’ the white paper, expressing dismay over various aspects. (Oxford too is quoted as savaging it, but I haven’t yet seen their response on the web).  Having been at the Council meeting when the decision was taken to sign the response off, I know just how strongly we collectively feel about what the White Paper may mean for the sector; as with the statement we made in the autumn on fees, we are willing to put our views out there for all to read without waiting for an FOI, I suspect to many people’s surprise.  As dons we may usually be described as eggheads living in an ivory tower, but that description would probably fit remarkably few of us, and certainly not those of us who are willing to put in the dedicated work serving on Council implies.  At this point I would also like to pay tribute to those students – undergraduate and graduate – who serve with us. During the nearly 3 years I have been on Council I have been tremendously impressed by all of our student members who are so articulate and have the courage of their convictions to speak out and challenge us older folk, as well as work closely with us to do what we can to maintain our freedoms and our excellence.

Cambridge at this time of year hums with promise and promises, with excitement and expectation. Long may it continue to do so.

 

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Logic, What Logic?

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Athene Donald

This week I attended the Elizabeth Johnson lecture at the Institute of Physics, given by Mary Curnock Cook, chief executive of UCAS.  Her topic was Gender Maps in Higher Education, and it explored the differences between male and female progression through the various key stages at school and subsequent admission to university. There were a lot of statistics, fascinating comparisons of different parameters, and because I didn’t take copious notes I can’t reproduce them all. Her starting point was the BIS report which demonstrated a significant difference in the ‘graduate premium’ – crudely the difference between lifetime income between those with degrees and those without – for men and women. This premium amounts to the tune of £121K for men and £82K for women. I think many of us in the audience were surprised the graduate premium is as small as it apparently is, only £2-3k per year, but the difference by gender is stark. When she had read those figures she had started questioning what lay beneath. There is of course the possibility that it is nothing less than women on average being more likely to take some time out for families, perhaps working a few years part time, and so falling behind, but there may be other more worrying causes for concern. So she started delving into the wealth of statistics both publicly available and within the 50 years of information the UCCA/UCAS files hold on admissions.

There have frequently been stories in the news about girls doing better at most subjects at most exams throughout schooling, but I certainly hadn’t known that when it came to university admissions men were slightly more likely to be made an offer than women, for a given ‘tariff’ from A levels etc. At first sight that sounds rather shocking, but there may be a perfectly innocent reason: men are more likely to be doing A levels in the sciences, certainly in the physical sciences, and more likely to be applying for a STEM degree course where offers are on average slightly lower than for arts and humanities courses (though the data also shows that maths and physics A levels are ‘tougher’ than say English and psychology).  So, it is always difficult to say one is comparing like with like.  The Royal Society has done a lot of analysis of A level choices, based on data gathered for their fourth State of the Nation report  published earlier this year. The choices boys and girls make are strikingly different at A levels around the 3 sciences, with far more boys opting for physics (singly or in combination with other sciences) and biology on its own being most popular with girls. It could be argued that the reason boys get lower offers is that they are systematically making pragmatic choices to optimise their admission to university. This argument has been put forward in the context of the David Lammy attack on Oxbridge regarding Afro-Caribbean admissions, or lack thereof, namely that black children may be applying for the most competitive courses such as medicine, whereas private schools know that if their (possibly not-top-of-the-class) pupils want to get into these universities without a real vocational pull, they should be encouraged to apply for ‘softer’, less competitive options such as Classics. Of course if you genuinely want to be a doctor such a course of action would be fairly futile.

So, to return to Mary Curnock Cook’s talk, her final point was that for the first time  median pay differences in the current 22-29 age group actually show women earning slightly more than men, something also shown in the  recent CMI survey of junior executives. Perhaps the gender pay gap really will vanish in the years ahead as that cohort of young women, whose academic credentials at school now exceed the males, progress through the system.  She furnished us with much food for thought, and far too many statistics to be digested in one sitting. But nevertheless, as she was the first to admit, it could only be a superficial skating over of the analyses that potentially could be done with the rich data in principle available for consideration.

The questions that followed the talk made clear just how many further issues were potentially of interest to the audience, and what sort of questions need to be explored if we are really to understand not only the graduate premium and any gender differences, but also how schooling, socio-economic and ethnic background come into play. One question regarding why women weren’t yet showing up amongst many prize winners she in essence left to me to answer: the answer I gave is very simple but worth remembering. Awards committees can only award prizes to those nominated and people must remember to do this. It is too easy to ‘forget the women’, so this is a plea to all Heads of Department or other senior researchers reading this article to remember to do so. Nevertheless, the numbers of women receiving prizes is increasing (this year’s recently announced IOP prizes only seem to feature 2 women amongst the 16 prize-winners; the Royal Society is doing rather better in 2011 with 28% of its winners being women, even excluding the Rosalind Franklin Prize, up from 12% in 2010).

However, there was one question that left her – and I would guess most of the rest of the audience – fairly gobsmacked. Maybe collectively we misunderstood what the questioner implied when he asked something along the lines of ‘had there been any research to study whether women wrote less logically than men?’ It was a rather rambling question but the implication was that he thought women progressed less well because they were incapable of logic. Mary answered very diplomatically, and a representative from WES (if I recall correctly) pointed out research showed that exams, for instance, were marked more harshly if they had a woman’s name attached than if they had a man’s. But I doubt the questioner felt he had been answered, whereas the rest of us probably felt he didn’t deserve an answer.

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Nodes and Links

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Athene Donald

This week I was invited to talk at the annual conference organised by Postdocs at the Institute of Cancer Research; the Conference’s theme was Networking and I was asked to talk about

how networking has influenced your career and any top tips you might have regarding networking techniques.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to spend much of the day there, which was imaginatively held at a ten-pin bowling alley so that informal networking could take place within the context of rivalry over strikes and near-misses. I couldn’t even watch the speed-networking event – 3 minutes to tell your life story – or listen to other speakers. I hope they had a fruitful day between themselves.

Networking is a phrase that was not much in circulation in my early days. I assume it’s part of management-speak, and certainly people like Suzanne Doyle Morris (author of Beyond the Boys’ Club) and other writers on the subject of self-help are keen advocates of the advantages of networking in order to progress. They are probably right, but setting out to do it by rushing up to people, shaking them by the hand and repeating their name several times to imprint it on one’s brain – which I think is what self-help books tend to advise – always seems a bit over the top to me (although not repeating their name several times, by the time you’ve reached my age, means you don’t remember it. Apologies to everyone whose name I have ever forgotten….I’m afraid that’s quite a few people).  Nevertheless, talking to people wherever you meet them and then trying to file away their names, life histories and professional activities undoubtedly has the potential to be very beneficial.

I like John Ziman’s description of this in his book Real Science, taking a sociological point of view, looking at the way we interact in terms of the culture we produce. He stresses that a network actually has two components, the nodes – which are the people – and the links which represent the activities and modes of communication that bring two nodes together. So, it isn’t sufficient that two people meet, shake hands and, like ships that pass in the night, move on. There has to be an interaction of sorts for the network to form. Shaking someone by the hand and repeating their name three times is not enough to forge a link, there must be something more specific and memorable.

So, when asked to talk about networking I don’t usually talk about people I have met, or conferences where I have deliberately set out to get to know some famous figure, because I don’t think I have ever operated like that. When I think about my career path, more relevant to me, was the sabbatical visitor from Australia I met when I had just moved into the field of polymers who was delighted to help me get to grips with some very basic concepts which I would have been embarrassed to ask my professor about or the committee member I met a couple of times, with whom several years later I felt I had enough familiarity to contact about some research, out of which a brief collaboration ensued, with corresponding publication.  I don’t think one should set out to cultivate the ‘great and good’ but build links wherever we can.

These links need to be strong, thick cables, to support a network of any meaning, not just mere bits of fluff loosely assembled. So, they need to be worked on to provide that strength. I tend to believe, although I know not everyone would agree, that collaborations only work well when there is some good chemistry between the participants. If the collaboration is simply a case of one person using one sort of technique on a sample, and someone else using another then that may be sufficient. But if, as in much of what I do, one is working with people from other disciplines that minimalist approach to collaboration really won’t suffice. It takes time to build up a good rapport with someone when every other word they utter initially you have to ask them to explain  in words of one syllable so you can grasp a concept that is their bread and butter – and they need to do the same in reverse. So, meeting someone briefly may be sufficient to create that first strand in constructing the link, but time, energy, enthusiasm and some sort of personal chemistry will be needed if the potential collaboration is to mature into something that can withstand the frustrations of research.

Another type of networking involves building up links to people to whom you can turn for advice. In this case the strength of the link needs only to be sufficient that you feel comfortable approaching them with whatever query you may have. Perhaps you’re job-hunting and recall you met someone in your field from the university advertising a post; can you ask them for some inside information about the strengths and weaknesses of the relevant department? Or you may recall chatting to someone you chanced to sit next to one meal at a conference and they had expertise in a field you want to move into – can you drop them an email asking for advice? Email makes this easier because if they want to say ‘no’ they have time to frame this tactfully in their response, causing less mutual embarrassment.  Such occurrences can be relevant at any career stage.

But again, to my mind. the most useful people are those with whom you ‘click’, perhaps fuelled by alcohol when you bump into them several times at the conference bar, and who over time can become people with whom you feel able to share your ups and downs in a more personal sense. We all need people like this, ideally people a step or two removed from one’s own environment but close enough to understand the challenges staring one in the face: should you accept some new responsibility (those in your own department may have a vested interest),  or go abroad for a period? What about the problem we all face sometime or other, how should you deal with a difficult colleague – always tricky to discuss with ‘locals’. It is good to get a spread of views and external ones may well approach the issue with a different perspective from those in your immediate circle, but you have to be able to trust the person you are asking, and this most certainly doesn’t happen overnight.

I think many of the aspects of networking beloved by self-help authors relate much more to some sort of instant gratification, and possibly are more appropriate for spheres beyond science and/or academia. The little I have read suggest this, using phrases such as ‘marketing yourself’ and ‘connecting to the right people’, as if you know who these are in advance. Perhaps this is relevant if you are setting about getting a job and meet the Section Head of a company, but may be less relevant for progression in science. Nevertheless,  seek people out and see what transpires. If they are your peers they may turn into friends, if they are more senior they may become a useful source of advice and supporters of your career, in essence mentors, in either case they may offer opportunities for scientific collaboration. But nothing comes for free and only by putting effort in will the rewards be forthcoming.

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Why Should She Do it All?

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Athene Donald

My recent article in the THE about cultural expectations being imposed on young girls (which also appeared as a post here) got a mixed reception in the online comments.  Several seemed to have failed to grasp the central point that upbringing does affect what girls (and boys) feel is acceptable and desirable regardless of any intrinsic neurological differences, and also appeared to think I was urging that every career should have a 50:50 split between the genders. It is depressing to find how little people are prepared to invest in reading an article properly before shooting off some reply. But the following response from ‘RS’ (quoted below in italics) is interesting in the assumptions it implicitly and explicitly makes.

As for ‘Female scientists can have families, you’re not excluded from that either’ – the thing is, due to biology, a man is physically capable of becoming a parent without taking time off work, a woman isn’t. Undeniably true

Generally academia will view you as unserious and uncommitted to your work if you take time off to have a family, and in the hell of the academic job market, even a brief interruption of full-time research can seriously damage your prospects. This is the sort of defeatism that makes change so hard, but it is also a serious assumption that – I would like to believe – is of decreasing validity. It is why the current debate about the rules in the REF about maternity leave is so important (see here for a fairly strongly worded introduction to the issue if you aren’t up to speed on this one). As long as time out to have a baby is accepted as implying a lack of commitment women, indeed society, will continue to have problems. The answer is not to say women should not have children if they want a career but to address the circumstances which lead to the disadvantages being referred to and change the mindset which perpetuates the myth that wanting a family/life equates to lack of commitment.

This is made worse by social expectations that it is the mother who will be primarily in charge of child care, not just in infancy, but until adolescence. So yes, it’s possible, but it results in women, unless they choose not to have children, finding it harder to rise through the ranks. Again this is defeatism. The social expectations will possibly begin to be challenged (I am optimistic on this front) by the changing law around paternity leave.  In which case, post-delivery, in principle we should only ever talk about parental leave.

This topic is brought into sharp focus by the recent release of the much-hyped (though not well reviewed) film ‘I don’t know how she does it all’. You cannot stir without coming across reviews of the film  and  articles prompted by it, or see the face of the Sarah Jane Parker – who plays the ‘she’ of the title – splattered on the sides of buses. It is the film of the book by Allison Pearson, a book I would not recommend to anyone. My mother (!)  kindly gave it to me to read, rather recently in fact, and I just found it intensely annoying.  In case you aren’t familiar with it the book describes some female financial hotshot who desperately tries to combine continuing as a hotshot with being the perfect mum until she realises that she is miserable and quits the day-job to stay at home with her children. At least, that is my memory of the outline, but what is so irritating – to my mind – are the things she feels she has to do to retain her status as Perfect Mum. The iconic moment of the book/film seems to be the image of her at midnight hard at work ‘distressing’ mince pies – distressing them in this context meaning to make a Sainsbury’s version look home-made and therefore acceptable to the other mothers (and in the book it is definitely mothers not parents that are being referred to). Maybe that really is the world some people move in, but I’m glad to say not me. I would guess probably not most scientists, but perhaps I’m wrong.

I doubt the book could describe a stressed scientist parent because surely, on average, we believe there is more to life than needing to shop for that ‘essential’ Gucci handbag (or Armani suit for men) to impress at work, and making sure our kids win the best costume prize on dressing up day. We have other ways of expressing our competitiveness on a daily basis than through our children, because that’s the academic world for you.  Maybe we are too abstracted in our research always to be the perfect parent, but distressing mince pies just seems an act too far. But that’s absolutely not the same thing as saying scientists don’t want or shouldn’t want to be parents.At this point I should put down a marker to say that once upon a time I helped organise a Blue Peter Sale and cooked a gross of chocolate buns for it; it’s not that I think none of that sort of good parenting matters, it’s just that one really doesn’t have to attempt to do everything.

I believe strongly we – and by ‘we’ I mean those parents, and particularly women, who have managed both to have children and a scientific career – need to counteract that pernicious message that younger women still receive along the lines of science career + children don’t add up, and state categorically that it can be done, albeit with difficulty and a lot of hard work. If you don’t believe this, let me refer you (as I’ve done before) to Ottoline Leyser’s fantastic booklet of 64 case studies demonstrating the myriad ways of accomplishing it . The hard work should be devoted to nurturing our children and our science, not feeding material insecurities in either ourselves or our children. Shed the guilt about the state of one’s mince pies or the lack of a pristine ironed shirt, and concentrate on what really matters which is healthy, happy children and exciting research. Life is hard enough without adding insecurities of this sort. The financial world is presumably different – maybe one’s ability to iron really does matter there, although probably it is the home help who does it –  and I, for one, am glad I’m not part of it.

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How Do You Know How to Write a Thesis?

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Athene Donald

I wrote my PhD thesis so long ago it was typed for me by someone else based on my handwritten chapters; the diagrams were drawn laboriously and messily by me with a pen, ink and a fair number of smudges; and the micrographs were produced for me by the group photographer. I have absolutely no recollection of being told what the correct form for a thesis was; indeed I don’t even remember my supervisor reading it, but suspect that there my memory is at fault. Surely he didn’t just let me get on with it! These days most universities will run courses on it, Vitae has useful web pages on the topic and there are a fair number of books to help. Nevertheless, even with a supportive supervisor it is still a daunting task for students, made worse by far fewer opportunities to write essays, reports or even extended exam- question answers than in the past. Students don’t necessarily get opportunities to write prose. Picking the brains of previous students, reading their theses and learning by example all ought to be used to supplement self-help and formal supervisory advice as thesis writing gets under way, although it should also be borne in mind there is no truly ‘right’ answer, no single way to do it (not even, in general, a single structure that would suffice) although some ways are definitely better than others. These thoughts are in part prompted by reading John Ziman’s illuminating decade-old text Real Science in which he refers to

newcomers to research…. entering a self-perpetuating ‘tribe’, where their behaviour is governed by many unspoken rules.

This is true of much of life, of course, and one frequently gets it wrong in ways that matter to a greater or lesser degree. At least these days, faux pas are unlikely to lead to the sort of social ostracism the rigid social mores in the past about dress or speech used to provoke. Nevertheless, as with all these things, the scope for making a fool of oneself is ever-present, with the potential for consequent damage to one’s self esteem, even if a lot of red ink from your supervisor is not in itself life- or even career-threatening. However, before a chapter – let alone a whole thesis – reaches the supervisor, there are things that can and should be done to reduce the risks of that flood of ink being stimulated, such as those I mention above.

As both a supervisor, and an examiner for my own and other universities, I have read a fair few theses in my time. Although upon occasion the results are fascinating, it has to be said reading theses is rarely entertaining, often for reasons that are not the fault of the student. The form of the thesis, starting off with a lengthy literature review and meticulous description of experimental techniques, is frequently and necessarily very boring. These should be written to be comprehensible to the next generation of students who will be following up on the work described. That means the methodology is frequently described in exhaustive (for which read exhausting) if appropriate detail and the literature review can describe papers which are only too familiar, not least because the examiner may personally have written a fair proportion of them. In my experience the examiner may have a keen desire to skip a lot of it.

However, that would be unwise because our job is to see that the student understands what is going on; sometimes they don’t, or at least they don’t appear to from the text. This is the sort of place where the unwritten rules of what should be included often come to the fore – and it should be recognized, reinforcing Ziman’s use of the word ‘tribe’, that different disciplines have subtly different rules about some of the following, which can also confuse the examiner as well as the student. Students may cut and paste diagrams from other texts (such as a previous student’s thesis from the same group) without due reference, or with an inadequate caption; perhaps the figures lack annotations, which would make things so much clearer, or are reduced so small it is hard to see without a magnifying glass; sometimes the figure isn’t even referred to in the text at all. I have seen examples of all such as an examiner, and in the results sections as well as the introductory chapters. I have seen cases where the whole style of presentation throughout the thesis – perhaps in terms of detail, or referencing – lacks something. An indadequate bibliography is often a cause for examiners’ complaints (missing key references, not up to date, citing reviews solely rather than original papers would be examples of familiar complaints).  I would have expected that osmosis from reading other student’s theses would have put across many of these fundamental ideas, but clearly not always. (I do believe it is the supervisor’s responsibility to pick such issues up before submission, but that also doesn’t always seem to happen for a variety of reasons, both good and bad). Nevertheless, it is worth bearing in mind that often it is during discussion of these introductory chapters that the student goes adrift in the viva. Writing a thesis about some pet technique without having a good grasp of fundamentals of how it works is prone to lead to difficulties; be warned.

Before students start getting very, very nervous upon reading this, I should state that it is really rather rare for examiners to fail students – even to fail a student a first time, let alone irrevocably at the reconvened viva. There was one unfortunate occasion when I turned up to be told I had to fail a student so that their supervisor could be taken to task. It was a great relief subsequently to be told by this same student it was the best thing that had ever happened to him as he was then able to proceed with his research with a different and more suitable supervisor. (This student is, by the by, a professor now). I have only completely failed a student once. The external and I felt terrible about it, agonised over whether we were doing the student justice, but the corrections that had been made between the first and second submissions were insubstantial and certainly did not come anywhere near to what we had indicated were needed. Furthermore, in the second viva the student seemed no more on top of the problem than first time around, so we felt we had no choice. But when we told the student the outcome he shrugged his shoulders and said he would have been surprised if we had done otherwise. Bizarrely it seemed to be less of a deal for him than for us. But by and large examiners want to pass students – honestly.

Writing a thesis can feel very intimidating. It should represent the culmination of years of hard work and sometimes it can be incredibly difficult to see the wood for the trees. Often it feels natural to write things up chronologically, in the order the work was carried out. Since research rarely actually proceeds in a linear fashion, this is often not the clearest way to put across the outcomes to an outsider, but stepping back sufficiently to see how best to present the results logically can be a challenge. But as the style of thesis-writing is, as Ziman implied more generally, determined by custom it is worthwhile trying to establish what those appropriate customs are before starting. Some students clearly pick these up unconsciously, others probably have to work much harder, and seek advice much more often in order to produce something that fits the bill. It is to a large extent a case of learning by example. Perhaps one of the most satisfying compliments a student of mine ever paid me in a thesis acknowledgement section (these are always interesting  to read, whether as examiner or supervisor) was to say I had taught them the ‘importance of caution and communication’. When I quizzed him about this he said that I had made him think much more clearly both about how to sift the evidence and then how to put it down clearly in writing. Still, supervisors, however willing, can only do so much. It is not our place to write that thesis nor would we be much good at it – it is the student who has done the work after all and has mastery over all the twists and turns of the research. The thesis should be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to show off that mastery.

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