An Influx of Visitors

Posted on July 30, 2011 by Athene Donald

This week I found myself standing on the platform at Ely, changing trains there on a day when the trains were actually behaving for once. It was a beautiful summer’s evening, and staring out at the green fields across from the station made one feel somewhere in the neighbourhood there must have been the ‘sweet sound of willow hitting leather’, as well as simply the pair of elderly gentleman throwing a ball for a pair of black Labradors. Too often Ely station is a miserable place to find oneself, waiting for trains that never arrive in the icy bleakness of a late winter’s afternoon; knowing that when a train does arrive to take one on to Peterborough it will be across the curious desolateness that is the fens, and on to the flat blackness of the bare fields that abut the line as it wends its way north towards Yorkshire. But this week, it was basked in golden sunshine, the trains were running on time and the sensations that were sparked were very different.

Yes, it’s that time of year when my home town of Cambridge too takes on a different complexion. The undergraduates have sweated through the summer term, their truncated world of revision summed up by the graffiti

Are you dead or just revising?

The subsequent long days of partying leading on to graduation, with associated ritual and Latin are past, the rabbit fur (fake) hoods returned to Eve and Ravenscroft. What does one remember of one’s graduation? In my case my predominant memory is the fear I would trip over my long skirt as I rose from the kneeling stool, a fear enhanced by having severely twisted my ankle a little while before; others have said they don’t remember too much because they were hung over (I didn’t get drunk the night before I graduated, merely got locked into the grounds of St Johns as my friends and I sat and gossipped on the grass through our last balmy evening together, failing to notice the passage of time until too late).

But now the town is empty of our own students, and the college rooms are full of other students, from other countries attending other courses. And the Victorian and Edwardian mansions proudly display signs advertising one English language school or another, with the kids from all parts of the world wearing matching tracksuits or clutching identical rucksacks in some unattractive bilious shade.  They are, I’m sure, good for the local economy as they eat many an ice cream on Jesus Green or Parker’s Pieces, trying out rounders or volleyball, burning holes in the grass with single use barbecues and (if they are old enough, or look it) straying into the local pubs investigating the real ales on offer. Added to which it would seem that their language schools include in the overall price of the tuition fee, bicycle hire.

At this point the mask I have adopted to describe a beautiful English idyll comes off, as I transform into a grumpy (relatively) old woman irritated by people’s bicycling habits. Cambridge students are bad enough, but at least they tend to know which side of the road they are meant to cycle on. They still do daft – not to mention illegal – things such as riding without lights in the winter’s evening or nipping onto the pavement when they want to jump the lights or a traffic jam. But they are likely to know that what they are doing is against the Highway Code, and are alert to the fact that other road-users may be doing things which could conflict with their own actions. Not so the students from abroad, often only in their early teens and probably (unless Dutch and we don’t tend to see many of them, probably because their English is already perfect) not used to cycling on roads, on either the right- or left-hand side.

So, they do insane, suicidal things, and they do things that are just plain irritating for the local law-abiding inhabitants (there are a few of us out there). Even on foot, they tend to hunt in packs, walking 6 abreast down narrow streets and across the bridges, without a care in the world and certainly without an apparent awareness that people approaching them don’t want to be forced into the road, up a lamp post or be trampled underfoot. Clearly being loose, unsupervised and abroad is so exciting the idea that other people live in the city escapes their notice. On bikes they are even more of a menace.

A while back there was a particular junction where a steady stream of them would whizz downhill every day and straight across the main road that is Madingley Road as they aimed for the further pavement. Every day, as I cycled into work, I would watch these lunatics and wonder when one of them would get killed straight in front of me. Luckily lights were introduced at this junction before I ever saw a student fall under the wheels of some unsuspecting driver. They are a menace because what they do requires everyone else to take evasive action – and sometimes the only place to go to be evasive may be into the path of an oncoming car. My worst cycling injury was sustained when I was forced into a metal pole on the pavement (which, I should add, was a cycle path); the injury was slight but the shock, I was astonished to find, lasted all day. I clearly should have drunk more sweet tea at the time. I particularly dislike the way they cycle the wrong way up one way streets (though to be honest so do our local students), forcing one to choose between hitting them, a pedestrian or a car. Cambridge streets just aren’t wide enough to cope with these cycling cohorts travelling in large gangs.

So, the arrival of these large numbers of young students – much though I admire them for wanting to learn our language when I have never mastered their’s – is a mixed blessing for the city. I am sure the drivers find them as terrifying to watch and encounter as I do on my bike. Summer in my city is not always idyllic.

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Interview Skills, Careers Advice and Social Mobility

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Athene Donald

Recently the Sutton Trust published an analysis of the relative successes different schools had in getting students into different universities: Oxbridge, the broader cohort of ‘top’ universities referred to as the Sutton 30, and universities overall.  One of the schools identified in the group that sent the largest numbers of students to Oxbridge – indeed the only state school named in the headline story – was one of my local Cambridge schools, Hills Road 6th Form College.  This school is huge, with an intake of around 1000 pupils a year, and certainly will have a large number of Cambridge academics amongst its parents. Over the years it has had a formidable reputation (such as topping the national A level league table for state schools for several years in succession) so it must be doing something right, even its intake may not be entirely typical of the country as a whole. Undoubtedly some of that lies in its ability and willingness to do mock interviews for Oxbridge and provide wise advice as students start to think about filling in their UCAS forms. Other issues also come into play including the fact that as local children choose which of the 6th form colleges to apply for, they know full well that Hills Road has high expectations and is – in the words of some – a sausage machine for turning out high A level grades. Some children are clued up enough about themselves to know that that is not for them, so there is a degree of self-selection going on, as well as any selection the Hills Road school itself may impose in its admissions policy.

The Guardian followed the Sutton Trust’s report up with an article discussing how schools with comparable exam results can differ very substantially in their success rates in getting students into the Sutton 30 universities, proving ability pure and simple is not the whole story.  In large part this comes down to what the schools are able to do in getting requisite information out to the students from an early age. IAG – that is Information, Advice and Guidance – is about to go through an overhaul. We can only hope that this improves the information getting out there, because very clearly a large number of kids are getting woefully inadequate information. Students apply for courses for which their qualifications aren’t appropriate; The Royal Society’s education report State of the Nation 4 highlighted the relatively low numbers of students in England doing more than a single science A level – thereby disqualifying them from many if not the majority of traditional science courses.  Furthermore students in surprisingly high numbers accept a university insurance offer requiring equal (or even more astonishingly, higher) grades than their first choice. One has to wonder how schools neglect to put across successfully the basic fact of how an insurance choice works. IAG is also about careers’ advice, but with only a tiny proportion of those providing the advice having a science background themselves it is not surprising the information they are able to provide may not always be optimum when it comes to either careers or university courses in science. Appropriate advice needs to start filtering through well before kids start making decisions about GCSE choices, let alone A levels, or they may well find themselves disbarred from what they want to do by accident. Simon Hughes recognizes this in his recent report to Government,  recommending careers’ advice should start before children leave primary school, encouraging children to have aspirations which should (where appropriate and regardless of parental background) include thinking about the possibility of university.

In this same report, rather bizarrely and with very little justification or explanation, Hughes suggests the Oxbridge interview, at least in its current form, should be scrapped. But the need to learn how to put yourself across well at interview extends well beyond Oxbridge admissions. Getting a grip on this is something schools can usefully pass on through mock interviews, as Hills Road does, but it is of importance at every stage of life. We all get thrust into situations – for job (or fellowship)  interviews but also when simply making a presentation to a committee or taking part in a discussion – when having clear ideas about how to assemble and marshall arguments coupled with the ability to think quickly on your feet in response to questions and defend yourself against unexpected attacks are vital, as is having the right body language. Some skills can be taught in this direction. At the most basic level this might amount to no more than making eye contact and speaking clearly – as proposed by the Fairy Jobmother in one of the ubiquitous reality TV shows, this time about working with the long term unemployed. But for many just having these basic skills drawn to their attention can be an eye-opener.

Not painting yourself into a corner is another skill about which students should be advised. For instance, in many situations an interviewer will try to start things off by throwing out an easy, open-ended question to get the conversation going. As an example, I have asked students (in college admission interviews) to tell me what they think the most important discovery in physics in the last 50 years has been, the idea being to allow them to start them talking comfortably about something that interests them. I really don’t care what answer they give me, there is no ‘right’ answer. I merely want to determine their interests, their ability to string a coherent story together and see how they weave science into their lives beyond the curriculum.  One year a student answered ‘electron microscopy’ which, as an electron microscopist myself, pleased and intrigued me. ‘OK, tell me some more’ I said, ‘tell me what’s so important and how it works’. ‘Err, I dunno’ came back the answer. Black mark. That student had taken a very friendly piece of rope and hung themselves with it. Although no school could be expected to prepare students for specific questions of this type, they could be expected to say that there will be general questions posed, when the important thing is to be able to talk fluently about a topic they will be given some choice in, and never to answer an open question with something that they can’t follow up on.

In order to increase social mobility, as this government purports to want, in terms of who gets to go to (which) university, some serious thought should be given to how information, advice and guidance operates in schools and it is good to see Hughes identifying this as vital. This means not just the provision of bumf highlighting the availability of modern apprentices (and given recent reports about work experience placements, I would guess those recommendations will be along the lines of hairdressing for girls and building trades for boys), or weighty tomes about narrowly defined career options lacking a map of the trajectory required to get there. I’d like to think that the Hughes’ report will quickly stimulate some serious thought about what information is most usefully provided and when. But training in practical skills as well as voluminous paperwork are needed: concrete advice, serious one-on-one discussion about requisite qualifications at an early stage and mock interviews and role plays to confer basic skills and confidence. Limits on social mobility cannot simply be laid at the door of universities.

 

Posted in Education, Equality | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Myers-Briggs Tests and the Scientist

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Athene Donald

In business, much more than in academia, personality tests are used at different stages of progression.  Additionally they can be used to identify what sort of career one is suited to. One common version is the Myers-Briggs test, which identifies the individual’s characteristics against 4 pairs of traits, to give 16 possible personality types. Recently, Virginia Hughes blogged  about these tests in the context of scientists. Her concluding remark was

In the Myers-Briggs code, you can be either a T (‘Thinking’) or an F (‘Feeling’). When making decisions, Ts prefer to “first look at logic and consistency”. Yup, that sounds like a scientist. Fs, in contrast, “first look at the people and special circumstances”. I’ve never met a scientist who looks at the outliers first.

Most scientists would probably agree with that final sentence, but actually that is a rather extreme version of the T/F split (I’m not sure where her definitions come from). That useful source of information, Wikipedia, gives a rather different emphasis

Thinking and feeling are the decision-making (judging) functions. The thinking and feeling functions are both used to make rational decisions, based on the data received from their information-gathering functions (sensing or intuition). Those who prefer thinking tend to decide things from a more detached standpoint, measuring the decision by what seems reasonable, logical, causal, consistent and matching a given set of rules. Those who prefer feeling tend to come to decisions by associating or empathizing with the situation, looking at it ‘from the inside’ and weighing the situation to achieve, on balance, the greatest harmony, consensus and fit, considering the needs of the people involved.

Put like that, it isn’t so clear to me scientists would be necessarily disbarred from scoring an F rather than a T. I say that with some conviction because carrying out a quick test myself (I used this site; there are plenty out there) I came out as slightly F. I think I can separate out how I look at my data from how I look at people, and the test questions tend to be about social situations rather than what might be found in a test-tube. So I am not surprised to find a ‘feeling’ tendency being recorded. However, I accept that I may be in a minority. That said, I am certainly not going to apologise for being ‘odd’ – we need diversity in science, and that includes people who look at things in different ways in every sense.

I was already thinking about writing a post about some of my recent experiences, which in fact tie neatly in with this analysis. Based on people’s reactions to talks I have given recently, interviews with me which have appeared in print (here and here; interviews in which I hardly recognize the totality of  myself as described, I should say, though factually they are correct) and responses to things I have written elsewhere on my blog, I have realised that I am conveying messages about life as a scientist in ways that perhaps scientists don’t always do. For instance, recently I gave a brief talk at the L’Oreal FWIS  awards, when I was asked to talk for 10 minutes about personal career highlights and some thoughts and aspirations to encourage others for the future.  Afterwards, I was touched by how many people had seemed moved by what I said, frequently using the word ‘inspirational’ – a word which has been tossed in my direction about the interviews and talks too. One woman (and not an early career woman, but a professor) wrote to me after the L’Oreal evening to say

I would like to thank you for speaking and taking the time out for women matters. The night made a huge impact on how I felt, just after yet another major failure. Hearing that other women struggle too gives a strange sense of normality – it is a huge danger to take the ‘I am wrong’ that gets thrown at us so persistently aboard and start sinking.

I am not trying to ‘big myself up’, but that started me thinking. Why, when I have always felt unsure of my own path and believed that others around me knew the rules better than me, sounded more persuasive than me on committees, got more grant income etc, why is it that speaking the truth seems so powerful? And of course, that is the answer. Most of us, most of the time feel constrained and emotional truths are rarely expressed. Scientists are not often given to talking about feelings so much as evidence, theorems and flaws in experimental design, at least in public – exactly the distinction of T/F in the Myers-Brigg analysis. The joke about extrovert physicists looking at other people’s shoes rather than their own is well known, although sometimes varied to refer to extrovert mathematicians, or even used as a way to distinguish physicists from mathematicians. Nevertheless, without going to that extreme of inability to communicate, the conference podium (for instance) is rarely used to express professional anxieties. So it is that the young, and even the not-so-young, may mistakenly believe that those further up the ladder really understand how the world works and always get things right.

I remember that moment of deluded transition, as I progressed from undergraduate to PhD student, that instant when I thought that now I really would understand not only physics but the ‘right’ way of doing things. That rite of passage, of course, amounts to no more than the option of putting letters after one’s name and shaking hands with the vice chancellor (or, in Cambridge, having one’s hand clasped as if in blessing, while Latin is quoted over you). The reality is that scientists are just as human as the rest of the population, just as prone to anxieties and insecurities, but perhaps not always so open to expressing them. It is not simply a woman’s privilege to suffer from a lack of confidence, although some may express it more explicitly or allow it to rule their lives more completely than many men do.

Some months back, when I was in Edinburgh in order to talk to the engineering graduates about my life experiences, I was taken out to dinner the night before by my hosts who talked about what they hoped I would convey. I came back, with a glass or two of wine inside me, and sat down at my laptop and wrote a blogpost about how I had no idea of what was useful to talk about, and perhaps people could indicate whether what I was going to do would go down well. Knowing full well, what one writes in a mild alcoholic haze may be regretted the next morning, I didn’t publish the post till about 24 hours later, having checked it through for accidental indiscretions. Being content that nothing too untoward was in it I pressed ‘submit’, expecting little interest. It has turned out to be one of my most read posts, although it has been read as if written from a position of strength and knowledge, which was interesting and illuminating for me.  That was when I realised that you folk out there reading this, are prone to look at me as if I have the answers you may sometimes feel you lack, rather than realise that I have been frequently lost in mazes too but have learnt that sometimes good can come out of what looks like a black situation if you just persevere or find out how to duck and weave.

I am honoured and flattered that by speaking honestly about the trials and tribulations that I, like everyone else however successful, have faced people find my thoughts helpful and, yes, inspirational. So, thank you. Maybe the F in my Myers-Brigg personality test has some use after all, because I am sure it has not always facilitated my career path and interactions. Your collective responses encourage me to continue to speak up, not just for women but for all scientists-as-people-with-flaws-and-fears. Some people may be very good at covering up their concerns. Nevertheless, if you could scratch the surface even of those who have just about every prize and honour to their name, I suspect you might well find that they too have their anxieties and moments (or longer) of self-doubt.  It is worth remembering this when fears assault you.

 

 

Posted in Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Mary Somerville

Posted on July 17, 2011 by Athene Donald

Somerville College in Oxford is much better known than the woman it was named after, Mary Somerville, an eminent scientist who had died 7 years before the founding of the college in 1879. Mary Somerville (1780-1872) was a polymath, an intellectual at a time when women weren’t supposed to be anything of the kind. She seems to have been an intriguing woman, who managed to tread the narrow path between being labelled as that awful thing a ‘blue stocking’, and being dismissed as lightweight and not worthy of being acknowledged by the real (i.e. male) scientists of the day. While away on holiday I read a biography of her by Kathryn A Neely  (Mary Somerville: Science, Illumination and the Female Mind). The book I found both fascinating and frustrating: fascinating because Somerville clearly was a complex mixture of absolute determination to advance her knowledge on many fronts combined with a willingness, and indeed desire, to fulfil many of the societal roles expected of a middle class woman of her day. Frustrating because there was so little explanation of how she managed to transform herself from a very badly educated child, who seems barely to have been literate as she hit her teens, into someone formally invited to translate Laplace’s Méchanique Céleste in middle age.

The basic facts of her life were recorded by Somerville herself in a volume, published posthumously, called Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age of Mary Somerville.   However, the text of this was clearly edited by her daughter Martha, her friend Frances Powers Cobbe and her editor, John Murray III (ie the third head of the publishing house of that name), and various versions of the manuscript exist, showing ways in which she was changing her mind about what to disclose.  Disclosure, openness and honesty were even more of a problem then than now. Her daughter would have been worried about protecting her mother’s good name, not least because Mary had been so successful at being a woman scientist, at a time when there were practically no others who were recognized by their peers. Somerville herself was regarded as sufficiently eminent that she received an annual pension on the civil list, an amount of £200 – later raised to £300 – comparable to male contemporaries whose names live on much more vividly today:  Airy, Faraday, Dalton and Brewster for instance.

I have always regarded myself as a scientist who happens to be a woman, rather than a woman scientist, but that distinction would undoubtedly not have been open to Somerville. She lived at a time when even the term scientist barely existed; indeed the term seems to have been first used in print by William Whewell in a review he wrote about Somerville’s very successful book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences in 1834. Science itself was not yet a profession and in some ways this seems to have made things easier for Somerville, as she was not treading on any professional bodies’ toes (something that happened later in the 19th century when women tried to enter medical schools).  But, whatever term one might want to use to describe her, it was important for Somerville’s success (and one assumes her happiness) that she was also a very visible model of domesticity. She married twice, the first time unhappily but briefly, the second time to William Somerville who seems to have been immensely supportive and proud of his wife’s increasing fame. She had 2 children by her first husband, 4 by her second; she enjoyed domesticity, dinner parties and was happy to be passive in financial matters, attributes which were probably very important in her acceptance by society since she did not transgress the norms of behaviour expected of a woman. Had she lived later, with the Victorian habit of putting woman on a domestic pedestal and not letting them do much else, she might have found her progression impeded to a much greater extent, as well as her freedom to act and write without male ‘authority’. In this sense her life could be contrasted with Victorian women novelists such as the Bronte Sisters and George Elliott – who felt compelled to write (at least initially in the former case) under male pseudonyms, or the moralising author Charlotte Mary Yonge who passed her stories to John Keble to vet before publishing them.

Neeley, in her book, is anxious to try to identify what it was that Somerville did, in order to work out her qualifications as an eminent scientist. As I mentioned above, Somerville’s first book The Mechanism of the Heavens (published when she was 51), was a translation of Laplace. But it was much more than simply a word-for-word translation, with significant original interpretations and synthesis. Nevertheless, it was clearly a book aimed at a small select group of people with high-level mathematics at their finger tips. Her second book, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences grew out of the first. It was much more ‘popular’ and cemented her reputation. In this text her ability to paint word pictures to make complex ideas accessible to those without the maths skills comes into its own. It is clear that this was one of her key strengths, so that the beauty of her writing was frequently alluded to.

Another facet of Somerville’s writing lay in her deeply held Christian beliefs. Her science, and her desire to write about it, was in large part driven by the need she felt to demonstrate that the world and its form was testament to God’s work. This seems to have been more obvious in her later book Physical Geography, in which the description of the world relates to how it has been structured by the ‘Creator’.

Political and arbitrary divisions are disregarded, the sea and the land are considered only with respect to those great features that have been stamped upon them by the hand of the Almighty.

Such texts are not so likely to find favour these days.

Neeley clearly believes that one of the reasons history has not remembered Somerville in the way she believes it should have done derives from the fact that Somerville’s strengths lay in the interpretation of the science rather than in any original discoveries; indeed that discovery, originality and/or innovation are what distinguishes the male view of what science is and hence who could be deemed a ‘scientist’. I am not convinced by this argument. All of us as scientists are constantly interpreting results – our own and other people’s – and our ability to do that is part of what makes science progress. It is even harder to evaluate whether this take on things has any relevance to how Somerville was viewed in her own times and immediately thereafter. After all, Whewell obviously saw her as the archetypal ‘scientist’ by coining the phrase to describe her.

For me, what was totally missing in Neeley’s book was a real presentation of how young, shy Mary Fairfax became the doyenne of mid-19th century science, so that the Royal Society placed a bust of her in its marble hall. Certain aspects are clear, including those that have entirely modern analogues, such as the use she made of networking. Starting her life, including her early married life, in the purlieus of Edinburgh, she was able to make contact and communicate with many of the young scientific lions of the day in that city, and subsequently build on that when she moved to London. She seems to have used this to great advantage, and been on good terms with many famous names who encouraged and supported her. But how she managed to teach herself the advanced mathematics without even having had the advantage of more than one miserable year of formal schooling is never made plain. Clearly she had the habit of hard work, and somehow managed to fit in her study and reading (as well as painting and apparently practicing the piano for 4 hours a day at at least one point in her life) around her domestic duties and family visits, all without losing the respect of male colleagues and society – male and female – more generally. It is an impressive story, and one that reminds me, as a woman who is not required to act as hostess at regular dinner parties during which I am expected to play the piano after dinner and pass around my watercolours, that things have moved on to the benefit of my sex, at least a trifle.

Posted in History of Science, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 6 Comments