Public Speaking Challenges

Posted on July 12, 2015 by Athene Donald

Technical glitches during talks are all too common, but never easy to cope with. Recently I had a simple talk to give, one which could safely be brought along on a memory stick to the event: I was giving a brief talk to a CUSPE meeting on ‘Effective Policy to Bridge the STEM Skills Gap’  in which I had only a handful of slides with some relevant data on, plus a few striking images of the sorts of things that deter girls from sticking with subjects like physics at schools. I couldn’t imagine a problem.

How wrong can one be? I have never seen a computer manage to mangle ten simple Powerpoint slides so comprehensively! Even had I checked beforehand I’m not sure what could have been done. It began with the title slide losing all colour, a trivial irritation. Thereafter it went from bad to worse. The slide advance had a life of its own completely unconnected with the clicker in my hand. This meant the punch of my punchy images was wasted, the slide appearing behind me unbeknownst to me and bearing no relation to what I was saying. Every slide was wrong in a different way. The title words moved randomly over the entire slide, sometimes obscuring the very words/image I was trying to emphasise. The penultimate slide, which contained all my recommendations, appeared in ca 6 point font so that I couldn’t read a word of it from where I stood. So I was left blathering about the policy interventions I thought would be useful since I had no notes to remind me of what they were and peering at the miniscule print did not help. The whole experience was a nightmare.

What should I have done? Done what the other 3 speakers did I suppose. Brought notes written in longhand. One of the speakers had slides but chose not to use them, in the light of my experience (they were all set up in one continuous file); the others had only words and their notes were all they needed. Belt and braces. I’d got cocky and thought I didn’t need anything but that stick. I should have known better (or should have read my own previous post about (Taking Precautions) .

I am, as a scientist, used to giving talks with Powerpoint backdrop. That is the standard presentation format. It works well for other sorts of talks too, when data is to be presented as was the case with this recent failed attempt. But Powerpoint is no use to me in my role as Master of a Cambridge college, in which after dinner speeches – or indeed brief words of welcome and thanks – turn up with a frequency to which I have not as yet got acclimatised. Powerpoint does not work for the after-dinner slot. I fear that if I attempted it I would be met with the barrage of half-eaten rolls I once saw being directed at an after dinner speaker, at a conference dinner held in this very same college of Churchill, when he attempted to sing his way through his speech. He may have been a fine singer, but the international audience had no idea what was going on and lost patience.

So, I am trying to find a new appropriate modus operandi. I have the notes of my predecessor to guide me a little as to content for some of the set piece speeches; but, with the best will in the world, I cannot speak another man’s words in my own voice so on the whole I don’t find these helpful. I have had bad experiences of using paper notes when the venue gave me nowhere to put them and I managed to drop some of the (foolishly unnumbered) pages on the floor. Too often I am given a hand microphone to speak into so that one’s juggling of it plus paper gets irritatingly complicated.

Too often, also, I find that women’s clothes are ill-suited to the lapel microphone (when supplied) with its battery unit. Men in suits have no problem with this: jacket pockets are always available, usually a choice of them. Even if I am wearing a jacket, though, women’s clothes are sadly deficient in pockets. Occasionally I’ve been lulled into a false sense of security at purchase only to find the ‘pocket’ is a mirage of superficiality. Dresses are even worse. It is a rare (and extremely welcome) dress that has useful pockets. I would opt for convenience over the line of my dress anytime, but that is not what the designers believe of us. They dictate what we are allowed to wear and convenience when giving after dinner speeches obviously isn’t high up their agenda. I have, upon occasion, had to borrow a belt from a stranger in order to have somewhere to affix the battery.

My most recent attempts at speech-giving have moved away from paper to iPad (same problem with hand-held microphone of course). This has the advantage of providing its own illumination and I can choose my font size to suit the venue. By which I mean, by the end of a long day in a candle-lit hall, my aged eyes cannot cope with a print size as easily as I can accommodate in full sunshine at 9am. Not even reading glasses can always save the day in bad light. So, iPad speeches with the key facts and headlines highlighted in yellow is my current style. Even this will, regrettably, not solve the problem of the desirability of restricting alcohol consumption through the meal in order to achieve clarity of diction.

Nevertheless I am hoping (at least until I forget to charge the iPad) I will be able to avoid future presentation meltdowns as I attempt to utter words of wisdom to the assembled dinner guests.

Posted in Communicating Science, Science Culture | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

A Basketful of Metrics?

Posted on July 9, 2015 by Athene Donald

For those who were involved with any aspect of REF2014, it had similarities to a slow speed nightmare. For those embroiled in preparing the submissions, not only was it extremely, ridiculously time-consuming, but it was also a heavy burden of responsibility because the potential financial stakes were so high. I have no idea what it was like to be on the receiving end of the submissions this time around, but I do know what it felt like for RAE2008, when I sat on one of the panels: it was most certainly no bed of roses. I cannot imagine this time was any different. The person who commented to me in 2008 that after reading all that paperwork I must have a wonderful overview of the state of physics in the UK had no idea how hard it was to retain any facts at all by the end of the mind-numbing process. Indeed, in the interests of not making any improper disclosure of salient facts about performance, it was rather important not to remember anything.

So, as I wrote about during the preparation for submission, I could find nothing remotely funny to say about REF2014. On the other hand, I also had little conviction that any purely metric-based analysis would be viable, despite Dorothy Bishop’s strongly expressed view supporting the idea. Now, the publication of The Metric Tide, the ‘Report of the independent review of the role of metrics in research assessment and management’ commissioned by HEFCE, supports my belief. Metrics on their own, however convenient, are simply not robust enough to stand in for peer review. That is the bottom line of their findings, as it was in Elsevier’s analysis reported a few weeks ago (and if ever an organisation had a motivation for finding the opposite conclusion, surely a publisher who wants to trumpet impact factors might have been expected to have one).

The problem with metrics is that academic research is simply not monolithic or in the least bit homogeneous, plus academics as a community are smart and so can probably game most (all?) systems devised. Even within a discipline, heterogeneity of approach is the norm not the exception. In physics, for instance, there is a huge difference between the field of particle physics – where teams of hundreds will be involved in most outputs from CERN – to my own sub-discipline of soft matter physics where five authors would be a lot. Even in REF2014 this difference caused issues for different panels about when you had to justify your specific contribution to a submitted output and when not. Trying to find a set of metrics that worked uniquely across the board is just too challenging a task.

So the report comes out in favour of a ‘basket’ of metrics to be used in a light touch way in conjunction with peer review. Not even a nicely constructed (woven?) basket, in their view, can be constructed to cover all situations without accompanying peer review. So, in one sense, this report isn’t very interesting. On the other hand, the carefully gathered evidence, the correlation analysis the group were able to produce in that short time window before the information on output scores were permanently destroyed (provided in detail in an appendix to the main report), mean that we really are in a stronger position to say no to simple metrics. Which in many ways is regrettable. It means, as successive governments require us collectively to be assessed, monitored and scored, huge amounts of time, energy and consequently money will need to continue to be devoted to the exercise. Many senior academics will lose sleep over the forms as they try to doubleguess how best to present their department’s case to optimise the cash they receive.

However, there are some really helpful snippets of information to be found in the report and useful recommendations for different parts of the academic ecosystem. Some refer simply to the importance of an open and interoperable data infrastructure, to enable data to be captured robustly, as James Wilsdon, the chair of the steering group, reports here.  Naturally I was interested in what they had to say about equality and diversity issues. And what they said seemed very constructive and worthwhile for the community to reflect upon. They brought together evidence on unconscious bias as manifest in the lower number of citations that papers with women as ‘dominant’ author receive. Additionally they noted the evidence for the lower number of self-citations women tend to make. It is also clear that systems such as h indices are likely to disadvantage early career researchers, who may anyhow feel under extreme pressure to publish in journals with high impact factors – however much the JIF may be a discredited concept. All these factors indicate why pure metrics would be disastrous for the health of the academic community.

Which leads me into the final aspect where I think the report is really helpful. It highlights what sort of practice institutions may indulge in themselves with regard to metrics that are far from helpful for the wellbeing of individuals and the community. It is becoming increasingly clear that performance-informed research assessment increases the pressure on researchers without necessarily leading to any improvement in the research they do. Any identification of the use of internal metrics can lead to unintended (as well as intended) consequences. Organisations that have signed up to DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment)  should ensure all parts of their institution abide by this declaration; it’s not always clear that that happens currently. Clear recommendations are made in the report (I pull out three from a much longer list):

‘At an institutional level, HEI leaders should develop a clear statement of principles on their approach to research management and assessment, including the role of quantitative indicators.

Research managers and administrators should champion these principles and the use of responsible metrics within their institutions.

HR Managers and recruitment or promotion panels in HEIs should be explicit about the criteria used for academic appointment and promotion decisions.’

These recommendations are to be welcomed. Let us hope organisations pay heed.

 

Posted in Research | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

How Do you Spend your Time?

Posted on July 2, 2015 by Athene Donald

Those of us academics working in UK universities will be familiar with the requirement to fill in forms every so often, accounting for how we spend our working week. Somehow we are supposed to account for every minute of that (ha ha) 37.5 hour week the Research Councils believe we work. When I attempt to do this I always feel defeated by the categorisation. I was reminded of this thankless task recently when I spent the late May Bank Holiday (Cambridge does not take heed of the May Bank Holidays, as the days are too precious as exams approach) tackling a reference request for a US university.

Writing references is of course a regular task for academics, writing letters in appropriately glowing terms for students, past and present, for former postdocs or even long-departed colleagues. (I keep meaning to get hold of the much-praised book, Dear Committee Member by Julie Schumacher, an epistolary novel entirely made up of imaginary reference letters, for some light entertainment.) The reference on this occasion fitted into the latter category. What appalled me most about this task was the voluminous literature I was expected to study when writing a reference for promotion for this person through the higher echelons of the professoriat. 862 pages I received via an inconvenient website, which didn’t even enable me to get hold of a merged pdf at first time of asking! Now of course most of it I didn’t read; indeed the vast majority of it consisted of student evaluations of taught courses. I read a few; I gathered an overwhelming impression of the excellence of the teaching given. I didn’t need to know more than that.

But what absolutely shook me was the amount of verbiage that had to be entered personally into a system that required a listing of all talks given, committees served on, courses given etc etc over the entire life time of the applicant. I wouldn’t be able to do that at all. I have no idea what talks I gave 30 years ago to whom, let alone the committees on which I sat; and, although I probably do recall the major courses I gave, that wouldn’t include the one off lectures to graduates on some specific topic. One has to ask does it really matter if someone served on the departmental student liaison committee in 1990 when it comes to promotion in 2015? If this poor benighted professor were asked to fill in a TRAC (Transparent Approach to Costing) form, although as far as I know there are no such requirements in the USA, how would he have accounted for the weeks spent filling in the form? And I know we’re talking about weeks here, because it was stated in fury by the applicant in their personal statement that the university’s IT system had swallowed their first attempt at form filling so that the whole thing had had to be done again. What a massive waste of time.

For myself, I find it hard enough to cope with trying to work out how to allocate time spent on emails. If I have a request from someone asking me for advice, a student in another university perhaps with whom I have no relationship, what does that count as? How do I account for time spent deleting spam from my inbox? What about declining invitations to speak at one event or another – does that count as outreach or public engagement even though I’m not going to do it? Or, away from email, the time spent travelling from one end of Cambridge to another for meetings?  My life and the TRAC form do not mesh easily. I am sure I am not alone.

Although, apparently unlike many of my academic colleagues I do understand the need to have large numbers of administrators to fulfill the tasks imposed on us by an ever-more-demanding central bureaucracy (all hail the proposed Teaching Excellence Framework for providing further forms to be pored over and sleep to be lost), I am baffled as to how to fill in my timesheets in a way that genuinely has any meaning. Academics, particularly senior ones who have moved on with regret from a life of pure research and teaching, do many important but practically intangible tasks and yet we have to assign them to categories.

Even if I ignore the measly number of hours that I am alleged to work, if I just deal in percentages of my total working week, it is horrifying to think how much of this time I spend on email. That is how communication has to be done: about diary dates, about requests, committee papers, departmental strategy or safety or meetings, let alone about reference ­– or refereeing – requests. If I attempted to carve up this time into different headings I would go mad. OK, you could argue that reading the committee papers is not email, even if that’s the mode of delivery, but it would be hard to pull that chunk of time out of total time spent staring at an inbox.

Letting academics get on with what they do best and trusting them to use their time wisely was something that Thatcher had no time for. She wanted us to be accountable. That in itself shouldn’t be a bad thing, but some of its manifestations clearly have many drawbacks and we have been increasingly ‘measured’ in all kinds of ways. Checking how academics spend their time sounds sensible in concept; in practice I suspect many of us make wild guesstimates since precision is impossible to come by. Each year I earnestly start the week I’m allocated by jotting timings down, but my good intentions tend to slip quite rapidly. Hard evidence, transparent costings are both self-evidently a good thing. The practical implications are quite another.

More general thoughts on metrics will have to wait for another post, as we await the HEFCE Metrics Report.

 

Posted in Science Culture, Universities | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

What Next after Tim Hunt? (#just1action4WIS)

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Athene Donald

Last week the world erupted into a storm of outrage over remarks Sir Tim Hunt, Nobel Prize winner, made in Korea. Unacceptable, indefensible remarks. He has been made to resign from positions and committees for which he has worked so hard. An extraordinary number of column inches (virtual and real) have been devoted to demonising the man. As someone who has expended much of my energy recently to working to improve the lot of women in science I was naturally appalled by his remarks, but I think it is worth asking what damage they have caused and whether the response actually helps the situation. Now a little time has passed, perhaps it is possible to have a more nuanced and reflective conversation than was had in the first days of outrage.

Scientists should be looking at the evidence, and I fear there has been too little of that done around this distressing episode. I have seen reports from attendees at that infamous Korean lunch which paint a rather different picture of how the remarks (which appear to have been in an impromptu welcome speech rather than something meticulously prepared) were received than the one doing the rounds. Laughter, for instance. But much more important is to analyse the bigger picture. So I would like to ask some rather different questions, to try to move the debate on.

1 Do these remarks prove Tim Hunt is sexist?

I believe we should judge the man not by the stupid, offensive remarks made in bad taste on the fly but the totality of his contributions, not just to science, but also to furthering the careers of the young. He has spent much of the last 15 years since his Nobel Prize win, travelling the world to speak to young audiences encouraging them, inspiring them. Not, please note, gender-segregated audiences! He has freely given of the Nobel mystique to all. Speaking personally – and I have sat on a variety of committees with Tim over the past 5-6 years and got to know him quite well – I have seen no evidence to suggest that at any previous point in his career has he done or said anything to indicate a sexist man at heart, certainly not in my hearing or in any actions taken at any committee I have been on with him. Other people have said the same (e.g. here) He is, as has been said, a man of his generation who undoubtedly was educated in different times and can say outrageous things on many topics, often with a twinkle in his eye. But my impression is firmly of a man who genuinely supports people, whatever their gender, background or specific interests.

It is worth remembering what happened a while back about Bora Zivkovic, in a rather different situation. In that case, once one woman spoke out others quickly followed. I have yet to see women stepping forward to say how Tim Hunt blighted their career by refusing to promote them, support them, actively behaving inappropriately or demeaning them. We should remember to look at the evidence and I for one have not seen any about such behaviour. However I have seen remarks implying that surely such people exist and that is the justification for stripping Tim of everything. That begins to smack of witch-hunting in the absence of evidence, particularly as I would imagine journalists have been digging around looking for it. Perhaps he really is just a man with foot-in-mouth syndrome but with enormous goodwill to support those setting out on their careers. Goodwill I suspect he will no longer be able to exercise in the way he has done through globe-trotting over the past decade.

2 Do these remarks prove the Royal Society is sexist?

There have been some wild extrapolations from this single set of offensive remarks to the idea that the Royal Society is endemically sexist. Even if you totally believe what happened proves Tim is sexist, it is not good science to extrapolate from one data point to a whole organisation. Calling for the Royal Society to do X or Y to eliminate Tim Hunt’s apparently pernicious influence, sounds more like baying hounds than evidence-based policy. However, he has resigned from the only committee he sat on, just in case people worry.

Worse, I have seen it suggested that because one FRS has made some awful remarks, women will be actively discouraged from applying for fellowships and research fellowships. This strikes me as inverted logic. If you believe what is wrong is that the Royal Society has insufficient women associated with it, then everyone should be doing all they can to change that. Early career women should be encouraged even more vigorously to apply for all the research fellowship schemes; senior women should be nominated with even more determination. The Royal Society cannot move towards the equality it itself seeks if women aren’t nominated. To change the situation there is an onus on others to act as well as the Society itself. (And, it should be noted, supporting women’s nominations to the Royal Society is exactly what Tim, to my certain knowledge, has been doing.)

3 Why do people attack in a way reminiscent of a lynch mob?

This question is at the heart of what disturbs me about this whole sorry affair. A speech on the other side of the world has let loose a torrent of invective. Those engaging in it may feel they are furthering the cause of women in science, something close to my heart as regular readers of this blog will be aware. But I feel they are in danger of doing the complete opposite, for instance by implying women shouldn’t bother to get involved with the Royal Society. Can each and every one of those who have engaged in this debate swear that they have themselves always spoken out about any and every issue of sexism they have encountered in their daily lives?

I believe the problems of sexism, the problems for women in society collectively and not just women in science, arise because people look the other way when they see bullying going on; when a woman is talked over at a committee; when a young student is picked on by a male colleague and laughed at if they try to pick up a soldering iron; when the male students in the group go off to the pub on a Friday evening making it clear the women are not welcome because they get in the way of lads’ talk; when women are not encouraged to aspire; when no one taps them on the shoulder to apply for jobs……The list goes on and on. Can everyone reading this honestly say they have never thought ‘I don’t want to get involved’ or ‘it’s not my responsibility’?

Curing the issues of women in science needs each and every one of us to be vigilant and to speak out about the everyday sexism that is all around us, not just wait to bay at a celebrity (which of course Nobel Prize winners are) who says something crass, suggesting he holds views that most of us think are Victorian. If watching this sorry affair unfold provoked people to act locally to eradicate all the microinequities that abound, then some good would have come out of it.

The ‘#distractinglysexy images, like the recent #girlswiththeirtoys photos that circulated on Twitter, are lighthearted ways of demonstrating just how much women are successfully embedded in scientific laboratories. But women will not rise to the top of the ranks if unconscious bias continues to rein. It would be wonderful if everyone who has posted some horrified comment about #huntgate or who has read some of the outpouring of media articles, committed to taking one action, just one, in their local organisation to counter the local brand of disadvantage that women may be facing. We should all be pro-active, not look the other way. Here’s an easy list to help people make that commitment. Everyone should be able to find one they are in a position to carry out.

  • Call out bad behaviour whenever and wherever you see it – in committees or in the street. Don’t leave women to be victimised;
  • Encourage women to dare, to take risks;
  • Act as a sponsor or mentor (if you are just setting out there will still always be people younger than you, including school children, for whom you can act);
  • Don’t let team members get away with demeaning behaviour, objectifying women or acting to exclude anyone;
  • Seek out and remove microinequities wherever you spot them;
  • Refuse to serve on single sex panels or at conferences without an appropriate level of female invited speakers;
  • Consider the imagery in your department and ensure it represents a diverse group of individuals;
  • Consider the daily working environment to see if anything inappropriate is lurking. If so, do something about it.
  • Demand/require mandatory unconscious bias training, in particular for appointment and promotion panels;
  • Call out teachers who tell girls they can’t/shouldn’t do maths, physics etc;
  • Don’t let the bold (male or female) monopolise the conversation in the classroom or the apparatus in the laboratory, at the expense of the timid (female or male);
  • Ask schools about their progression rates for girls into the traditionally male subjects at A level (or indeed, the traditionally female subjects for boys);
  • Nominate women for prizes, fellowships etc;
  • Tap women on the shoulder to encourage them to apply for opportunities they otherwise would be unaware of or feel they were not qualified for;
  • Move the dialogue on from part-time working equates to ‘isn’t serious’ to part-time working means balancing different demands;
  • Recognize the importance of family (and even love) for men and women;
  • Be prepared to be a visible role model;
  • Gather evidence, data and anecdote, to provide ammunition for management to change;
  • Listen and act if a woman starts hinting there are problems, don’t be dismissive because it makes you uncomfortable;
  • Think broadly when asked to make suggestions of names for any position or role.

If every reader signed up to #just1action4WIS (or came up with another one to add to that list and acted upon it) that would be much more appropriate than pouring all the vitriol onto one man but doing nothing about the bigger picture.

Please make that pledge to do your part. Let’s get something positive out of this debacle: remember #just1action4WIS.

Bibliography

For readers interested in my previous posts on related subjects, here’s a quick reprise to some particularly relevant ones:

Whose responsibility? It’s too easy to say ‘not mine’

Time to eradicate the academic jerk

Leadership strategies to deal with jerks

Stand up and be counted

Why can’t a woman be more like a man

The myth of the myth of women in science

On sponsorship and kindness

Is the Royal Society treating women fairly?

Attacks on the Royal Society miss the point

10 things you should know about election to the Royal Society

On being feisty and unconventional

Changing the departmental mindset

Incompetence at the top?

 

Posted in Equality, Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 223 Comments

Faking It

Posted on June 7, 2015 by Athene Donald

I seem to have given a lot of talks recently in which the phrase ‘faking it’ sat at their heart. You will realise I am not referring to talks about protein aggregation, microscopy or other scientific subjects when the use of such words might imply some decidedly dodgy and unethical practice. Rather, my talks have been about career progression, confidence building and moments of transition to independence. In such talks, what I am talking about is not so much dodginess, more expediency when trying to cope with areas in which discomfort is liable to be the primary emotion.

So what do I mean? I mean exuding a confidence you don’t feel until (eventually) it becomes deep-seated. All of us, throughout our lives, find ourselves being asked to do something for the first time. Perhaps it is your first conference presentation, your first committee meeting or your first visit to talk to school children; what then? It is bound to feel a bit unnerving to do anything for the first time and, as a result, there is the danger that you will ‘freeze’ or, at the very least, perform less well than you feel you’re capable of. How to beat that? In my view, the only way to do it is to ‘pretend’ that you know what you’re doing and slowly you’ll find that perhaps you really do. Of course, there are some things you may never be very good at; that is also true for everyone and in time you can work out what your own weaknesses are and avoid the wrong kind of situations and tasks. But, if you avoid everything just in case….you’ll never find out your strengths.

There are additional tricks of the trade to help beyond merely refusing to give in to your doubts which can help you on your way. I’m a great believer in grasping the wrist holding the laser pointer with your other hand to stop those irritating nerves causing the highly magnified image of the laser beam to bob up and down embarrassingly as you quietly shake while delivering that conference talk. I’m sure every experienced speaker could pass on similar tips to help get you through and one should always be willing to seek out advice from more experienced colleagues and friends. But, whatever useful tips are passed on, some of the ‘oomph’ you need to perform has to come from within, a fact that I believe remains true throughout life.

The recent talks I gave included ones to postdocs aiming to make the move to their first independent position (e.g. fellowships or lectureships) and to some of Cambridge’s stunningly smart and dedicated international research students. Both cohorts knew full well they were at a critical point where they were moving from ground they already saw as familiar to arenas they were much less well acquainted with. I think it is important to remind such folk that no one finds things easy the first time around but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. If you allow yourself to feel unconfident so that you mutter as you sit around a committee meeting table or when attempting to answer questions after a conference presentation, then you are likely to continue to feel unconfident. On the other hand, if you answer in a strong voice the facts you want to convey will be no more or less true but they will come across with conviction. Saying something along the lines of ‘that’s a very interesting question but I don’t know the answer/my data can’t address it’ in a firm voice is infinitely preferable to muttering something which makes you look merely as if you’re not on top of the game. Facts may be the same, outcome likely to be very different.

For those who’ve just made the transition to PI – and I had a conversation with 4 people about their recent experiences doing just this as part of this ‘transitioning’ workshop – it was interesting to hear what they thought were the most challenging things they’d had to face. None of them mentioned explicitly what I recall with alarm, the student who turns up with results they (and you) can’t explain and they look to you to tell them why they’ve got them and/or what the next experiment they should do is. It’s tough. You may have no idea but you can’t sit there and witter. You are responsible for them.

I remember the first time this happened to me and my internal voice said ‘help, what do I do?’ With hindsight I think I used the method exemplified by Elle in Legally Blonde. If you haven’t see the film it goes something like this (she was cross-examining a witness at the time). You ask a question and get an unhelpful answer; you have no idea what to do next so you ask it in a slightly different way; you ask again embroidering the question and seeking more information about the context. The witness (for which read student) may start to get annoyed by what seems a fruitless line of enquiry but as a result they too start embroidering their answer. Hey presto, they let slip something that they hadn’t realised was important. And suddenly there is some light at the end of the tunnel; a new angle presents itself suggesting what to do next, be it another experiment or a reanalysis of the data or whatever. (Of course in the film this very quickly led to a confession of murder, an outcome not likely to be relevant to a research student’s apparent ‘dead end’.)

The thing to realise is you don’t need to be omniscient to be helpful, you merely need to use your experience to look at things multidimensionally and then you and the student together can create a better understanding to allow progress to be made. Faking it, in acting like more senior colleagues who have had to sort out students like this previously, is no reason why you can’t facilitate your student’s research. Indeed such action is not only useful but in a situation like this absolutely vital. There will come that moment as a supervisor when you think ‘[insert suitable expletive], I don’t know what to do’ but you’ve still got to do something. Even if all it amounts to is, let me think about this and I’ll meet you at the coffee machine tomorrow with some suggestions. Buying time is not a bad tactic and can convey a sense of calm and knowledge of where to look next which in itself can be reassuring to the student facing their brick wall. Of course, this tactic only works if you can, in the next 24 hours, find a suitable reference/colleague or idea to move things along, but given that time you can at least probably find some further questions to ask. And then go back to the Elle tactic described above. The one thing a supervisor should never do is say ‘No idea, go away and work it out for yourself’ – unless you are quite deliberately trying to develop the student’s own confidence and problem-solving skills.

So, faking experience and faking confidence are all good ways of coping with uncertainty and lack of knowledge. You will know you’re doing it, but by practicing sounding calm and certain, over time when you find – with luck – that the world has not crashed around your shoulders and that you are indeed moving forward rather than back each time you do it, the fake will become the real thing. And then you are ready for the next challenge, and the next.

 

 

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , | 3 Comments