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| Thanks Winston |
I recently acquired an academic lecturing role, a position to which I have strived for the majority of my adult life (post-I want to write a fiction novel days).
Linked to this I recently had an interesting conversation over a few pints of local ale about belonging to a place. Various international friends discussed where they truly felt that they belonged and why they felt this way. Coming up to the end of my 20s I've begun to think about belonging a lot, it's something that suddenly matters when the haze of dropping everything and moving at the drop of a hat calms down and you begin to value stability. Where do I belong?
During the conversation I began to think back over the adult years of my life. I belonged in Swansea, it was my home, a place that formed me and shaped me into the person I am now. I equally belonged in Australia, a place where I felt my esteem suddenly rose, facing endless challenges that I previously believed were impossible with relative ease and meeting people who I related to, loved and who loved me back exactly as I was.
Re-tracing my mental steps I stopped and realised where I've always felt an unwavering sense of belonging, and that is at University. I remember vividly when this epiphany happened. I was standing outside of Swansea University library armed with a reading list for a dozen new modules and faced with the challenge of navigating the library and the journal archive. It was exhilarating, frightening and for the first time I had the sense that I had complete control over my destiny, and not only that. The people who surrounded me were interesting and all dying to learn.
I knew from that moment as a lost 18 year old I knew that I'd never leave University.
So fast forward 11 years later and I'm doing what I love. Academia cops a lot of stick, Psychology has often been branded as a University's cash cow, drawing in hundreds upon hundreds of students each year, some of them leaving with no direction upon what to do next. Academia also involves a lot of postulation, a lot of thinking and drinking coffee at relative leisure. It certainly doesn't require the same amount of emotional and physical energy to run around a busy Emergency department at midnight cannulating a bunch of drunk teenagers.
However, academia despite all of it's flaws, is a wonderful and noble profession, made more wonderful when you love and believe in what you research and care about what your students learn. As i'm slowly learning the ropes, collating a number of year's post-doctoral experiences into one I've started to learn the lesson of what it takes to be a successful lecturer. Good organisation.
Being a lecturer is like collating every single role you've adopted over the course of your academic training. Whereas I spent a year musing over a paper and analysing data, suddenly you only have an afternoon. Whereas I had been paid full time to write grants. Now I have to write them on a Sunday afternoon whilst squeezing in a little bit of pleasure reading. Whereas I had months to think about lectures, now I have days. Academia is about juggling and prioritising.
Upon preparation for my new role I did what I do best and that's do my research. I searched for resources and accounts of experiences to tell me what I should expect and what I should do. I came back empty handed, only finding depressing articles documenting the abysmal success rate for young female academics rising within the profession (http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2012/may/24/why-women-leave-academia).
So here are my top 10 tips of how to not lose your marbles in academia:
1. Study what you love and think about what you truly want to change
2. Be prepared for research to be slow, at times agonising and for no change to ever happen overnight
3. Get involved in periphery projects that you might not have considered before. It's because of helping out with an obscure paper that I research what I do now
4. Be persistent and don't take things personally. There's no point crying over reviewer 3 implying that you are an idiot. Re-write, take it on the chin and move on
5. Try and put yourself in the student's shoes when they are nagging and generally being a pain. They are 18, hungover and away from home for the first time
6. Treat students like adults and try to inspire them rather than tell them what to do
7. Go to smaller, more focussed conferences of 100 people rather than huge international generalised meetings
8. Keep abreast of what's actually going on in the real world to get perspective on your topic
9. Believe in your ideas, twice I doubted myself and my credibility only to find that a big wig at Harvard published a paper on the exact thing 6 months later
10. Stop feeling guilty about everything. You don't have to be writing 24/7, sometimes the best ideas come when you're not thinking about them
And finally, the best thing you can do is to take good advice from people you respect. I learnt very early on that until you've held an academic position for a long time, you are an amateur. I slowly learnt to collate advice from an assortment of people prior to making any major decisions. The biggest turning point in my career was deciding to leave Australia, something that held an enormous amount of emotion for me independent to what I did. My boss (most handily a psychiatrist) told me one thing, take the emotion out of the situation and make a decision based upon what is right for you next.
And there we have it, I boarded a plane, took a job that was right rather than struggling to get by in a million different smaller positions. Something that incredibly tough but was absolutely the right decision at the right time.
So there you have it young, especially female, aspiring academics. Be bold, believe in your ideas and yourself, take risks, throw yourself by the neck out of your comfort zone and prepare for life to take you in exciting, wonderful and life changing directions.
Good luck!
HYKAEI
Linked to this I recently had an interesting conversation over a few pints of local ale about belonging to a place. Various international friends discussed where they truly felt that they belonged and why they felt this way. Coming up to the end of my 20s I've begun to think about belonging a lot, it's something that suddenly matters when the haze of dropping everything and moving at the drop of a hat calms down and you begin to value stability. Where do I belong?
During the conversation I began to think back over the adult years of my life. I belonged in Swansea, it was my home, a place that formed me and shaped me into the person I am now. I equally belonged in Australia, a place where I felt my esteem suddenly rose, facing endless challenges that I previously believed were impossible with relative ease and meeting people who I related to, loved and who loved me back exactly as I was.
Re-tracing my mental steps I stopped and realised where I've always felt an unwavering sense of belonging, and that is at University. I remember vividly when this epiphany happened. I was standing outside of Swansea University library armed with a reading list for a dozen new modules and faced with the challenge of navigating the library and the journal archive. It was exhilarating, frightening and for the first time I had the sense that I had complete control over my destiny, and not only that. The people who surrounded me were interesting and all dying to learn.
I knew from that moment as a lost 18 year old I knew that I'd never leave University.
So fast forward 11 years later and I'm doing what I love. Academia cops a lot of stick, Psychology has often been branded as a University's cash cow, drawing in hundreds upon hundreds of students each year, some of them leaving with no direction upon what to do next. Academia also involves a lot of postulation, a lot of thinking and drinking coffee at relative leisure. It certainly doesn't require the same amount of emotional and physical energy to run around a busy Emergency department at midnight cannulating a bunch of drunk teenagers.
However, academia despite all of it's flaws, is a wonderful and noble profession, made more wonderful when you love and believe in what you research and care about what your students learn. As i'm slowly learning the ropes, collating a number of year's post-doctoral experiences into one I've started to learn the lesson of what it takes to be a successful lecturer. Good organisation.
Being a lecturer is like collating every single role you've adopted over the course of your academic training. Whereas I spent a year musing over a paper and analysing data, suddenly you only have an afternoon. Whereas I had been paid full time to write grants. Now I have to write them on a Sunday afternoon whilst squeezing in a little bit of pleasure reading. Whereas I had months to think about lectures, now I have days. Academia is about juggling and prioritising.
Upon preparation for my new role I did what I do best and that's do my research. I searched for resources and accounts of experiences to tell me what I should expect and what I should do. I came back empty handed, only finding depressing articles documenting the abysmal success rate for young female academics rising within the profession (http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2012/may/24/why-women-leave-academia).
So here are my top 10 tips of how to not lose your marbles in academia:
1. Study what you love and think about what you truly want to change
2. Be prepared for research to be slow, at times agonising and for no change to ever happen overnight
3. Get involved in periphery projects that you might not have considered before. It's because of helping out with an obscure paper that I research what I do now
4. Be persistent and don't take things personally. There's no point crying over reviewer 3 implying that you are an idiot. Re-write, take it on the chin and move on
5. Try and put yourself in the student's shoes when they are nagging and generally being a pain. They are 18, hungover and away from home for the first time
6. Treat students like adults and try to inspire them rather than tell them what to do
7. Go to smaller, more focussed conferences of 100 people rather than huge international generalised meetings
8. Keep abreast of what's actually going on in the real world to get perspective on your topic
9. Believe in your ideas, twice I doubted myself and my credibility only to find that a big wig at Harvard published a paper on the exact thing 6 months later
10. Stop feeling guilty about everything. You don't have to be writing 24/7, sometimes the best ideas come when you're not thinking about them
And finally, the best thing you can do is to take good advice from people you respect. I learnt very early on that until you've held an academic position for a long time, you are an amateur. I slowly learnt to collate advice from an assortment of people prior to making any major decisions. The biggest turning point in my career was deciding to leave Australia, something that held an enormous amount of emotion for me independent to what I did. My boss (most handily a psychiatrist) told me one thing, take the emotion out of the situation and make a decision based upon what is right for you next.
And there we have it, I boarded a plane, took a job that was right rather than struggling to get by in a million different smaller positions. Something that incredibly tough but was absolutely the right decision at the right time.
So there you have it young, especially female, aspiring academics. Be bold, believe in your ideas and yourself, take risks, throw yourself by the neck out of your comfort zone and prepare for life to take you in exciting, wonderful and life changing directions.
Good luck!
HYKAEI
