Ep 12 Overcoming writer's block – The Other Kind of Doctor
This week, Gemma and Gaia discuss overcoming writer's block by following advice from Dr Vicky Penn, who is a researcher development officer at Royal Holloway. They discuss different techniques such as the pomodoro method and freewriting, and reflect on their own experiences of (trying to) overcome writer's block.Stay tuned for the end of the episode for this week's 'Brain Bites' – Is taking your annual leave really that important?For a full transcription of the episode, please visit our website (https://theotherkindofdoctor.wordpress.com/episodes/)Check out our social media accounts for bonus content and behind the scene footage.Twitter (X): @otherdoctor_podInstagram: @otherdoctor_podThank you to Royal Holloway Doctoral School for funding this podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episode Transcriptions
Trailer
TrailierGemma: Hello and welcome to ‘The Other Kind of Doctor’ podcast. My name is Gemma. Gaia: And my name is Gaia and we are both on the journey of gaining a PhD. Gemma: At ‘The Other Kind of Doctor’, we celebrate the quirks and triumphs of the doctoral journey. Gaia: We’ll be sharing insightful conversations with academic and industry experts, fellow PhD students, and a whole host of other guests. Gemma: We’ll be exploring their doctoral journeys, their top tips to succeed in academia and beyond. Gaia: As well as having a few laughs on the way… Gemma: Whether you are knee deep in research or just curious about academia, our podcast offers a light-hearted take on the serious business of earning a PhD. Gaia: You can expect topics such as career, post-PhD, managing toxic productivity, and supporting wellbeing as a PhD student. Gemma: Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on your chosen podcast platform and check out our Instagram and Twitter accounts: @otherdoctor_pod as well as our website: theotherkindofdoctor.wordpress.com. Gaia: Enjoy the podcast and we look forward to chatting to you soon. Gaia and Gemma: Bye!
Season 1
Episode 1
Procrastination with Gemma and GaiaSUMMARY In this episode, our hosts, Gemma and Gaia, reflect on their journey to becoming PhD students and their experiences so far in the complicated world of academia. This week, Gemma and Gaia discuss their experiences of procrastination as a PhD student. They delve into why we procrastinate and share some evidence-based top tips on how to overcome procrastination!
OPEN Gemma: Hello and welcome to ‘The Other Kind of Doctor’ podcast. My name is Gemma, Gaia: and my name is Gaia, and we are both on the journey of gaining a PhD. Gemma: A quick disclaimer before we start. We are in fact the academic kind of doctors. Gaia: Well, nearly doctors. Gemma: Yes, nearly doctors. But we’re not your medical kind of doctors. Gaia: So if you do need medical attention, please contact your GP. Gemma: Now, let’s get on with the episode.
INTRODUCTION Gemma: Hello! Hi. Welcome to the first episode of ‘The Other Kind of Doctor’ podcast! Gaia: Exciting! Gemma: Do you feel excited? Gaia: I feel excited and scared. Gemma: Yeah, it’s pretty scary and exciting, which is a bit like doing a PhD to be honest. Gaia: Maybe more scared than doing a PhD?
INTRODUCING YOUR HOSTS Gemma: Yeah, yeah. But I do feel excited, and I’m really happy that we’re here and actually getting it off the ground. I suppose we should probably introduce ourselves, because none of these people know who we are. Which is crazy. Gaia: They should definitely know. Go on then. Gemma: Okay, I’ll go first. My name’s Gemma and I am a third year PhD student, which sounds scary, but my PhD is actually four years, so that does make me feel better that I’ve got another two years left. And my PhD is in psychology and that doesn’t mean I’m going to read your mind, it just means a lot of stuff less exciting than that. . What about you, Gaia? Gaia: I just want to say that Gemma was looking at her iPod throughout the whole thing, and I’m scared she have written down notes about her name. So I’m Gaia, I’m also a PhD student in psychology, third year. But like Gemma, my PhD’s four years, so I’m not panicking just yet. Gemma: Panicking a little bit though. Gaia: Yeah, but not like major panic… Gemma: Okay, let’s, let’s carry on. Otherwise, we will waffle for a whole hour. And so I feel like when people say what their PhDs are about, people kind of switch off. But I feel like because this is for other PhD students, people will be interested to know what our PhDs are in. So as a brief kind of introduction, my PhD is looking at how young people use social media and how that relates to their mental health. Gaia: And my PhD is, oh my god, I forgot what my PhD is! Gemma: Only three years in. Gaia: My PhD is about improving eyewitness testimony in forensic lineups. Gemma: Yeah, very exciting, and very different types of psychology as well. And, yeah, I think it would be interesting, I feel like people come to PhDs from all different types, and all different backgrounds, so it might be useful to say kind of like, what our background is. I don’t want to hear about your childhood trauma and experiences, but kind of maybe our, maybe kind of our educational background might be useful for people to know. Why don’t you go first this time? Gaia: Yeah. So I’m actually Italian as you might be able to tell. Gemma: It’s really strong accent. Gaia: So I came to the UK for my undergrad. So I did my undergrad in psychology, then a master’s in forensic psychology here at Royal Holloway. Then one year as a research assistant actually during COVID, so it’s just me in my room typing away, and now I’m doing my PhD. Gemma: Very exciting. Look, look, look how far you’ve come. For me, I am what they call like a straight through PhD student. So I did my undergrad at Royal Holloway, I finished in, well, my undergrad during COVID, last two years, and then I had a six month break after I graduated, and then I started my PhD. Hang on. Gaia: Is that right? Gemma: Not six months. It was about four months, actually. Okay, a four month gap between graduating and starting my PhD, because I was a January starter. And yeah, really exciting. My undergrad was in psychology as well. My undergrad certificate says clinical psychology, but it was just psychology and then they did clinical specific third year. Gaia: Not sure if you want to slander. Gemma: No, it’s not. It’s just like, it’s psychology, clinical psychology and mental health. Gaia: Right. We’ve been sharing an office for way too many years. Gemma: Yeah, so we met when I started my PhD. Gaia: Which was like four months after me.
ABOUT THE PODCAST Gemma: Four months after you and yeah, I’ve been stuck with her ever since. Can’t get rid of her. She followed me to this podcast studio and everywhere. So it might be useful as well to say why we wanted to do a podcast. Mainly just to sit and then chat to a microphone maybe every week, but I think for me, I think there was kind of like a gap to understand kind of the PhD going into it. It’s like, what, what even is it? I don’t even know two years in and it’s like really interesting to speak to experts and I feel like that’s what we kind of do in our day to day life anyway, but it would be nice to actually get it on record and maybe share that with other PhD students that are interested. Gaia: Yeah, I think the best thing of doing a PhD is like sitting in the PhD office or like wherever and just talking to other people about what’s going wrong in your life in your PhD. Gemma: Or what’s going… Gaia: or what’s going right. This is what we’re gonna do. Gemma: Yeah, and also thinking about careers as well and thinking about what happens after you finish your PhD because that just feels so long away but I feel like it will happen eventually and we’re gonna have to decide what we want to be when we grow up for everyone that thinks that we’re still at school. This podcast is also not just for PhD students. I think it’s just for people as well that are curious about academia or thinking about doing a PhD. Gaia: Or just like if you want to understand what a PhD is. Gemma: Yeah, because people might be thinking that they might not be good enough to do a PhD. It’s quite like a daunting thing if you’re like a first generation university student or anything like that. Or you’re not quite good enough or understanding what it involves. We’re going to be talking about all kinds of stuff like that on this podcast. Gaia: Exciting! Gemma: Exciting! So there is going to be some sort of structure to this podcast, believe it or not. As even though we could ramble for hours I think we’re going to start off by having like a discussion of a topic. Sometimes we’re going to be inviting guests on and getting expert opinions because we want to learn stuff as well and, and learn all about stuff. And then next, we’re going to be having a key piece of advice to take away. Gaia: On the topic, of course. Gemma: On the topic, not just general advice, just on the topic specifically. And then lastly, Gaia? Gaia: Brain Bites! This is just something interesting about research we found that week.
TOPIC INTRODUCTION: PROCRASTINATION Gemma: Yep! So today, we’re going to be talking about something that PhD students will encounter during their PhD. I don’t know a PhD student that doesn’t encounter this. Yeah. And that is drum roll! Gaia: Managing procrastination! Woohoo!!! Gemma: Woohoo!!! Yeah, I think everybody procrastinates. Don’t they? Gaia: We’re procrastinating right now on our PhDs. Gemma: We developed a whole podcast just to procrastinate from our PhDs. Gaia: Very sorry to our supervisors. Gemma: So, yeah, I think it’s a very common experience and I think it’s not just about pretending that you don’t procrastinate, but I think it’s about managing it. And I think that’s kind of what we wanted to talk about today, using a bit of research as well, because… Gaia: Because we are researchers. Gemma: We are researchers and we also, we want to know how to manage our own procrastination. Gaia: So the advice we’re going to give. It’s not just based on what we think is good, we actually researched this. Gemma: Yes, we did actually, again, procrastinate from our PhDs and look at research to do with procrastination. Okay, so… Gaia: So why do people procrastinate, Gem? Gemma: Well, I think there’s a lot of different reasons why people procrastinate. And we had a look at some research, and these are just some that we thought, some of the reasons we thought would be specifically applicable to academia and PhD students. I think the general kind of thing with procrastination, it’s like a procrastination cycle. You’re anxious about a task. You’re then going to avoid the task because you’re anxious about it, and you’re going to procrastinate. Yep. Because you’re leaving it to the last minute, you’re going to do badly in it. Probably. And then because you do badly in it, it’s going to make you want to procrastinate again on the next task because you’re worried about doing badly. Gaia: Yep. Makes sense to me. Gemma: Yeah. So there, again, there’s also different kind of I guess, subsections to why people procrastinate talk about the first one? Gaia: So something that I think both me and Gemma struggle with. And actually, I feel like any PhD student. Perfectionism. Because you want to, whenever you have to do something, you want to do it perfectly, so you won’t start doing the task because you’re scared you won’t do it well enough, so you’ll procrastinate. Gemma: Completely resonate with that. I think especially in academia, because everyone who’s doing a PhD obviously loves their PhD, and probably hates it at the same time. It’s like their baby and they wanted to make sure it’s like, it is a baby and you want to make sure it’s perfect. But then you feel like you can’t start because whatever you write won’t be good enough for it. Gaia: Another reason, which I think is just, it’s not another reason per se… Gemma: It’s like a theory. Gaia: Yeah. It’s the Emotional Self-Regulation theory. So by procrastinating, you’re making yourself feel better in the short term, but then obviously in the long term, it’s gonna be worse. Gemma: Yeah. So short term, I feel good going and doing a full food shop rather than writing my introduction. Gaia: I did clean the whole day yesterday because I didn’t want to work. Gemma: Yeah, so you’re kind of feeling good in the short term, and you’re not focusing on like your long term goals and things like that. Yeah. And I think that kind of leads on to a theory that I read about called the drive to delay versus the drive to act theory. So people that procrastinate are more driven to delay a task, whereas people that don’t procrastinate are driven to just sit down and act, so they will act over and over. Good for them, I don’t know what that feels like. Another kind of section, I think, or reason why people procrastinate is that people don’t have like a defined realistic goal for the task that they want to do. Gaia: So for example, for a PhD, you’re thinking about the end result of your PhD sometimes. So you’re thinking about all the things you need to do throughout those like three or four years, instead of thinking of the thing you need to do today, which might be like, write the method section of a paper. Gemma: Yeah, so like, or for example saying, ‘I’m just going to do some writing today’ but you’re not saying like, how much writing or what you’re going to write about. Gaia: Yeah, sometimes I’m like, I’m going to write this whole paper. Never happens. Gemma: No, unrealistic. So, those are really good reasons, Gaia. Gaia: Oh, thank you! Didn’t come up with them.
HOW TO MANAGE PROCRASTINATION Gemma: How, how are we going to manage that? How do we manage all of these different things that are going on during a PhD and these different reasons to why we’re going to be procrastinating on our, on writing our PhDs? Gaia: Well, I don’t manage, but if someone do wanted to manage… Gemma: I think for me, the key thing to remember is that everyone is going to procrastinate at some point and don’t beat yourself up if you genuinely need a break and you’re overwhelmed and you’re burnt out and you need to have a day cleaning or a day going to see your friend and things like that. But understanding that you need to manage it so that you’re not spending a whole week cleaning your house or a whole week going out and things like that. And just to make sure that you are meeting deadlines and you’re keeping up with your projects and stuff. So, I think if someone is struggling with perfectionism and I’m thinking everything needs to be perfect something that we saw is a really good tip for this, is breaking in drafts. So, you know, working through your drafts, understanding that you just need to sit down and write something, whether it’s, you know, a bullet point. 10 bullet points, writing small questions within a chapter helps as well, because at the end of the day, you can’t edit a blank piece of paper. If you’ve got something to work with, it’s better than nothing. And then, you know, you can elaborate on that. Gaia: Yeah, you can elaborate. Yeah, in undergrad, I used to, I used to think that I had to sit down and write perfectly from the first sentence. And obviously, I wrote like three sentences a day that way. Now, I just sit down, not even with my laptop, but with my notebook, and just write down random stuff, like from research from my head and I know because it’s in a notebook and not on my laptop, it doesn’t count if it’s not perfect. And I just translate it. Gemma: I like that idea because it’s not writing on like a word document. It’s just notes. That’s a really good tip, actually. I like that. Something to help as well is increasing your motivation for the task So, I feel like because the PhD is so long, it’s, it’s three years, like, it, Gaia: Hopefully three years. Gemma: Three years, four years, you know, you’re tired and I think it, can be difficult. You can find yourself losing track of the end goal, right, and your long term goals. Something that I have done is visualising my end goal, like visualising graduating, like visualising like handing in my thesis. And that might, that might be like overwhelming for some people. Gaia: That’s adorable, Gemma. Gemma: Aw, thanks. It might be overwhelming for some people, but when I’m, you know, it’s a Monday morning, it’s cold, I want to, you know, stay in bed. I would be like, do you know what, I’m not going to be able to, you know, graduate, hand my thesis in if I don’t just sit down and write something. And that does help with my motivation. But something else that we’ve done, actually, is set up writing groups. Gaia: Yeah, it helps a lot. Like, for me, it’s really hard to just sit down and work by myself. Because no one is checking on me. And therefore, I’m like, I’m just gonna read a normal book for 10 minutes, and then end up reading 10 whole chapters, and it’s 9pm. But if I’m working with someone else, or in a study writing group, everyone is there and if I procrastinate they’re gonna see it. Gemma: Yeah, like having someone else hold you accountable is really useful and I think for some like writing groups they set goals and things at the beginning and then you like check in and see how you’re getting on and things like that and then I think this is pretty like self explanatory, but when we said about not having defined realistic goals. Just break down your tasks like break big chunks of you know like an introduction chapter don’t try and start from the first sentence like just write like… just break it into sections. I had a friend say to me the other day that they wrote their introduction chapter and they asked themselves like mini essays within a chapter. So they write like a question and then wrote like mini essays and that apparently really helped them. Gaia: It does sound good actually. Gemma: That is everything we have to say about procrastination, but please feel free to drop us a message on our socials or on Instagram or Twitter or something, or X I should say now. Does anyone say that? And, and let us know ways that you procrastinate or ways that you manage your procrastination, because let’s face it, we all need help with that.
KEY ADVICE Gaia: Key advice! Gemma: Our key advice for procrastination. Gaia… Gaia: Should have thought of that. Gemma: Gaia, what is your key piece of advice for procrastination or managing procrastination? Gaia: I think it will be break down your tasks into mini tasks. Otherwise you’re gonna get overwhelmed, procrastinate, get more overwhelmed, and cry. Gemma: Yeah. Crying is optional, of course. Yeah. I think my key piece of advice would be to just sit down and do it. Make yourself accountable or have someone else make you accountable for just getting something down. Whether that’s bullet points… I think writing in a notepad, like you said, is a good way to start, rather than just staring at a blank piece of paper.
BRAIN BITES Gemma: Okay, now for our Brain Bites section. Gaia: So as we’re recording this, it’s actually the second week of January. Gemma: Yeah, 10th of January. Gaia: Yeah. So we’re still on track with our New Year’s resolutions, I think, are you? Gemma: Yeah, I’m, I’m on, I’m kind of on track with my New Year’s resolutions. Gaia: Okay, but how do we keep being on track? Gemma: Yes, so our piece of research we saw this week was asking, are New Year’s resolutions actually effective? I’ve been seeing online, everyone’s been like, this is my New Year’s resolution. Gaia: I’m going to read a hundred books! Gemma: A hundred books, 2024 goals, I’m going to the gym a million times a week, that kind of thing. So we actually had a look at some research and Gaia, what did they find? Gaia: I mean, it depends. Usually less than 10 percent of people keeps up with their New Year’s resolutions, but there’s a reason for this, and it’s that, again, people make really big New Year’s resolutions, like going to the gym a hundred times. Yeah. But actually, you need to make smaller, more manageable resolutions, like, I’m gonna walk to work. Gemma: Yeah, so they tend to be a little bit over ambitious New Year’s resolutions. So, in a book called ‘The Power of Habit’ by Charles Duhigg, and ‘Tiny Habits’ by BK Fogg, they set the following tips for making New Year’s resolutions effective. The first was setting measurable goals. Rather than saying like, I’m going to walk more, say, I’m going to take the stairs every day. That’s measurable and it’s easier to keep up with. Gaia: Then, have goals built on existing activities. Don’t be like, I’m going to climb a mountain every Sunday, if you don’t already do that. But for example, if you go on a brisk walk like three times a week, just add 20 minutes to your walks. Gemma: And the last thing for making them stick is to make the action easy to do for the first week. So if you get that first week over and done with and it’s easy and you’ve kept up with it, you’re more likely to keep it up for the long term. Yeah. And that’s everything for today, guys.
CLOSE Gaia: Wow! First episode done! Gemma: First episode done. See you next week! Gaia: Subscribe. Is that what people say? Gemma: People say subscribe. So yeah, subscribe to the podcast, leave a review. If you want to leave a review for the first episode, but maybe listen to a couple to make sure you actually like it. So yeah, please subscribe and check out our socials to find out some more behind the scenes content, I guess. Gaia: Some nice tweets. Encouraging. Gemma: Yeah, our website will also host all of our transcriptions and our Meet The Team page where you can meet our fantastic podcast team, because believe it or not, it takes more than two people to set up a podcast. So thanks so much for that. And also thanks so much to the Royal Holloway Doctoral School for supporting this podcast and allowing us to do it. Gemma: It’s very exciting. Thanks guys! Gaia and Gemma: Bye!
Episode 2
Toxic Productivity with Gemma and GaiaSUMMARY In this second episode, hosts Gemma and Gaia talk about what Toxic Productivity is and how it’s actually not all that productive. They give research-led ‘Key Advice’ on how to combat it, then in ‘Brain Bites’, discuss how having a low maintenance plant can boost your mood and contribute to overall wellbeing.
OPEN Gemma: Hello and welcome to ‘The Other Kind of Doctor’ podcast. My name is Gemma, Gaia: and my name is Gaia, and we are both on the journey of gaining a PhD. Gemma: A quick disclaimer before we start. We are in fact the academic kind of doctors. Gaia: Well, nearly doctors. Gemma: Yes, nearly doctors. But we’re not your medical kind of doctors. Gaia: So if you do need medical attention, please contact your GP. Gemma: Now, let’s get on with the episode.
INTRODUCTION
Gemma: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Episode Two of the ‘Other Kind of Doctor’ podcast! Yay! How do you feel? Episode 2? Gaia: We made it to Episode 2. I didn’t think it was possible. Gemma: We also, like, we’re really sorry if we sound different this week. Hopefully we don’t, but our lovely sound technician, Ryan, is poorly so we’ve had to kind of muddle through and do it ourselves. Gaia: We did video call him. Gemma: We did. I wish we didn’t have to. Poor Ryan. Gaia: Hi Ryan. Gemma: Hi Ryan. Yeah, so hopefully… Gaia: Yeah, if we sound different like we’re underwater just try not to judge. Gemma: But hopefully it’s okay. Gaia: So what did you do this week? Gemma: This week? It’s been stressful actually. I’m preparing for my upgrade and I’m also finalising my first author publication, which is exciting. Well, it might not be published yet, but I’m submitting it to a paper for the first time. Gaia: And that’s good enough. Gemma: That’s good enough in my books. I’m also marking undergrad exams, which is lovely. No, it’s horrible. But it’s one of the things you have to do when you teach. Gaia: Yeah, if you’re an undergrad, it’s not your exams that are horrible, it’s just the process of it. Gemma: It’s just the process and the fact that we have to mark like 90 of them and it’s intense. Gaia: If you are an undergrad, please try to write clearly in your in-person exams. Gemma: Please do. Yeah, so other than that, I’ve just been getting into the flow of the new year. Teaching starts this week when we’re recording this, so I’m teaching my first lab class on Friday. Gaia: Did you manage to still stick to your New Year’s resolutions after last week’s topics? Gemma: No…I’ve been making more realistic goals, so. Gaia: What’s your Goodreads goal for this year? Gemma: My Goodreads goal? Overambitious. I’ve gone for like 25 books. Gaia: No, that’s fine, I thought you were about to say like 50. Gemma: Oh no, hang on, no, not 25, about 35. Gaia: If you do not have Goodreads, please download it. Gemma: Yeah, if you like reading, Goodreads is a great app. Anyway, we’re getting off track again. What have you been up to this week, Gaia? Gaia: Mainly coding, analysing data. Not fun. I mean, a bit fun.TOPIC INTRODUCTION: TOXIC PRODUCTIVITY
Gemma: Okay, so what are we talking about today Gaia? Gaia: Everyone’s favourite topic: Toxic Productivity! Gemma: Yeah, I feel like toxic productivity is a big thing at the moment, it’s very hyped up on social media as well and just in academic culture in general. For those of you who don’t know what toxic productivity is, we have looked up a definition. So I’m just going to read that. ‘Toxic productivity is the drive to be productive at all times, not just at work, but in all areas of life. It happens when you push yourself to unhealthy extremes in order to accomplish more, often at the expense of your physical and mental health. This is likely to lead to feelings of guilt that you’re not doing enough.’ Gaia: Toxic productivity is very familiar to everyone in academia, as studies have found that it’s actually more prevalent in academia than anywhere else. Gemma: Really? Gaia: Yeah. Well, everyone in academia takes their job really personally, because it’s your own very, very tiny niche piece of research, and you really want to succeed, you’re really competitive in getting grants, internships, whatever you need to get. And this leads to working extra hours, and therefore poor work-life balance. And as we were talking about last week, academics are often perfectionists, so we usually tend to work longer hours. Just so that everything is exactly what it needs to be. Gemma: Yeah, that resonates with me a lot. I do think that maybe the word toxic productivity hasn’t been around very long, but the feeling that academics need to work more than other people I do think is… I think as well with academia, there isn’t really any set hours. So you’re not necessarily going to the office and working nine to five, especially with a PhD. Gaia: Yeah. And it’s good in a way, because maybe you can go to Pilates at 4pm. But in another way, you can also work until 2am and people will reply to emails at 3am sometimes. Gemma: Yeah. I mean, everyone’s got their own timetable. So whatever fits around what you’re doing, but I feel like because it’s so flexible, you can just end up working all the time and not really setting boundaries. So, I kind of feel like we’ve already touched on this but, why is toxic productivity bad? It’s really, it’s good that we’re getting everything done, right Gaia? Gaia: Are we getting everything done, or are we just killing ourselves? Gemma: Possibly. So research has found that working too much, i.e. being productive but over-productive can impact your sleep as you’re working all the time. It can impact your relationships with like friends, family, just because you’re spending all your time working or all your time having to be productive rather than unwinding and doing things that you enjoy. And stress as well. I feel like because you have such a high expectation of yourself that you need to be getting everything done. Obviously, it’s gonna lead to you being more stressed. Gaia: And feel really guilty when you’re not doing something. Gemma: Yeah. And then you’re not properly unwinding because you’re feeling guilty. So even if you’re, I don’t know, sitting down to watch a movie with someone or just by yourself, you’re going to be feeling guilty because you’re watching a film not doing what you should be doing. Gaia: And still thinking about your research at all times. I feel like that’s normal with PhD students, but to a point. Gemma: Yeah. All of this mental health stress can lead to physical health implications as well. So for those of you who aren’t psychology based, because I forget not everyone is, constantly reading about psychology, but your mental health and your physical health aren’t completely separate. They’re completely intertwined. So when you are feeling stressed that does have physical implications on your body then it can also lead to general burnout as well, which I feel like we could do a whole other episode on. But just if you don’t know what burnout is, it’s physical and emotional exhaustion, from work and other demands that you have in your life. Gaia: So it’s like when you’re trying to work and you can’t physically open a document because you can’t do it. That’s what it feels like. Gemma: So I guess, it would be good to talk about our experiences of toxic productivity. Gaia: Yeah, I know you’re a pro at it. Gemma: Yeah, I think anyone that knows me that’s listening to this podcast will be like, yeah, that’s Gemma because she always has a hundred things to do. So I’ll probably sound like a hypocrite in this podcast, but I think for me when toxic productivity hit a peak was in my second year. And I think I know from PhD students I’ve spoken to, when you hit your second year you have this dawning feeling like, oh my goodness, I have so much to do. Gaia: Oh my god, it’s real. Gemma: It’s actually real and I’ve got to produce this thesis and I’ve got so much to do. And as I hit my second year, I was taking on this really big project in my PhD, my biggest study. And I was using a lot of different techniques that I wasn’t familiar with. And a lot of coding and really complex materials and programs I needed to learn. And it was really overwhelming and I felt, okay, the only way I can understand this is if I push myself so much and try and learn everything all in one go, all at the same time. Gaia: How did that go? Gemma: Not great to be honest. Because I was pushing myself all the time even when I thought I was switching off I thought I needed to be productive in other things as well. So I was like, okay well, if I’m not doing my PhD stuff I need to be doing something else productive like cleaning the house, doing whatever like having like chores, other life stuff that wasn’t relaxing and constantly trying to be productive. Gaia: Yeah. I remember when you woke up during the night because you had dreamt how to solve your code and it actually worked. Gemma: It did actually work. Gaia: It was impressive. Gemma: It was impressive, but I think I was just constantly switched on. I wasn’t relaxing. Even when I was sleeping, I wasn’t relaxing. I was like waking up. I’m like, Oh, I know how to do that bit of code. And I got up and scribbled on a bit of paper. And I think I forgot the importance of thinking time in a PhD that you don’t always have to be working on something , even just sitting down and just, pondering or thinking about things. Really like stoic position, like putting your hand on your face. Yeah. Hmm. And also this eventually led to burnout. Gaia: No. No. Really? Gemma: Yeah, so I ended up taking two weeks off and I just spent those two weeks doing nothing. Gaia: Oh, I remember that. It sounded beautiful. Gemma: It was, I spent two weeks doing nothing because I physically couldn’t do it anymore. Gaia: I was working on my upgrade and Gemma was just like, I’m reading my book. Gemma: No, I just spent some time really reflecting and understanding what went wrong. As in why I literally couldn’t open my laptop. I was so physically burnt out and it was definitely due to toxic productivity. What about you? Gaia: Well, I’m also really good at it, but I’m getting better at managing it. So up until, I’d say, my first year of PhD, so since, think high school, after my first year of PhD, that’s, what, a decade? I used to do this thing where if I wasn’t productive from, let’s say, 7am to at least 9pm, I felt like I hadn’t done enough, but it also- that’s not good at all. But it also had the opposite effect because I was so tired that even in all those hours, I didn’t do as much as you think I would do. But now I’ve learned that if I do not work during the evening or during the weekends, I used to work during the weekends all the time. And when people were like, I think you need to take a break, I’d be like, you don’t understand. And now, at first I forced myself not to work in the weekends. And now I just refuse to open my laptop after Friday night until Monday morning. Sometimes I feel bad, but then I’m like, don’t care. I’m not saving lives. Gemma: Something that I think is really pushed towards this like toxic productivity culture and it is social media because I have a PhD Instagram account and you always see like, videos of people saying, Oh yeah, I worked 12 hours straight, or study with me between the hours of 12 to 4am and I’m sitting there like, I’m not doing enough. Gaia: How? Gemma: How? Well, first of all, how? I go to bed at 9, how are you up at 12? But I understand people have different working patterns, but there’s a trend going around at the moment, it’s like, how many hours I worked on my PhD this week. It’s like, Monday, 12 hours. Tuesday, 15 hours. And I’m sitting there like, that’s not right. Whatever works for you, and I’m not judging anyone. Gaia: And obviously it makes more sense if you have a deadline after like, in like two days, and you have to cram something. But after that… Gemma: Long term, it’s not sustainable and I think watching and having this pressure that you need to be doing everything and keeping up with other people, our PhD projects are completely different as well. Just because , me and Gaia are both in psychology, but our projects are completely different. Our timelines are different, our studies are different and I think definitely the social comparison that you have with other PhD students doesn’t help with it. Gaia: Agreed. It’s probably going to be similar to everyone else’s experience because we’ve heard it from so many people. Gemma: Yeah. And I think it is a learning thing as well. So, being productive is good because last week we spoke about procrastination – so delaying tasks. So surely being productive is good. So how do we tell the difference between normal, I’m being productive and I’m getting my stuff I need to do done and toxic productivity? So what are kind of like the warning signs, I guess? Gaia: So productivity itself is not toxic. Like, completing your work or chores is good, but it becomes toxic when you replace your personal needs with your work needs. Gemma: So feeling like you kind of have to constantly be doing something to have a purpose, but actually doing nothing is still looking after your wellbeing. Gaia: Yeah, just sit down, watch an episode of Gilmore Girls. Drink coffee. Gemma: Yeah. Other programs are available. Gaia: No, they’re not. Gemma: Gilmore Girls is the only option. I think kind of the warning signs to understand that when you’re kind of going over towards more toxic productivity would be over committing to projects, putting quantity over quality. So just getting loads of writing done, for example, but that writing might not be great. You’re not submitting your best piece of work and kind of having a hard time disconnecting like we were saying earlier, me sleeping and dreaming about my code that I was writing or not fully switching off would definitely be a sign of toxic productivity. Gaia: Yeah, I feel like another type of toxic productivity is, so of course we’re going to focus a lot on our PhDs, like on our PhD project. But once it’s done, and we’re trying to get a job, everyone that we’re like competing with has a PhD, so we all try to do so many side projects to add to our CV that at some point it just becomes like ticking off things off a list, even if they’re not really relevant. So, we found this research by Martin et al. 2023 and they proposed, it’s a nice acronym: R.I.G.H.T. So you need to follow these five points when you want to decide whether this side project is worth it. So The R of RIGHT is reasons why one should say yes or no. So Gemma does this thing when someone asks her to do something, she’ll just say yes because she doesn’t know how to say no. Gemma: I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about – I can say no! No, that is true, to be honest. When someone’s like, Gemma, can you do this? Gaia: It’s not relevant at all, but she’ll be like, yeah. Gemma: Yeah, it actually got to a point where my supervisor, who’s probably listening to this had to be like, Gemma, is this actually relevant? Like, just think about it. And I’m like, I can’t say no, but yes, definitely. Gaia: Going off of the relevant thing. I is, is this opportunity working towards my long term goals? So Gemma is doing all those side projects just a way to pass the time and feel like you’re doing something or is it actually working towards what you want to achieve? Gemma: You could say that about this podcast, to be honest. I think this podcast is actually really good for impact and things like that. So I do think that was a good opportunity, but some of the things I have taken up haven’t been relevant. Gaia: Agreed. G – does this have a growth opportunity? Yes, this podcast does have a growth opportunity, you’ll say. H – how will you fulfil the obligation given other commitments? Gemma: Balancing your time. So how are you actually going to do it? Does it mean that you’re going to have to sacrifice some of the key important personal needs that you have to do this extra thing? Do you actually need to do it? Are you going to be working in your evenings and things to get it done? Gaia: And then, finally – T: is the timing right? So should you start recording a podcast when you’re about to get married and have to organize the entire wedding? Gemma: I don’t know. I have no idea what you’re talking about. For those of you who don’t know, I’m getting married this year and decided to start a podcast and do a million other things at the same time, but the timing is right with this podcast. I feel like we’re ready and in terms of your professional career like the first two years of our PhD, we wouldn’t have been able to do a podcast. A, because we didn’t know enough about doing a PhD. Gaia: Do we know enough now? Gemma: More than we did in our first year. Gaia: Okay, fair enough. Gemma: And yeah, we’re kind of getting into the flow of it. But then certain things like other side projects that we’ve been asked to do, I have had to say no to. Gaia: Good job! I’m proud of you. Gemma: Because it’s not right time, time-wise will be all right in a year or so, I guess. Gaia: Yeah, so if you do learn to check all these five items off your list, but you’re still pressurized to work, what should you do? Gemma: I understand everyone’s relationship with their supervisor is different. But I think speaking and communicating with either an advisor on your PhD project or PGR lead, or someone who is more experienced academically, who’s able to kind of mentor you into understanding, is that side hustle appropriate at this time? For me, it was my supervisor had to kind of be like, okay, Gemma, like, you’re kind of taking on too much. And also having someone set boundaries for you is really helpful if you are in that frame of mind that you’re having to work all the time, it can be really hard to get out of that. So having someone else hold you accountable and say, Do you know what? It’s Friday evening. Switch off your laptop. Agreed. Or you worked in the evening on Thursday, take Friday afternoon off. My supervisor was really great at that, but I think anyone in your kind of PGR or more senior academic is able to advise PhD students on that. Gaia: I agree. They will do way more years to train themselves not to work in the weekend. Another good one would be speaking to other people in your PhD community. Obviously, usually people who are further up in the PhD program. Or, also people who are just older than you. Because even though they might be in their first year, they must still be better at work life balance because they’ve had more to live. Gemma: Yeah, more life experience. I definitely think speaking to other people in the PGR community does help. Even if it’s someone just to relate to and be like, oh, I feel like I’m working all the time. And, if you are concerned about if you’re just being productive or you’re being toxically productive just speaking to someone else and being like is this normal? Is it normal that I’m working 48 hours a week? 50 hours a week? Probably not. Gaia: Something I do, is because I know that Gemma is also really big on toxic productivity, sometimes it’s like 9pm and I text her. Do you think it’s good if I just turn off my laptop and read a book and she’ll be like, yes, and then I’ll be like, okay, if she said it’s fine, then it’s fine. Gemma: Yeah, help from others is really helpful. I also think just from my experience reflecting on how you’re spending your time is really good. Obviously it took getting completely burnt out for me to reflect on how much time I spent on things but the general rule is having, you should have eight hours sleep, eight hours work, and eight hours doing something you enjoy. Obviously this is flexible, but it’s a good starting point to try and think about if you’re trying to be over-productive or if it’s getting to be a problem. Gaia: Agreed!KEY ADVICE Gaia and Gemma: Key advice! Gemma: So my key advice for toxic productivity would be that you are more than just a PhD student. I think it can sometimes feel like your PhD is your whole world and you need to be spending all of your time doing it. But you’re also, you know, a friend, a partner. In my case, I’m a dog mum. Gaia: Four dogs, people. Gemma: Four dogs. There are other things that I can be doing that isn’t PhD related. I’ve got time. You’ve got more time than you think. Especially if you’re working lots of hours over a continuous period of time. It’s not sustainable and you will burn out. I saw a really interesting quote from Dr Will Cole. Gaia: She loves a quote. Gemma: I love a quote. And he’s the author of ‘Gut Feelings: Healing the Shame-Fuelled Relationship Between What You Eat and How You Feel’. But he says, if you don’t take time to rest, your body is going to pick a time for you that you won’t be able to work. So that basically means, if you don’t choose, ‘Okay, I’m going to switch off now, I’m going to take some time to rest’, your body will just shut down anyway and you won’t be able to do it. And you won’t get a choice about when you’re going to have to take time off. I think that leads nicely onto the importance of setting boundaries with yourself. You might feel like, I know it’s Friday at 6:00 PM, I could just spend another couple of hours doing this, but setting boundaries and be like, no. It’s Friday. I’m gonna switch my laptop off, and I’m gonna pick it up on Monday and also with others as well. So when people are asking you, oh, Gemma, Gemma always picks up extra projects, saying, oh, I’d love to, but I don’t have the capacity at the moment. It’s okay to say, and it takes practice, saying no. I’m still learning how to do that. Gaia: Yeah, I haven’t learned yet. So my piece of key advice was actually not from me. It’s from our Research and Guest Liaison Manager, Courtney. Her quote was, ‘always underestimate what you will be able to get done.’ And I know it sounds wrong, but actually, so what she means is, if you make a really long daily to do list, you’re gonna overestimate what you can get done for the day and then when you get to the evening and you don’t have everything done because you overestimated what you will be able to do, you’re gonna feel guilty and work through the night. So always try to underestimate what you’ll be able to do so you won’t overwork. Gemma: Yeah, you can always add to it, can’t you? If you manage to get everything done by 3pm, either switch off for the day. That would be nice. Or just you know, add a small task on to the end of the day. Good job, Courtney. Gaia: Good job, Courtney!
BRAIN BITES Gaia and Gemma: Brain bites! Gemma: Brain Bites is the last section of our podcast where we talk about some interesting research that we found that week. And it is completely separate to what we’ve been talking about, but it’s just something fun and interesting. Gaia: So what Brain Bites do we have for today? Gemma: When we were thinking about this for this week, I was actually looking at our plant that we have in our office, and I was thinking how well our plant was doing. We’ve actually named this plant. He’s called Reginald II. Gaia: And he’s doing much better than our previous plant Reginald I. Gemma: Yeah, Reginald I w as a previous office plant we had that died, but we’ve got a new plant and he’s doing very well, and we actually found some research about the impact of indoor plants on our wellbeing. Gaia: Yeah, so the research is a bit contradictory. So don’t spend all your money on office plants. Gemma: Because it might not work. Gaia: If you like them. But research by Thatcher et al. 2020 found that office plants can improve wellbeing, but of course this depends on many factors that we can’t go into, but stuff like size, species, personal experiences. If you’ve been bitten by a plant before somehow. Don’t get a plant. Gemma: That’s not gonna be good for your wellbeing. Yeah, basically don’t get one if you have allergies or ones that are hard to look after. Gaia: Yeah, like Reginald I. We were so sad. Gemma: Yeah, Reginald I was a difficult plant to look after. Gaia: Not good for wellbeing. Gemma: Not good for wellbeing, but in general, having it can improve wellbeing. So if you have either an office space at university or like a workspace at home, having a little plant there might boost your mood. If not, it just looks green and healthy. Sometimes, unless you forget to water it.
CLOSE AND SOCIALS Gemma: Okay, that’s everything for today. Episode 2 done! W here can everyone find us, Gaia? Gaia: Good question, Gemma! On Twitter, Instagram, and on our website. Gemma: Yep, Twitter and Instagram is @otherdoctor_pod and our website is www. theotherkindofdoctor.wordpress.com. Gaia: That was impressive! Gemma: Yeah. Typed it in Google enough. So yeah, we’d really like to hear from you if you’ve got any future episode suggestions, have any thoughts about what we’ve talked about today. Gaia: Any guests you’d like us to interview. Gemma: Or if you want to be a guest, yeah, get in touch. We really want to connect with as many like-minded PhD students as possible or early career researchers, anyone like that. As always, thanks so much to the Royal Holloway Doctoral School for supporting this podcast. We couldn’t do it without you, as well as our amazing podcast team. Thanks! Gaia: Thanks! Gaia and Gemma: Bye!
Episode 3
Teaching Alongside Your PhD with Gemma and GaiaSUMMARY In this third episode, hosts Gemma and Gaia talk about their experiences teaching as they work on their PhD projects, including teacher training programmes like inSTIL and nervousness on the first day. They give ‘Top Tips’ for teaching your first module, then in research-led ‘Brain Bites’, discuss how the way you dress can affect productivity.
OPEN Gemma: Hello and welcome to ‘The Other Kind of Doctor’ podcast. My name is Gemma, Gaia: and my name is Gaia, and we are both on the journey of gaining a PhD. Gemma: A quick disclaimer before we start. We are in fact the academic kind of doctors. Gaia: Well, nearly doctors. Gemma: Yes, nearly doctors. But we’re not your medical kind of doctors. Gaia: So if you do need medical attention, please contact your GP. Gemma: Now, let’s get on with the episode.
INTRODUCTION Gaia: Hello! Gemma: Hello! Gaia: Welcome to the third? Gemma: Third episode. Yes. We didn’t record last week so we were on a bit of catch up. Welcome to the third episode of the Other Kind of Doctor podcast. So happy to have you here, our listeners. Gaia: I thought you were talking about me. I was like, I’m always here. Gemma: I’m not happy to have you here at all….So, how has your week been, Gaia? What have you been up to? Gaia: Lots of, applying for ethics and teaching. So fun! Gemma: Applying for ethics. How’s that been? Gaia: Next question, please. How was your week? Gemma: My week has felt really long. And it’s only Thursday, when we’re recording this. I have just had my upgrade as in about two seconds ago, came from having my upgrade to, the podcast studio. For those of you who don’t know, a an upgrade is where about halfway through your PhD, you’re not actually studying for a PhD until you’ve had your upgrade. It’s like a, almost like an oral examination, but it’s a bit less scary than that. It’s like a meeting. Less formal. It’s to check your progress and to check you’re on track to complete your PhD within the funding. And just to check if there’s any issues or obstacles and things, So I just had mine, and I passed. Woo hoo! Gaia: Woo hoo! Against every expectation… I’m joking. Gemma: Obviously. And I’ve also been marking this week, or I just finished marking. Gaia: How was that? Gemma: Brilliant. Loved it.
TOPIC: TEACHING ALONGSIDE YOUR PHD Gaia: Right. So what’s the topic this week? Gemma: So it actually leads on from your teaching and my marking, because this week we’re talking about… Teaching! Yeah, we’re talking about teaching in our PhD and teaching as a PhD student. Gaia: Yeah, we are fairly not new to teaching, because we’re in a GTA contract. What that means is Graduate Teaching Associate, so we’re in a 60 percent PhD. 40 percent GTA contract. So we teach a lot. Gemma: Yeah, we tend to teach more than a typical PhD student. So we kind of feel qualified, to talk about teaching during a PhD. But, teaching during your PhD is quite a common role, and to have alongside your PhD. It’s also quite good because you can earn a bit of extra money and also get teaching experience. What does teaching look like as a PhD student, Gaia? Gaia: I don’t know what it looks like in other departments. Well, we kind of do. But so much. It’s just so much. So we do workshops for undergrads. We do running seminars. Some PhD students also give lectures if they’re really, if they’re lucky. Gemma: Workshops might also be like demonstrations. So like in biology and more sciencey subjects. Like in labs, they might demonstrate how to run a specific experiment. Gaia: With your little lab coat. We always see them. Gemma: Yeah, with a nice little cute lab coat. We do a lot of marking. Oh, so much marking. Well, I think me and Gaia actually do more marking than a typical GTA. But you might do about one or two batches a year of marking. Gaia: It’s fun, actually, until it becomes too much. Gemma: Too much. And I think as well teaching or education -this is what we were talking to our Director of Education in the psychology department last week, actually. Hello, Victoria, if you’re listening. Gaia: But I don’t think she would be listening. She better be. Gemma: She’s got much better things to do then listen to us. But she was making a really good point that teaching isn’t just about physical teaching, giving lectures and things. It’s about education and advocating for education within the higher education setting. So that might be engaging in pedagogic research, attending seminars related to teaching, outreach, scholarship, which could be things like doing a podcast, disseminating teaching information and things like that. Gaia: Yeah, so not just strictly teaching and marking. Gemma: No, you’re also attending workshops like the teaching one we did last week, which was really good. It was about teaching focused careers in academia, which was really interesting. We also will go to department board meetings. So we get to know how the department runs. We go to school board meetings as well which actually is really interesting you are a GTA or a TA and you’ve been invited, it is quite useful to go to, I think, because you get to understand the broad context of why you’re teaching. Gaia: Yeah, it gives you more of an idea of what’s going on in general. Gemma: Yeah, and where things are going, like the strategy, what might happen next year, how things are changing. And that also can help inform your teaching as well. So when students ask you really random questions, you can kind of answer them. If they ask you about something that you have no idea about. What about qualifications, what qualifications do you have to teach? Gaia: I have done inSTIL. Gemma: inSTIL, I think, is just Royal Holloway, but other universities might call it something different. Gaia: Okay, so at Royal Holloway, when you start teaching, you do inSTIL, which is like a course on how to teach, basically. You attend many seminars, and then you have to do your little portfolio that you will submit. And then at the end of it, if you’re lucky, you get to be… Gemma: Not if you’re lucky… Gaia: If you’re good. You get to be Associate Fellow of Higher Education something… Gemma: Association, I think, HEA, whatever that stands for. So when you start teaching, so mostly teaching associates and PhD students become the Associate Fellow of the HEA, which is at the bottom level of the teaching qualification. So you’re kind of assessed on things like delivering a workshop or running small group teaching. Diversity. And you have to do a reflection log about how you’ve done all of these things. It’s really interesting and I actually learned quite a lot. Gaia: And it felt like doing a coursework while in your PhD, which made me feel so, I don’t know… Gemma: Yeah, and it was nice. I enjoyed it and actually, got to learn about teaching in other departments as well, and how that’s run. Once you finish your PhD, you can continue on your teaching qualifications, which I think you do have to do when you become a lecturer or a Postdoctoral Teaching Associate or Teaching Fellow, you can gain Fellowship or Senior Fellowship of the HEA by doing the next qualification, which is at Royal Holloway called Capital, but other universities might call it something else. Gaia: How was your start of teaching? How did you feel when you started teaching? Gemma: I found teaching quite daunting, surprisingly. Oh, no one does… I had done some kind of tutoring in the past, like one to one, but to get up in front of, a seminar, and deliver a seminar in front of 30 to 40 undergrads staring at you, and you’re expected to know what you’re talking about, was really scary for me. I was straight out of my undergrad as well, so I’d only just graduated so I felt like such an imposter because I was like, hang on these are I was an undergrad a few months ago and now I’m expected to teach undergrads. I mean, they were first year undergrads. So it was you know, I knew I knew everything, but it was, that confidence wasn’t there. I felt like I didn’t know enough. I actually asked another lab tutor, which actually was a really good thing to do, and it did kind of settle my nerves. There was someone teaching the same class before me. And I said, do you mind if I just sit in your lab class and watch you do the teaching so I can, see how you run things? Gaia: That’s really cute. And also a really good idea. Gemma: Yeah. So I shadowed him for his session. I prepped so much for that first lab class, I prepped so much, almost too much. I got so stressed, and it did go well, probably. But the class I had was just really quiet. So I was supposed to be doing all these group activities and I’d kind of envisaged them all chatting and putting their hands up and I was like, no one was talking and I was like, oh no. After a few weeks they did kind of open up. I think it was a new, you know, a fresh face. This is my third year of teaching, and, some classes are just more chatty than others. It just so happened that the first class I got were really quiet. Gaia: You also learn how to deal with it after a while, but I had the same thing with my first class. I was like, I don’t know what to do with this! Gemma: Yeah, you just have to adapt your technique. How about you? What was your teaching experience like when you first started teaching? Gaia: I was so stressed. You know when you’re on the train and you’re so stressed that you’re like not stressed? I don’t know how to explain it. Gemma: I have no idea what you mean. Gaia: Before going, I was like, I need to look decent, so that if I don’t know what I’m saying, at least I have my little eyeliner on. So I chose my outfit, I had a little cat shirt, and my jeans, I had my eyeliner, and I was like, okay, at least I look good. Gemma: That’s all you can ask for really. That was part of the inSTIL qualification. Gaia: Yeah, it does make you feel more confident, even at conferences, if you think you look good or professional, it makes you feel better. Like you can actually do it. And again, my first class was, it was so quiet, and after it, I just messaged the Team’s chat of the whole department being like, Please, help! And people were very nice about it. But, yeah, it was daunting, but at the same time, after like, fourth week, you get used to it, and then it’s kind of fun. Gemma: Yeah, it is. It does become fun. Yeah. I didn’t say that in mine. It does become fun. Yeah, I think just getting over those and also understanding that everyone kind of feels nervous and the students definitely don’t realize that you’re nervous. Gaia: No, it’s just right after my first class, it’s like, you know, when you do an interview and then you get out of it and you’re like, I have no idea what I just said. That’s how I felt. Gemma: Yeah. And I think what I did for when I first started teaching was I pretended it was almost like I was acting like a confident teacher. So I say this to people when I have students that are worried about doing like a class presentation. I say, just go in there and pretend that you are a presenter on telly talking about that subject, and that presenter is really confident. You’re not Gaia, you are Ant and Dec. I don’t know. You’re, you know, Tess Daly of Strictly Come Dancing. Do people watch Strictly Come Dancing? You don’t know who that is. Gaia: No, I don’t, sorry. Gemma: Anyway, if you knew her, imagine you were her doing your, your teaching. You should watch a video after this. Gaia: Okay, I will. I will. Gemma: After our nervousness we need to probably tell the listeners how to make teaching successful. Gaia: What is something that you learned after three years of teaching? Gemma: I think first of all, giving yourself a break. I didn’t have any formal teaching experience before I started my PhD. A lot of PhD students won’t have teaching experience. And that’s absolutely okay. You’ve got three years of your PhD to gain teaching experience, and it’s one of those things you are not supposed to be amazing at it straight away. And also having the confidence that you do know more than the students. I went into my first class and was like, Oh, I’ve got to tell them what a correlational design is. Scary. And I was like, actually, I know this because I learnt it three years ago and I’ve been studying it since. So, that’s fine. Marking as well. If it’s not in your subject area, it can be daunting. So understanding that you’re not going to know everything straight away and actually doing a bit of reading around it, trying your best, that’s all you can do. Asking advice, you messaged the whole teaching department about your nervous class. Asking someone, Oh, do you know, I don’t really understand this marking. I speak to the module coordinator. Could you give me some advice? You have like marking guidance. We had marking training. Gaia: And similarly to that, even though you will know more than your class when you’re teaching it, if they ask something that you don’t know, don’t panic. You’re not supposed to know everything. Just tell them you’ll come back to it later. Gemma: Or if they ask you a really theoretical interesting question and you have no idea. I just say, Oh, that’s a really good question. What do you think? Gaia: I do that all the time. I did that this morning. Gemma: And whilst they’re answering it, I’m on Google. What is the answer? Or I say, Oh, that’s really interesting. Why don’t you have a think about that and email me what your thoughts are or have a read around some research because that’s really interesting. And yeah, dig yourself out of that hole. That’s really good. Most of the time you do know the answers to questions, but sometimes if you’re put on the spot, you just can’t remember what they are. Gaia: Just tell them you’ll email them later.
TOP TIPS Gemma: Our face to face teaching, what are we doing to make little top tips? Gaia: So, first of all, I think my big top tip is create a rapport with the students. Don’t just walk in there and start talking about the subject and ignore them. Try to be a bit funny, but at the same time, try to learn their names. Be nice to them. What do you do at the start of every – Gemma: I love how you have to say be nice to them. Gaia: You know, I feel like some people… Gemma: Don’t be horrible to your students. Gaia: Yes, please don’t. No, but also, at the start of every academic year, I walk in there and I – So this is very daunting for all students. The little icebreaker questions, I hated them as a student. So what I do now, because I hated them, and I know they’ll hate them, instead of like, pointing at them and asking them, tell me a fun fact about you right now, I just do a little Menti and ask some fun questions. The one last year was, Do you think Rachel and Ross from Friends were on a break? Yes or no? That’s how I found out that students don’t watch Friends anymore. I felt so old. But, the ones that do watch it thought it was really nice. Thought it was good. Started a discussion. Nice. Broke the ice. Gemma: Yeah. I did one last year with my class, a little ice breaker, and I put up pictures of my dogs, and I got them to name them. And guess what their names were. And then whoever picked the best name, I gave them a chocolate. Gaia: Sam and Gemma. Gemma: No. I’m sorry. It was like, Cheesy and Mr. Something. They thought Tilly was a boy. Gaia: Oh, no. Was Tilly Mr. Something? Gemma: Mr. Something. Gaia: Oh, and this was when your dogs were still two and four. Gemma: Yeah, they’re now doubled. Anyway, another thing which is quite an easy tip to do if you’re nervous about teaching is familiarizing yourself with the teaching room. If you’re on a campus based university, or even if you’re not on a campus based university, finding the room that you have to teach in and making sure that you get there, leave enough room, set up your PC. Gaia: Get yourself a little coffee so you, you feel like you have something to do with your hands Gemma: Yeah, so you have something to hold, get some water as well. I always forgot to bring water and then I’d get a really dry mouth from talking so much. So that’s a really good tip as well. Speaking to other PhD students that have taught on that module as well. Gaia: Definitely helps. Gemma: We teach on different modules so we can’t talk to each other, really. But, if you’re teaching, like doing demonstrations or workshops where you’ve got a group of students and you’re just, helping, you might be working with someone else as well, so if they’ve done it before, just having a chat with them and being like, Oh, hi. My name’s Gemma, what do I have to do? Yeah, I have no idea what’s going on. Yeah, and that’s absolutely okay because everyone was in that position. Gaia: I did that in my first workshop. It worked. Gemma: Yeah, so did I. I met up with the person beforehand and got a coffee with them and they told me what I needed to do. If it’s activity based as well, kind of planning roughly how long you’re going to spend on each exercise. Gaia: And usually it always takes either so much longer or so much less time. Gemma: Yeah, you can roughly plan but it doesn’t always go. Gaia: But at the same time after a bit you get the hang of it and you know how your students are going to act. Gemma: Yeah. Or if you think, oh I’m going to spend 15 minutes on this activity and it gets to 10 minutes and you hear the students talking about something that’s absolutely not related to the topic at all. You’re like, okay let’s bring it back and let’s have a class discussion. Gaia: Yeah, try to see what they’re doing. Try to get what the vibe is and go off of it. Gemma: Go with the vibes. Marking. What kind of top tips could we give for marking? Gaia: Don’t leave it all for the last day before the deadline. Don’t do that. Gemma: We are such hypocrites. Gaia: I always do that to this day. Gemma: I did that this week! I did it Sunday night. It was due in Monday morning. But it’s very stressful. Don’t do that. No. Use your time management skills. Marking is renowned for being boring, but if you can get a little bit done each day, it does just make it such a nice process. The last batch of marking I did was the first batch I ever did where I wasn’t leaving it to the last minute, and it was so nice. But then I just marked this batch and it went to pieces again. Especially if it’s a subject that’s not your subject, don’t leave it to the last second because you won’t know what the answers to the questions are, and you’re going to have to do research and read the guidelines really. I’ve marked on quite a few different modules now, not all the marking guidance is the same. Some people will give really, like, loose marking guidelines and some will give really strict ones and it’s kind of nice to find a balance in between that. You obviously want some structure to understand what you’re doing, but also you don’t want something to be so rigid that there’s no flexibility. Gaia: Yeah, I agree. Gemma: If all the papers are not meeting that, there needs to be some kind of…. Gaia: And obviously you don’t have any power over this, but after the first about 15 papers, if they’re exams, or after your first six course works, you kind of know what the average looks like, so you can go off of it. Gemma: And you say we don’t really have any power, but I think we do in that if you are… probably need to build your confidence up before you feel like you can do this, but certainly for me, when I’m marking and something isn’t clear, I will say, I’m not quite sure this is quite right. I’ve marked on this module a few times and I don’t think this boundary is what it should be. Marking is much easier when you have clear guidance that you agree with. Gaia: Agreed. Gemma: So the last kind of tip that we want to give is I think liaising with other teaching members of the department can be quite daunting as well. Yeah. Especially if you’re a new PhD student, you’ve got to talk to these super important professors and you need to talk to them about teaching. I do think that you’re, when you are a PhD student, you’re a Teaching Associate. You do have a lot more face to face contact with the students than some of the people that are making the big decisions do. You’re actually more involved and speak to the students more, and you’re able to give really valuable feedback. If you think something could be better, just say. Gaia: But sometimes module coordinators will ask you straight up. Because they know that you talk to the students way more than they do. Gemma: Or if they’ve changed something in their module when you deliver the seminar, and they’re going to ask you how did it go, it’s really important that you’re honest, you know. Gaia: Yeah, don’t just say, oh yeah, it went all good, but the class is up in flames. Gemma: I think yeah, understanding, that your voice is really important. We like going to staff events as well. I love it. We love it. We’re, we’re so important, but we, I, I did that right from when I started. It’s speaking with the more senior members of staff can really help you build networks and friendships in the department. Building that community with the staff. Yes. You obviously want a PhD community as well, but having those connections with the staff members really help . Cause they’ve all done a PhD as well, and if you know them, you feel like you can talk to them more if you’re struggling with work-life balance or PhD teaching. Gaia: You can totally moan to them. And they’re going to understand because they’ve done that. Gemma: Yes. And it will also give you a break from your PhD stuff as well, because you’re going to be in, staff events. Gaia: And you feel so productive even though your PhD is still there, untouched. Gemma: It’s a great way of procrastinating.
BRAIN BITES Gaia: Brain Bites! What is this week’s topic? Gemma: It kind of links into what you were talking about earlier. We wanted to find out whether wearing a good outfit or making yourself look good or making yourself feel good makes you more productive. Because, Gaia, when I work from home, I work in my onesie, not onesie, an Oodie. Gaia: Oodie. So good, so comfy, but at the same time… Gemma: I work in my pyjamas and my Oodie, and I want to know whether it would be better if I just got dressed. Gaia: The answer is yes, you should get dressed. I know, I’m sorry. Gemma: What does the research say? Gaia: Research by Kim (2023) says that those who are dressed in nice outfits, but it doesn’t have to be objectively nice, just stuff that makes you feel good, they will perform better because your self esteem will be higher, so you’ll be more productive. Gemma: Oh, so you’re building that self confidence and you’ll be more focused. Gaia: Yeah. This won’t stop me from wearing PJs at home. Gemma: I mean, I probably still will wear my Oodie. But, maybe if I want to be super productive, I might get dressed. Maybe loungewear, because that’s not really pyjamas. Gaia: It feels like pyjamas. Gemma: If I feel like I look good in my Oodie… Gaia: That’s, yeah, your big pink fluffy Oodie. Gemma: I do, my Oodie is pink like a marshmallow. Gaia: Yeah, she wears it during our Team’s meetings, so. Gemma: Yeah, so it is about what you interpret yourself to look like. You don’t need to wear a three piece business suit in your house. Gaia: No, just something that makes you feel good. Gemma: If you feel, confident in your leggings and your jumper, fab. It might also be good to think about for conferences and stuff as well. A hundred percent. If you’re going to feel, more confident dressed up, in more business attire, then wear that. But if you’re going to feel more comfortable and confident in jeans and, a smart jumper, do that as well. Totally fine. Like us right now, I’m in my work trousers. Gaia: Well, you did just have your upgrade in leggings and a huge sweatshirt. Gemma: A very big jumper. Well, anyway. That’s it for today. So wear whatever you like, is the conclusion. But you are going to be more productive if you feel good.
CLOSE Gaia: Third episode done! Fabulous. These are going to come out very soon. Can’t wait. Gemma: Yeah, as we’re recording this, our trailer comes out on Monday. So in a few days. How exciting. Well, we really hope you enjoyed this episode. We are really enjoying making these, so we hope we can carry on doing it. Stay tuned for next episode, which will be coming next week. Thanks so much to Royal Holloway Doctoral School for supporting this podcast and our amazing podcast team, behind the scenes. If you want to find out more about The Other Kind of Doctor podcast, where should people go, Gaia? Gaia: Instagram and Twitter @otherdoctor_pod and our website is… Gemma: http://www.theotherkindofdoctor.wordpress.com. Gaia: Nice! Gaia and Gemma: See you next week! Bye!
Episode 4
PhD and Neurodiversity with Gemma, Gaia and guest Hannah JonesSUMMARY This week, Gemma and Gaia are joined by Hannah Jones. Hannah is a fellow PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London, and is researching reading motivation for individuals with developmental language disorders. In this episode, Hannah shares her experiences of academia as someone who is neurodivergent, and discusses what universities and supervisors can do to support neurodivergent individuals. Lastly, she gives her top tips for other neurodivergent PhD students on navigating the academic world.
OPEN Gemma: Hello and welcome to the Other Kind of Doctor podcast. My name is Gemma, Gaia: and my name is Gaia, and we are both on the journey of gaining a PhD. Gemma: A quick disclaimer before we start. We are in fact the academic kind of doctors. Gaia: Well, nearly doctors. Gemma: Yes, nearly doctors. But we’re not your medical kind of doctors. Gaia: So if you do need medical attention, please contact your GP. Gemma: Now, let’s get on with the episode.
INTRODUCTION Gemma: Hello! Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Other Kind of Doctor podcast. Gaia: What are we talking about today? Gemma: We are talking about, we’ve actually got a really exciting guest, our first guest, Hannah Jones who’s a fellow PhD student on, and we’re going to be talking about navigating your PhD as someone who is neurodivergent. Gaia: Yes.
DISCLAIMER Gemma: Just a quick disclaimer before we start, I accidentally got my words muddled up briefly in this episode. I used the word neurodiverse rather than neurodivergent, and Gaia is going to give us a quick definition about what those terms mean. Gaia: So the term neurodivergent, which is what Gemma should have used, refers to individuals with conditions such as ADHD, autism, and is used as the opposite of the term neurotypical. But the term neurodiverse is generally used to describe a group of individuals who are neurodivergent, although some sources also report the term as representing the whole spectrum of diversity, so also including neurotypical individuals. Gemma: Okay, I hope that clears everything up, but without further ado, let’s move on with the episode!
HANNAH JONES INTERVIEW Gaia , Gemma: and Hannah: Hello! Hello! Hello! Gemma: So today we are joined with lovely Hannah Jones. She is a fellow PhD student. And we’re going to be discussing navigating a PhD with neurodiversity. Woo hoo! Woo! We’ve been really excited to have Hannah on as our first official guest. Yay! Yay! How do you feel about being our first guest, Hannah? No pressure. Hannah: I mean, Courtney asked me and I was like, okay! Gaia: Oh, you didn’t jump and scream when she asked? Hannah: I didn’t give it much thought. Well, she was like, you seem up for it, and I’m like, yeah, I mean, I can do anything. Gemma: We think you’re really well versed on this topic, and we think you’re going to be really interesting. Hannah: I’m just talkative, that’s what you mean? Gemma: Yeah, basically. That is exactly what we mean. Hannah: I thought I’d given you enough life stories! Gemma: Yeah… Gaia: So, first question. Just tell us a bit about your PhD. Oh, this sounds like a PhD interview. Gemma: Yeah, it’s not a PhD interview, but bear in mind… Gaia: Just what’s your PhD about? What are you doing? Gemma: Yeah, what subject area you’re in? Like, tell us a bit about you. Hannah: Yeah, so, obviously psychology. I’m just going to start with that. Gemma: She’s another one of us, psychology. Hannah: Yes, yes. And I’m in my first year. And mine’s, I’m working with Saloni Krishnan and Kyle Jasmin and also Cathy Manning of Reading and mine’s centered around reading research. But specifically we want to look at you know, you have two children in a class, both with the same profile, like they have the same disability, the same language profile. For whatever reasons, their trajectories should be exactly the same, they should end up in the exact same place. But obviously, as we know, that doesn’t happen. One ends up loving reading, and for some reason keeps trying to read, and the other doesn’t want to even look at books. So, we’re kind of coming up with a way to test that without actually using questionnaires. Because currently, there’s questionnaires, which is like, do you like reading? One to nine. And obviously if anyone’s read Amrita’s paper, which if you have not. Gaia: Shout out to Amrita. Hannah: Yeah, very good paper. It doesn’t predict whether you’re going to like to read. So we’re really interested in that department, whether we can expand on that and whether we can separate ability from effort. And we don’t mean effort as in like something you can control. It’s more how we evaluate effort and reward. So like, am I willing to run for a piece of chocolate now, depending on how much you like that chocolate? Gemma: Depends if it’s Dairy Milk or, or a Galaxy, really. Gaia: I wouldn’t run for any reason, to be honest. Gemma: I wouldn’t run for a Galaxy chocolate bar. Hannah: Yeah, and imagine we then tailored that running ability so we know that you averagely run five minutes, right? You can run five minutes. No sweat. You’re fine with it. You don’t want to run at all. So it’s zero. That’s your baseline, right? And then imagine I knew that that’s your ability, so I’ve tailored it to your ability and then I say hey if you run ten minutes, which I know is above your limit I will give you two pieces of chocolate. But if you run 15, I’ll give you three. So that’s what we’re altering, but it’s tailored to your ability, so that kind of cancels it out the equation. Gaia: And it’s really interesting. Gemma: Could, I wonder if you could tell us why you wanted to pursue a PhD? Your PhD topic sounds so interesting and obviously you’re in your first year, so kind of like, why you wanted to be a PhD student, I guess. Hannah: Yeah, I think my destination is a bit, like, funny because obviously this subject is different from what I applied for originally. Because I originally had an idea to centre my PhD around special interest in reading and seeing if we can use special interest to kind of a strength based approach to like improving reading motivation, and that’s, we’ve obviously gone very far away from that. And that was basically because there was all like, actually do we, should we want to use like, should we categorize special interest? How would we apply it? And then it’s like, a lot of these are more like people who work with kids naturally start to do this. But obviously if you don’t work with kids, you don’t actually start to do this. And then we were like, oh, that’s going to require different research. And then Saloni presented this idea and I was like, Oh my God, that’s so cool. Because also we use like computational modeling, which is awesome, though very complicated and I am not excited. Gemma: So if you, did you do a master’s or did you go straight from undergrad? Hannah: No, so I did undergrad and while I was in there, I started to apply in my final year to PhD programs and that was based on like other people’s advice. Gemma: Did you always want to do a PhD? Hannah: I wanted to do research so I’ve always been one of those people that’s been like research and if I have to do teaching I’ll do a bit of teaching. Like one of those people that is like I just want to do research and I just want to I guess help, in a way, because like, I think a lot of people, like, we’re all, like, bound by our, like, experiences, aren’t we? So, like, I came from, like, one of those things where, like, I was diagnosed by an educational psychologist when I was little. And I remember in my educational psychology report, my parents told me this repeatedly, that it said, She’ll go to university. She can, with the right support. My parents did not believe her. But to be fair, that’s because they didn’t think I’d achieve GCSEs, right? So then I think back to that, and you think, Well, that’s down to all the support, and mostly all the research. And also, I’m a person that likes to learn. As I said, I’ve always been one of those people where it’s like, what can I do to improve myself? My brothers hate me because they’re like, they’re the type of people that wouldn’t be like that. They’re like, one of them is like, I’m ready to retire now. And it’s like, you’re two years older than me. Why are you ready to retire? But he’s like, no, I’m ready to retire. And the other one’s like, no, I don’t want to do psychology more. Because he did psychology undergraduates and he did a master in clinical. And he literally said, I’ve discovered I don’t like people. Gemma: Well, that’s a long way to find out that you don’t like people. Hannah: To be fair, he does like people. I do think. I think he definitely has traits of autism that he just doesn’t know he has and he’s just like, I mean, he’s like, I want money and I was like, yeah, that’s not how you get it. Gemma: You’re certainly not going to get it as a PhD student. Hannah: So that’s his- now he’s a car insurance person. So he does car rentals. Gaia: Good for him, I guess? Hannah: Hey, he’s getting a house… Gaia: Good for him then! Gemma: So you kind of hinted towards it just there, Hannah, but I wonder if you could tell us a bit about your neurodiversity and maybe if you’ve got a diagnosis and your experiences so far. Hannah: Yeah, well, that’s a very complicated question as in like, cause like if we’re going like from when I was a child, we’ve always known. So the moment I went into nursery, the teacher actually told my mom something’s different about her. That’s the first thing she literally said. She like, something is definitely off. I don’t think she used the word different. I think it was like, something is definitely off with your child. Because I was the type of person to like, play alone, scream under desks, clutch onto my mom as she tried to pry me off her. Gaia: Sorry, did you say scream at desks? Hannah: Scream under desks. Gaia: Oh, oh, okay. Hannah: Crawl under the desk and then scream for your life. Gaia: I thought you meant AT desks. Hannah: No, no, no, no. Though that does not seem far from what I would do. To be fair, it was like one of those things. So I had like loads of little quirks. And it took years and years and years of like loads of educational psychology. That’s most of what I remember from my childhood of just like being other support, being out of class. So that was like, loads and loads. And the educational finally diagnosed me with DLD, so that’s Developmental Language Disorder. Woop woop! Dyslexia, which obviously, struggle with reading. Dyspraxia, which is that my fine motor skills aren’t very good. And that includes my eyes, funny enough, people don’t know that. Gaia: How does that work? Hannah: So, you have fine little muscles in your eyes. And if you have dyspraxia, some people will actually notice that their eyes vibrate slightly. So most eye doctors won’t pick up on it. But if you go to a specialist eye doctor, they do. Gaia: Oh. Interesting. Can you feel it? Hannah: No, obviously. But, like, it’s why sometimes, like, words move. You know, like, like Percy Jackson always says, the words move. That’s not dyslexia, that’s dyspraxia. Gaia: Wow, you should tell them that. Gemma: You should write to Percy Jackson. Hannah: It’s one of those things where a lot of people who have dyslexia don’t even know though. Because actually they have dyspraxia as well. Because they’re so comorbid. And then I’m also diagnosed with hypermobility with double joints. So my, I can do that with my finger. Everyone really hates it. Gemma: She’s doing that with her thumb. She’s like clicking her thumb. Hannah: I can like dislocate it on and off, it like jumps out of the thing. People find it disgusting and I’m just like, it’s not that disgusting, it’s just a normal thumb. Gaia: There’s a time and place.. Hannah: When is the time? Gaia: I am not sure. Hannah: Alone. Nowhere should see me. And I was also diagnosed with Low Working Memory, which, funny enough, someone said to me, is that a diagnosis? And I said, yes, it is. Literally when I did my – I did a neuroplasticity assessment when I was getting diagnosed later on in life in university for ADHD. And they found that actually my working memory for like visual is like one percentile. Gemma: Could you explain for listeners what working memory is and what kind of Low Working Memory looks like? Hannah: Yeah, so for example, I can’t hold things in my head. So like, if you tell me, Hannah, go out and take the trash out and it’s the green bin. Right, you’ve done two loads of questions, so I’m not gonna remember one of those. Or I’ll step out the door and then go, Wait, which bin? Green, Hannah. Oh, okay. Step outside. Oh god, forgot again. Go back in and I’ll, What bin? So I can be like, Wait, like, just, very forgetful though, people don’t notice normally, cause, I have loads of strategies. But, like in terms of what it looks like, that’s, like, very hard to describe. Gemma: Yeah, I think that summarizes it quite nicely. I wondered how your neurodiversity has kind of influenced your educational journey. So we were chatting a bit about before we started recording. I don’t know if you want to talk about that a little bit. Hannah: Yeah, yeah so, after I was diagnosed, because, obviously, other discussions of other disorders were on the table and all of this. But in order to get me into a dyslexia school, which is what my parents wanted to prioritize I didn’t get diagnosed with ASD and ADHD, just ADD. But later in university in year one, my undergraduates, I was then diagnosed with them, because… Gaia: Sorry, and for listeners, those are? Hannah: ASD is Autism, obviously, which is impairments with like, communication. It’s also like sometimes I assume knowledge, which is what I did there. Don’t worry, I do that with other people as well. Randomly start talking and they’re like What? You’ve missed out a couple of steps there, very important ones. What else? ADHD. Hyperactivity. And inattentiveness. I feel like all of them have just shown signs of the whole thing! Gemma: So you obviously had some diagnosis later on in your kind of primary or secondary school. You said you went to a, did you go, you went to a dyslexic school, is that right? Hannah: Yeah, I went to a dyslexic specialist school. So halfway through primary, I got it from the government, so the government paid for it because my parents couldn’t pay for it. But it did lead into a lot of debt for my mum and dad. And so then I finally got into a sexist school in like year five. And then I probably started to properly read in year seven. And then I stayed in the dyslexic school for quite a long time, obviously. And then I achieved more than I thought I would. Gaia: Now you read so much! Hannah: Yeah, I love reading now. Literally, I got to year 8 and it was like, you can’t stop me now, I’m forever reading. I will read everything and anything. Yeah, and then I ended up going to A levels. Which, funny enough, my parents thought the educational side would be the hardest part. And I’d say that’s like, even with university, with neurodiversity you think that must be the part you struggle with because obviously you have ADHD that means you can’t concentrate on your work or you have you know autism so that means you can’t work with colleagues very well. But actually it all came to the fact that, no socialization is the hardest part. It’s just like one of those things where like working memory. It’s really easy if you had working memory and not Autism, because you’d be able to go like, Hey, so I don’t know what that person looks like. Because I can’t remember faces, fun fact. Like, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m reasonably fine. Like, I remember you guys faces. But sometimes, I generally like, someone came up to me today, and I’m so sorry to this person. I have no clue who they are! Gaia: What did they look like? Hannah: They had glasses, I think they were from the ASD lecture I did, because I was a guest speaker for that, but I don’t know if they were. They just came up like they were so familiar to me, and they were like, oh hi, are you coming from a lecture, are you just leaving? And I was like just coming in. Like, I don’t know. Gemma: To be fair, I don’t have face processing issues, but I, you just have to go with it, haven’t you, when people come up to me and I just go yeah, that’s great. Good. Hannah: I just forget people so much. Like, my dad says, like I always say this to my dad because it always happens in movies. And I’m like, if there’s two average blonde looking women in a movie, they’re just exactly the same. And I’m just like, okay, I understand that they’re two attractive blonde women, but other than that, they’re the same person. Gaia: I get that. So, this was your journey when you were little. Do you think your university is affecting your educational journey now as a PhD student? Hannah: I mean, I think some ways, yes, because obviously it’s still the socials big like thing and like I’m not fully independent in other ways, right? So I still live at home. And my mum does help me with a lot of things, right? But in terms of like, the actual experience of a PhD or stuff like that, it’s very similar. So like, because of all the support I’ve got in place, and like with Saloni, she’s very nice. And she understands a lot of what I say. But she will have to treat me slightly differently and she literally said to me she was like I didn’t realize how many things that were unspoken and how many things like I didn’t realize how different it was and that’s really funny coming from a person who’s like worked with people with autism, worked with people with DLD. But then when you meet someone with it, it’s like, oh, you start to realize like small little things, like she would say to me, Hannah, five minutes. Now what that means is shut up, shut up because we need to go in five minutes, not what I thought was continue talking for five minutes. So she told me that and I was like, right, that means shut up. Got it. Okay. Gemma: Oh, that’s really interesting actually. So Saloni’s your supervisor. Hannah: Yeah. Gemma: And yeah, considering her research is on looking at different types of neurodiversity that that was kind of taken for granted, and I can imagine other PhD students that do have neurodiversity or are neurodiverse that do have different experiences because their supervisors don’t have that knowledge. Hannah: Yeah, there’s like so many experiences where like I’ve met so many people, like even recently Cathy Manning came and we were talking and they were like, wow, your parents must be so much readers, were they when you were a child? And I was like, no, not at all. They didn’t really like reading. And they were like, did you have a TV? And it’s because I said, like, I, I, I kind of started to read in a way of trying to, like, not be excluded from communication. Because there’s a lot of, like, stuff we communicate through, like, reading in the sense of, like, Oh, here’s a movie, but if you can’t watch the movie, you would read the book. Like, very weird little things. Gemma: That’s really interesting to think about how people who maybe don’t have the same reading motivation that you do who might be dyslexic and things like that, everything that’s communicated with PhD students is in a written form. Apart from podcasts! So that is actually something really interesting to think about. Hannah: There’s so many things, like, I was speaking with Kyle, who, he’s worked with people with ASD, and when I first met with him to discuss, actually, a PhD proposal, that was when I was in my third year in undergraduates, he was like, you use your hands a lot. And I was like, What? And he was like, Oh, you use your hands a lot. I saw that people with autism don’t use their hands a lot normally. And I was like, that’s actually fascinating because if you read like a different side of research with specifically girls with autism or like certain adults with autism, like not all people, obviously is that we use our hands a lot more because like, it’s sensory processing, isn’t it? It’s like, how to sensory seek without being inappropriate, obviously. Because like, you can’t have a fidgety toy all the time. So you use your hands like a, like right now, I’m just like flailing my hands about. Gemma: She is. She definitely is. Hannah: It’s like the way I talk. Gaia: Although I didn’t n Gemma: No, now you’ve noticed it, that’s what we’re going to be looking at. Hannah: Yeah, it does, it does, it does. It’s like, it’s nuts. Gaia: Going off of that, do you think there’s something that they should be doing in higher education to make it more accessible? Hannah: I mean, I think it’s like with all these things, like when we’re talking about like psychology students, right? I think a lot of people work with and we learn about like disorders and we learn about like children and all these things, but sometimes it’s like, it’s very funny when you know, you’re working on a PhD about like reading and neurodiversity and stuff like that, but then you do stuff and you’re like, Huh, you know, there’s so many unwritten rules. I think that’s the biggest one is like even with the like a lot of things in the PhD. Sometimes things are very un- not written and not spoken about and you almost expect to learn as you go. But some of us don’t learn as quick as others and it’s like, oh, I don’t want to hurt another person I don’t want to upset like my supervisor or someone like this, but you haven’t totally been upfront so, it’s like… Gaia: It’s actually a good point. Gemma: So is that kind of looking at supervisor education as well? So kind of because obviously, you know, even supervisors from other departments like, you know, an English PhD student, history PhD student- educating them to kind of not go in with these preconceived ideas about how things should be. Hannah: I think it also starts at the grassroots and like undergraduates, for example, like we talked about like ASD and not having a guest speaker. So we’re talking always about people without actually including people. And the problem with that is that it’s so different from actually talking about dyslexia. Like we all know what dyslexia is, right? You shouldn’t be able to read. That’s the stereotype, right? And like in books, like I’m a reader. And in books when I read dyslexics, who are in books, they are always people who can’t read at all. Gaia: Percy Jackson. Hannah: That’s one, and so many others, like, and sometimes you’re like, that’s not the way dyslexia always is. Yes, there’s so many people who are like that, and there’s also people who can read but they don’t want to read. And there’s so many different types, but also, as you say, there might be an English literature PhD student who’s working with her supervisor, she has dyslexia, and she might make mistakes, right? But she can write, and she can do it, and someone might not understand, hang on, why are you not doing that, and why don’t you make mistakes all the time? But it’s like, when they’re doing a back and forth, like, conversational email, I don’t want to listen to my voice, and like, with that little, like, speaker, you know, the electronic one. And I don’t want to do all these like crazy checks, I just want to talk to you. Right? Where if I’m submitting a document and it’s like, not the first draft, because my drafts are really rough, even though Saloni’s like, your rough draft is never rough, and I’m like, that’s my rough draft, because it includes loads of spelling mistakes. And it’s like, when spellcheck isn’t on, god, she like goes through and she’s like, yeah, I noticed there’s a little mistake here and I was like, spellcheck isn’t on. I’m going to have to copy and paste the whole thing into Word. But like, it’s very small stuff like that. And I think someone who might understand, but have the stereotype involved. And I think sometimes you almost like, you know, actually in university societies, you know, those Code of Conduct, that would be nice for the supervisor relationship. Gaia: I don’t know what, what is it like? Hannah: So Code of Conduct, it’s like what you expect from each member of the society, what you expect from the people who are attending, what you expect from like everyone involved. So like… Gemma: It’s like a bit of like rules… Hannah: Responsibilities, responsibilities, expectations, like I guess like stuff like that. So like, if you were a person who only wants to be contacted during hours, right, then you would specify that in just the little thing. Yeah, which that’s not always the case because Saloni says to me she contacts out of hours and she doesn’t expect you to respond. Gemma: Yeah, having supervisor training delivered by people who are neurodiverse or people who are neurodiverse creating resources for supervisors so they can better support them and it will kind of talk about it. Would that work? Hannah: I think it’s more down to actually, I think that’s what we need to be doing, like, at the grassroots, like, with undergraduates and with training. But then I guess at the supervisory level and when you’re already, like, right now, I would say is that allow neurodiversity to be open communication, right? Like, I struggle with this. And even, like, people who don’t have any diagnoses. We’re all a bit, we all have our things where we’re like, Hey, I really don’t understand what you mean here. Can you explain it to me? But you feel like this thing of not being able to do that. And like, I’m very lucky Saloni understands me. And I’ll be like to her, I’m very open about stuff, you know. I’ve never not, like, I’ll just randomly say like, I’m dyslexic when I make a mistake. But like, other people aren’t. And I think that’s where, like, I guess the PhD advisors come in. But I guess, like, maybe for certain… Gemma: Advisors, for people who might have different terminologies at university, it’s kind of a impartial person on a as part of your PhD team. So kind of separate from your supervisors that can give advice. Gaia: That you go to not for your actual PhD research, but more for like general life. Hannah: Yeah. I wonder if like before, like, your first meeting, not even first meeting, maybe, like, during, like, the introductory week, you should meet with that person and your PhD supervisor. Talk about, like, expectations, like Code of Conduct, but in a meeting. You know, like, hey, I communicate this way, I don’t do it out of hours. Is there any questions? Or, like, what do you expect from me? Gemma: Yeah. Or if people struggle, like, keeping up to date with emails, like, maybe, you know speaking with supervisors and being like, you know, as part of that introductory meeting, you know, I’m not very good at reading really long massive emails. Is it better to condense it into, you know, a short meeting or something if you can communicate better that way? Hannah: And I’ve always been like, I always say like, being open is always best. Like, I’ve openly said to like Saloni, I’ll be like, Oh, by the way, I’m taking medication for depression, right? And it’s like, I don’t think any of those things should impact anyone. But if they are, I would say like, impartial people are great for the standpoint of like, sometimes people don’t understand what you mean, but it’s like, hey, just in case I might just have a mental dip, it ain’t about you because I do want to do this, but it’s like, it’s like sometimes we can’t control anxiety and we can’t control depression. And sometimes, neurotraumatists decide to opt out. They’re like I’m on a tea break today. How fun. Gaia: As a last nice question, what do you think is a top tip for helping other neurodivergent individuals in embarking in their PhD journey? Hannah: Yeah, I guess it really depends what stage of life you are at, but like I would say for undergraduates, because I know that’s when like some people are looking, or like master students, I would say it’s okay to be open, right? And if people do discriminate you, it’s also okay to report them. And I know it feels awful and you’re like, they may blacklist me! They won’t. Like, if they’re actually that horrible, trust me, they’ll be like, grateful. Not them, but other people will be grateful, right? Because like, I think at certain times, when you get to a point where like, if you are not doing psychology, I think psychology is so easy to be open, like go for it, do it. Cause actually that can actually be a reason you are more likely to get offered it, which is crazy, but it’s the truth. But if you’re doing like English lit or chemistry or something, and it does feel like something that’s more of an obstacle, I would say, I would say you don’t have to actually disclose it straight away when you’re applying, you can disclose it afterwards to your team and everything, but I would say always be open to your supervisor if you can. And if they. If they don’t seem to understand it, then I would say talk to someone and try to get them to understand, but be very understanding that they may not understand it, because it’s very hard, I would say, like, a lot of people, like, just don’t know your shoes, like, and it, if they are rude, then you report, like, I would say, like, now, now it’s the time, like, I don’t even mean rude as in, like, rude, rude, but if they’re, like, very condescending or something, feels very off, you should do it, because it’s not worth it for anyone, and you do, I always think, like, think about another person who will come in, like, who might be, you know, in that position. And if that happens to them, are they gonna be on stable ground? Are they not? Yeah. And you know, I really think that’s more important nowadays. Gaia: Yeah. Yeah. Great advice! Gemma: Absolutely. Just to finish off are you on Twitter or X as we call it now? Are you? Gaia: Do you want people to follow you anywhere? Gemma: Do you want people to follow you? Hannah: To be fair, I don’t have any social media. That’s a, that’s a weird autism slash anxiety thing. Gemma: Absolutely. Gaia: Don’t follow Hannah anywhere. Gemma: If you, if you want to find Hannah, well you can’t. Gaia: Don’t. Hannah: I have a Pure profile on Royal Holloway. Gaia: Google Hannah Jones, Royal Holloway. Gemma: And you can check out her Pure profile. Hannah: Yeah, and then my email’s on there. Gemma: Yeah, and we’ll link it in the thing. Yeah. It’s so lovely to have you on, Hannah. Thank you for being our first Guinea pig guest. Hannah: I am a Guinea pig. Gemma: You are a Guinea pig. But yeah, thanks so much! Hannah: I wish I was a dog . Gemma: Not a Guinea pig. Hannah: Not a Guinea pig. Even though they are adorable.
BRAIN BITES! Gemma: Brain Bites! Woohoo! What’s the topic this week? Gaia: Well, it’s actually come from a TikTok trend and it’s does caffeine consumption work as a treatment for ADHD symptoms? Gemma: So it kind of feeds on from what we were talking about with Hannah today about neurodiversity. So yeah, I’ve seen this on TikTok loads. Yeah. Everyone’s saying oh yeah, when I have caffeine, when I have coffee, it actually like makes me like more relaxed, but focused, not hyperactive and things like that. And as a researcher, I was thinking, is this true? Gaia: Or is this just a trend? Gemma: Well, we had a look at the research, didn’t we Gaia? Gaia: Yes, so, excuse me for the pronunciation, but, Vázquez [et al.] (2022) actually looked at this, and they did find that caffeine treatment increases attention and improves learning in ADHD, but, Gem, Gemma: But, they were only looking at animal studies, and the results are quite contradictory. And there’s actually no support on reducing hyperactivity symptoms. It’s only looking at increased attention and improves learning. So take from that what you will. But don’t believe everything you read online or see online. Because it doesn’t look like it’s proper treatment. And obviously, just a disclaimer. If you do have ADHD, please go and see your doctor… Gaia: Yeah, and after this, don’t be like, Oh, I’m gonna drink three coffees right now because you might die. Gemma: Please don’t do that. Obviously, follow your medical advice that you’ve been given, but we were just trying to have a look. Gaia: Yeah, again, not that kind of doctor. Gemma: Not, we are not that kind of doctor. Gaia: Oh, so good.
CLOSE Gemma: Anyway it was great to record another episode. That’s it for us today. Gaia: Chat to you next week! Gemma: Chat to you next week. Don’t forget to subscribe and hopefully you’ve listened to all four of our episodes. So yeah, subscribe and review. Give us a five star review because these episodes are lovely. Of course. Gaia: Our trailer came out yesterday. So exciting! Gemma: Yes! Obviously thank you so much to the Doctoral School for supporting this podcast. Where can people find us on social media Gaia? Gaia: @otherdoctor_ pod. Gemma:Gemma: That’s it, on Twitter and Instagram, and you can look at our lovely website and for full transcriptions at http://www.theotherkindofdoctor.wordpress.com. Thanks. Gaia and Gemma: Bye!
Episode 5
Presenting Your Research Like a Pro with guest, Dr Beatrice HayesOPEN Gemma: Hello and welcome to the Other Kind of Doctor podcast. My name is Gemma, Gaia: and my name is Gaia, and we are both on the journey of gaining a PhD. Gemma: A quick disclaimer before we start. We are in fact the academic kind of doctors. Gaia: Well, nearly doctors. Gemma: Yes, nearly doctors. But we’re not your medical kind of doctors. Gaia: So if you do need medical attention, please contact your GP. Gemma: Now, let’s get on with the episode.
INTRODUCTION Gaia: Hello! Welcome to this week’s episode… Gemma: of the Other Kind of Doctor podcast. Gaia: Yes, obviously. What are we going to talk about, Gem? Gemma: Today, we’ve just actually finished our interview with Dr. Beatrice Hayes, really fascinating interview. I really enjoyed it. We learned so much. And what Beatrice was talking about was presenting your research like a pro. Because we all have to do it at some point. And Beatrice comes and gives some really useful, practical tips I think everyone can implement into presenting their research. Gaia: So yeah, let’s go to the interview!
INTERVIEW WITH DR BEATRICE HAYES Gaia , Gemma and Beatrice: Hello! Gemma: Oh, who is this? Who have we got? Who’s that third person? This is Dr. Beatrice Hayes. Beatrice: Hello. This is so exciting! I know, ’tis I, Dr Beatrice Hayes! Gaia: I’m looking at you through the thing of the microphone so I see her like behind the screen. Beatrice: How dramatic. Oh, you know, like when very, very rich widows go to their husband’s funeral and they have like a kind of black mesh thing. Gemma: That’s not morbid at all. Beatrice: But it’s fashion. That’s what it is. It’s fashion. It’s wealth. It’s unbelievable wealth. So yeah, I think I’m gonna yeah, I’ve definitely I feel like I’ve got my kind of widow vibes behind this mesh. I love it. Gaia: That is perfect. Gemma: So that’s not actually what we’re talking about. No What are we talking about? Gaia: We’re talking about presenting your research like a pro! Gemma: You are the pro Beatrice. Beatrice: Thanks guys. Gemma: We’re really excited to have you on. And I wondered if you could tell us a bit about you. Gaia: Not your favourite colour, more like what you do. Also your favourite colour. If you want. Beatrice: Okay, this is going to be the easiest thing ever. What do you think my favourite colour is? Gaia and Gemma: Pink. Beatrice: Correct. And that’s why I was invited on this podcast. Friendship like that. I love it. Yeah, cool. So, my name is Dr Beatrice Hayes and I’m a teaching fellow within the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway. And I completed my PhD in 2021, I did my Viva in 2021. And my PhD research was all to do with children and adolescents, but mainly children’s social media use, particularly around the risks, the benefits and sort of perceptions around the risks and benefits. And my research now, I’m still interested in that, but I’m more interested in kind of emerging adults, so university students aged between kind of 18 and 24, and particularly around their online communication, their online self disclosure. So yes, as a sort of overview, my interests are very much to do with online communication and, yeah, the digital age. So that’s kind of my research. Gaia: Wow, you sounded so confident. Beatrice: I’ve said that so many times in so many settings, you just get used to like having your little like, elevator pitch. That’s basically my elevator pitch. That’s just like bish bash bosh. This is what I do. Gaia: That sounded great. Gemma: It did sound great. And that’s how we know each other. So Beatrice and I are in the same lab group because our supervisors for the same, well, I’m like Beatrice 2.0 in our lab. As in Dawn Watling is my supervisor, she was also Beatrice’s supervisor before. Gaia: And I’m just there. Gemma: Gaia is just there. She’s got nothing to do with us. Beatrice: Gaia just is here for the ride. She’s having a great time. Just vibing. Vibing all day all day. Gemma: So, today obviously we’re talking about presenting your research. We’ve invited you on because we’ve seen you talk a lot. No offense. In different, in different contexts and you are just really good at presenting your research, but we kind of want to take you back, again. How was your first experience presenting your research? So think back to your first year of your PhD. What was that like? Beatrice: You know what? Full on. Trigger warning for me, you asking that question. I’m like, the minute you said that, I was like, I can tell you exactly the first time I presented my research. It was in my first year, or just at the end of my first year, so like going into my second year of my PhD. And I presented at, so it was the British Psychological Society Developmental Psychology Conference. And it was first time I presented my research to like an academic audience. I, I’d done like mini, I wouldn’t really call them presentations, but I’d spoken to like other PhD students about my research. I’d done something called cake club, which you guys obviously know about, but it’s like a very informal way of telling your peers about your research. But this was, this conference was my first time properly presenting and I was absolutely terrified. I was so nervous and the, there was a keynote that was on before my talk. Gemma: Pressure, pressure, Beatrice: Literally it was day one of the conference opening keynote and the first like section of talks, mine was like the first one. It was literally, it was like, I was like the opening act essentially for like the normal talks. And I was sat there in this keynote and it’s such a shame because the person who gave the keynote is a really nice guy and his research is so interesting. And I would have totally benefited from listening to it, but I did not listen to it. I literally sat there and rehearsed my talk in my head. Like, and it was a 15 minute talk, this was an hour keynote, so I like rehearsed it in my head like four times. I kid you not, and I went into that presentation, into that talk that I gave and I just like did it. But it went really, really well. It was great. I, yeah, I freestyled some of it, like it, and, and it was, it was actually, it went really, really well. But the in the nerves going into that. Ugh, I don’t think I’ve felt like, other than my viva, I don’t think I’ve felt nerves to that level. I was terrified. Gaia: Wow. Going on from there, how did you develop all the confidence that you have now? Beatrice: So, it’s a kind of a combination of things. Kind of going way, way back. When I was in school, I did public speaking and debating. And throughout, particularly secondary school, I did a lot of debating. I did public speaking competitions. I competed like nationally. It was a big hobby of mine and that absolutely helped with public speaking tips and tricks, I would say. And then I’ve all, I’ve done a lot of activities and I’ve been involved in a lot of things throughout my life where I’ve had to speak in front of people in some way. So for example, when I was at university, I was the president of the dance society. So when we had like our shows, and even just in like, dance classes or rehearsals, I would have to stand in front of like, the whole society and say, even if it was just like, hi everyone, welcome to today’s rehearsal or something. I just got used to kind of speaking in front of lots of people. And then I was a primary school teacher, so I was literally public speaking every day because I had a class of children. So I was constantly talking to groups of people then. So I think it’s a, it’s definitely like, practice is my key thing here. It’s being in situations and scenarios where you have to speak in front of people and even if it’s only a small group of people, it’s still people that you’re speaking in front of and genuinely I’d say it’s practice. It’s just practice, it’s just familiarity with doing that. And now I don’t really get nervous at all when I give talks. I genuinely don’t really get nervous at all because I’ve done, I’ve done it so many times. And I, part of my role now is I lecture, you know, I gave a lecture this morning and it was a first year module yeah, it was a first year module. So there was, you know, the entire cohort there. So the confidence is, it’s a hundred percent, and I’m a big believer in this, of fake it till you make it, fake it, fake it, practice it, rehearse it, put yourself in situations where you have to keep doing it. And then you, it gives you that confidence, you just accrue it over time. So yeah, that’s like the overview. Gaia: Yeah, one of the following questions was, do you still get nervous? But apparently not. Beatrice: It depends. Gaia: I’ve seen you profusely sweat one time. Beatrice: When was that? Gaia: Psych fest. Might have been the fact it was like 40 degrees. Beatrice: I was literally like, I was, oh my god, it was so hot. It was so, I was, I’m not, listen, I’m not a summer person. I was not put on this earth for summer. Gaia: She’s ginger. Beatrice: I’m pretty, I’m pretty, I’ve got auburn tones. Thanks, Gaia. I’ve got auburn tones. I was sweating. Yeah, I, I definitely get like, I get adrenaline. And this, I’m gonna save this point, because you may ask me a question later on that will link to this. I get adrenaline, but I don’t consider that necessarily nerves. But there are certain situations where I do get nervous. There are certain situations where like, yeah, there are times when I still get nervous, but usually I don’t. It’s unusual now for me to get nervous with public speaking. Gemma: Why do you think it’s important to be able to deliver talks confidently as researchers and PhD students? Beatrice: It’s really important because it’s the best way of getting your research, or not even necessarily your research, but something that you are doing across to people. Obviously with research you write empirical papers, you write blog posts, you write articles, you do all these things for the scientific community but also for public consumption. And that’s great. You need to do that. That’s really good. But talks are such an important and effective way of getting your key findings or getting your kind of take home points across to people in such a more digestible fashion. Even like top, top scientists and like professors will skim empirical papers. Like they won’t necessarily, unless they’ve got a real invested interest in your research area, they’re probably not going to read your paper that deeply. And doing talks is such a great way of getting that key information across, especially if you’ve got really important findings. And then in terms of the non-academic community, particularly in terms of like communicating with the public in dissemination. You know, the majority of people haven’t got PhDs. They’re not going to have a clue what your result section says. And so being able to go to an event and make science and make your findings more palatable to the public is really important. Again, especially if you’re doing research in an area that’s really important and where the impact of your findings could be potentially like groundbreaking, you know, someone who is an ordinary person living an ordinary life could really benefit from your findings. That person’s not going to read an empirical paper, but they will watch your talk on YouTube or something like that. So being able to clearly get that information across is important for all the audiences that you communicate to. And it’s important for yourself to give your research justice and to give it space. So yeah. Gaia: How do you prep for these talks? One thing I noticed is you always have a very cute outfit. I was wondering if that was part of it. But in general. How do you prep for them? Beatrice: I just wake up like that. I was just born this way, Gaia!. I’m like, oh my god, I’m colour coordinating! Legit, that’s part of it. 100%. You’ve got to feel good. You’ve got to feel, you’re, the way that you present yourself, it’s not armour necessarily, but it’s, it’s kind of like, it gets you into the zone and it gets you into a frame of mind. And I’m a big believer that clothing and presentation is a really important way of how It links with my research because I also do a lot of research and online self presentation and that kind of thing, but the way that you present yourself is very much aligned with your goals and like what you want to achieve. So for example, when you go to work, you’ll dress a certain way because you want to look professional or because you’ve got certain professional goals in mind. So if you’re giving a talk and you’re going to be in front of people, you want to make a good impression. You want to dress in a way that makes you feel comfortable. Why’d I go Northern then? You want to dress in a way that make you feel comfortable. When I’m in fields, I wear me boots because I feel comfortable. Gaia: Listeners have turned off the… Beatrice: I have no idea what happened then. Literally changed region. You want to be dressed in a way that you feel comfortable, but you feel confident in. And if you feel that you look good, that’s I just feel like you’re immediately going in there with a good energy, and energy is super important. Like, you want to go in there feeling good, ready for the talk. Also just knowing your environment and knowing your audience. If you’re doing like, I don’t know, say for example, okay, let’s say you’re going to a school and you’re giving a talk to A level students. Don’t go into that talk with the same energy that you’d go in for like an academic talk in front of professors because you’re going to have to be meeting that audience at a completely different angle. So I think knowing your audience, kind of understanding or thinking about what they’re going to want to achieve from that, from going to that talk, I think that also really helps to kind of get you in the right mind frame, like getting, getting in like the mindset of a, of a talk, I think makes it a lot easier to then go and kind of deliver it. Cause you’re kind of, you’re sort of already in that space, you’re already in that zone. And the way that you dress is part of that. So yeah, I think just kind of really feeling comfortable, feeling confident in myself, knowing my audience is kind of the first thing that I do like to get myself in the mind frame when I’m about to give a talk. Gemma: Nice. I love that. I actually links to, when I first presented my research was at the British Psychological Society Developmental conference, and Beatrice, I was actually sharing a room with Beatrice. It’s true. Sleepover. Sleepover. And I remember that the morning of my talk, I was saying to Beatrice, what shoes should I wear? Beatrice: Yeah. And I was like, what you feel comfortable in, for the love of god, do not wear something or don’t, don’t pretend to be something that isn’t, that you’re not. Yes, fake it till you make it in terms of like, be confident, just like push through like you, you know, you will be fine, but you’ve got to be yourself, you’ve got to present as yourself because that’s when you feel the most comfortable when you’re in your own skin and you’re doing your own thing. And often the reason why we get nervous when we do talks and we present is because we have imposter syndrome. We feel like, oh my goodness, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t know, like they’re going to know that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m going to get it wrong. A, that’s not true. But B, if you’re comfortable in how you’re presenting and what you’re doing and what you’re wearing and where you are, that helps with that because you don’t feel like you’re playing another character, like you’re just being yourself. So you can’t be an imposter if you’re just being yourself. So that helps. Gemma: You’re so knowledgeable. So something that I – it links to our Brain Bites, which we’re gonna be doing after this discussion. But is it helpful to picture the audience naked? Beatrice: Absolutely not. Whoever came up with that, obviously had deep issues and should be in therapy. The whole, the whole, like, picture your audience naked thing is such rubbish. I’ll give you a much better tip. When you feel nervous, and you’re, you know, your, your anxiety is going a bit. You’ve got the sweaty palms, your heart starting to go, your mouth is getting dry and all of these things. That’s adrenaline. And put yourself in the mindset of rather than going, I’m so nervous, I’m so nervous, I don’t want to do this talk, I’m so nervous. Think, okay, my adrenaline’s pumping. That, cause that is actually what’s happening. And that’s because you’re getting prepared. Your body is preparing you to, to talk, to, to stand in front of people, to deliver this information. So rather than thinking I’m nervous, just think cool, my body’s getting me ready, my body’s getting me prepped. And actually that’s really important because it means that when you’re stood there giving your talk, you’re going to be thinking more quickly, you’re going to be processing information more quickly. People are going to ask you questions and you’re going to get the answer quicker because your body’s kind of pumped, you know, like the adrenaline’s pumping. So you’re going to be moving, thinking a bit faster as long as you can calm down how fast you speak because a classic is… Gemma: That is something I do I talk a hundred miles an hour and it’s really bad. Beatrice: Slow that bit down, but if you view your body is helping you rather than I’m nervous I’m nervous I’m nervous I’m nervous That is the best tip I can give. View it as adrenaline, your body is helping you, you’re getting prepped, and that’s actually a good sign. It means that you’re pumped and you’re ready for it. Gaia: That’s such a good point such a good point. Same if you want to like, fight a bear. Beatrice: Precisely. Gaia: Do not fight a bear. Beatrice: Don’t fight a bear. Or give the talk first, and then fight the bear. Yes. Follow it up with a bit of bear fighting. Gemma: So that kind of links to kind of what you said earlier about questions after a talk. They’re really scary, especially for someone new to presenting. I remember the first time I presented my research I was like, they’re gonna ask me questions I have no idea about. That, you know, all of these really fancy professors are gonna be quizzing me and telling me off for doing something wrong. How do you answer these questions and what do you do if you don’t have an answer? Beatrice: This is the ultimate fear, I think. Gaia: Play dead. Beatrice: Yeah, play dead or then let the bear in, let them fight the bear. Don’t fight that bear, let them fight the bear. By the way, no bears were harmed in the making of this podcast. I don’t support bear fighting or anything like that. Gemma: That’s going to be in the audiogram that goes on social media. Beatrice: Don’t fight a bear, please. I was just thinking where would you find a bear in the UK, but that’s not the point. So, I think questions are the thing that, I think other than imposter syndrome in terms of like, I don’t know what I’m talking about, they’re gonna know that I’m an imposter, which is not true, and everyone struggles with that no matter what point in your career you’re at. Other than that, I think questions is the thing that people get most scared about. Firstly, most people, I can’t swear, most people aren’t unpleasant. Most people don’t want to trip you up, or catch you out, or make you look like a fool. That’s not what most people want to achieve, right? When someone asks you a question, it’s often because there’s something they want a bit of clarification on, because they just zoned out, or forgot, or wasn’t quite sure what you’d said. Or it’s because they’re interested and they want to know more. That, that’s genuinely like, if you think about it, when you’re at a talk and you, if you ask a question, those are the two reasons why. So I think knowing people’s motivations behind it can ease the nerves around questions because you’re like, they’re not trying to trip me up, they just want to know more. And half the time, like, this is your research. You have done this. So you do know the answers, or you can have a, you can think, well, I’m not 100 percent sure because that’s not totally aligned with my research. However, I did read this paper that said da da da da da, or however, if I think about the link from my research in this sense, then I could say da da da da da, and that’s completely fine. If someone asks a question and you really don’t know the answer, and you’re really, really not sure, for the love of god, don’t try and blag your way through it. That is the worst thing you can possibly do. And I’ve been at talks before where someone’s clearly tried to like blag their way and it makes you wince. It’s like, don’t blag because it’s obvious that you don’t know the answer. And no one, no one’s expecting you to know the answer to everything. Like that’s the whole point of science, right? Is that we’re building upon knowledge. We’re always learning. If you don’t know the answer. A classic is just to say something like, That’s a really good point, I hadn’t thought about that. I haven’t really got time now, but can we have a chat about that afterwards? Or, if someone is being a little bit annoying, and they are pushing a question, and you’re like, maybe this person is slightly unpleasant. Just stroke their ego a bit, it’s what I’ve done before. So I’ll just say something like, That’s a really good point, I hadn’t really thought about that. Like, you clearly have quite a lot of understanding on this, so could I grab you afterwards just to have a chat? It’s basically your way of saying, Shut up, sit down, and fight the bear. We need to leave this bear, we need to leave this bear thing alone. But yeah, most of the time, that kind of response, like if you don’t know, Oh, that’s really interesting, thank you for that. I need to think a bit more about that. Could we grab a coffee after this and have a chat? And then it just shuts them up. Gemma: Such a good way of saying that. Beatrice: Shuts them up, then you can move on to the next question. Gaia: I would have just cried. So final question, are you ready? Beatrice: Oh, I’m enjoying myself. I don’t want this to end. I’m loving this! Gaia: I’m sorry. Do you think presenting your PhD helps doing your Viva? Beatrice: 100% Oh my goodness, you have to practice before your Viva. Practice and practice. Also, before your Viva, your Viva is such an intense experience where you’re talking about your research that you’ve been doing for like hours. If you’ve never done that before, it’s really difficult to do. The reason why at the beginning of this podcast, when you were like, oh, you know, talk about yourself, and I was able to just like, rattle off a script. Because I’ve done it so many times. And so, in my viva, it was, again, it was just as easy to summarize. And it also just helps you to talk about your research and to talk about it in a way that clearly gets that, gets the meaning across and gets the kind of clarification across. If you’re doing anything that’s conceptually quite dense, talking about it and presenting it helps you to figure out better ways of articulating yourself. Also, it’s a great way to gather people’s like thoughts and opinions. I’ve been at talks before when I’ve said something. Someone’s asked me a question or they’ve just made a comment and gone, Oh, how’d you feel about doing it like this? And I’m like, Oh, that’s a really good point! Like it’s really helpful getting feedback and that ultimately improved my thesis so that by the time it got to my viva, I’d rather have that feedback at a talk than in the middle of my viva and then turn around and be like, Oh, good point. Can we hit pause? Like, you know, I’d rather hear that beforehand, but again, it just helps you to talk about your research and articulate it. And the thing you have to remember is even with your examiners, one of my examiners literally read my thesis in one sitting. He literally said, I read, I sat down with like a cup of coffee and just spent the day and just, I read your thesis. And he was like, it was so interesting, I didn’t want to put it down, blah, blah, blah. Gemma: I want someone to say that about my work! Beatrice: He literally read it in one go, which is great, which is lovely. But also it’s because when I submitted my thesis to when I had my viva was quite a short there was a really short gap in between like it was literally I think it’s like three weeks between, yeah it was super quick, so he didn’t have loads of time to read it anyway. But my point is as lovely as that is he’s only read it the once so there are certain concepts or there were certain links that I made or certain things that I did in my analysis that he would have skimmed over and so when he was asking me questions about certain things I needed to make sure that I really clearly articulated. There were some things that like he kind of said and I was like oh that’s not quite what I meant. What I meant was da da da da da. So you have to remember your examiners they don’t necessarily know your thesis that brilliantly or they may have read it a thousand times but still have misinterpreted something. You need to be able to clearly articulate and explain. So make sure that you address their misconceptions or that you can explain or counteract something that they say that you disagree with. The more that you present, the better you will get at doing that. And like I said, you want to strengthen those skills during minor sort of stressful events, compared to developing those skills in the middle of your viva. So, it really does help. Gemma: It’s also about being able to explain research concisely as well. Something I really struggled with when I first started, when I presented research was, I just waffled. And I ended up not getting my point across properly. And I think when you like, for example, I’ve done a five minute talk before and things like that, you can do the five minute theses. So, to be able to explain points in a really concise, obvious way is better. And I think that comes with practice, doesn’t it? Beatrice: So true. I mean, like, I can talk. Gemma: Really? Beatrice: I can, oh, I can talk. Gemma: With lots of different accents, apparently. Beatrice: In many different countries. But, like, yeah, that’s so true. Like, you need to be able to concisely get your information across. And you want to be able to do that before your viva. You don’t want to get into your viva and then be waffling and be complicating, over complicating, causing like worry and, and, and then thinking, oh, do they really understand like what they’ve done? When actually you do, you’re just not used to talking about it. Gemma: Ah, this has been such an interesting episode. Just to summarise, what would be your top tip for people who are nervous about presenting their research? Beatrice: I basically gave this advice to someone literally a few weeks ago and they found it so helpful. They were going in for a job interview and they actually got the job. They were really, really happy. So my advice is pause, slow down. If you’re nervous, slow down. As I said earlier, firstly, just kind of identify those nerves as adrenaline, think, get your mindset in that space. And then when you’re actually stood there, in your mind, everything’s going at like a thousand miles per hour. So you think that you’re talking at like a normal pace, but you’re talking really, really quickly. Slow down and practice so that you’re talking at a slower pace and the more you practice doing that, the better you’ll get at being able to slow yourself down and pause. If you’re nervous, pause. In your mind, your pause is like a minute long. To the audience, you’ve literally put, like, they probably hadn’t even noticed that you’ve paused. Have a bottle of water. So if you’re, you know, if you, if you need to pause, pause and take a sip of your water. No one’s going to go, Oh my goodness, what are they doing? It’s been ages. If you’re having a sip of water, no one’s going to think anything of it. Slow down. And honestly, that will benefit the clarity of your talk, but it will also benefit how you’re feeling. Cause if you’re physically slowing down, you’re going to slow down that heart, that racing heartbeat, that you’re going to slow down all of those feelings. Slow. Down. That’s my ultimate tip if you’re nervous. Just slow down and pause. It sounds super simple, but seriously It really, it really helps. Gaia: That’s such a good tip. Gemma: So we’re gonna practice that. Beatrice: Seriously, seriously, you’ll be amazed! You’ll be amazed like it’s like, oh, yeah, obviously slow down and pause like obviously. Practice it because seriously like the better you get at it, the more you just do it naturally. Gemma: I’ve heard someone say when they did a TED Talk, that they’re in like preparation for that, they had to, like the public speaking experts told them to practice in slow motion. So then, so then when you end up getting to the talk and you’ve got that adrenaline and then you think that you’re practicing in slow motion, then you end up talking at a normal pace. Beatrice: Funnily enough. So, yeah, like, when I used to do my public speaking, we used to practice to um, what are those things called? a Metronome? Metronome, yeah. Is that right? Yeah, get one of those. So you can get them on, like, just like Google it, you can get like the sound on Google and practice talking to the beat of the metronome, whatever it’s called. And as you practice doing that, you’ll start to naturally do it when you actually do your talk. Cause, in your head, you’ll assign words to the – obviously don’t – speak – like – that – because people will think there’s something wrong with you. But like just practice like with that in the back of your head and it helps to kind of just slow you down a little bit. Gemma: Oh that’s fantastic. Gaia: Wow. So where can people find you Dr. Beatrice Hayes? Not your house, as in online. Beatrice: Please don’t come to my house. Like that would be terrifying. So you can find me on Twitter. My handle is @DrBeatriceHayes. Revolutionary, I know. And yeah, you can follow me on there. You can find me on LinkedIn. I guess that’s it really. Gaia: Go follow Beatrice. Beatrice: Go follow me. Gemma: Go follow Beatrice. Well, thank you so much. That was really fun. Beatrice: I so enjoyed this, this is so much fun! I’ve loved it, thanks so much for having me. And like, yeah, I hope that everything that I’ve said has been helpful. Gaia: Oh, so helpful. So helpful. You’re gonna be famous soon! Beatrice: Me, Molly Mae, we’re just gonna be hanging out. You know, having a good time.
BRAIN BITES Gaia: Brain Bites! Gemma: Brain Bites! This week actually leads on from literally what Beatrice was talking about, and we tried to find some research to see if it actually is helpful to picture your audience naked. Gaia: So the short answer is no. Gemma: No. Like Beatrice said. Gaia: Yes. She, I don’t know if she read this research, but it’s basically exactly what she said. The more helpful way to calm your nerves, not even calm your nerves, just give a good presentation, wouldn’t be to picture your audience naked, but just to reframe your anxiety as something helpful, as excitement. Gemma: Yeah, and the research has actually shown that people who do this perform better than people who actually try to calm themselves down. Like Beatrice said, reframe your nervousness into excitement, you’ll perform better than if you try and calm yourself down and something that a neuroscientist called Christian Jarrett said is that being an effective presenter is about respecting and engaging your audience, but if you’re picturing them naked you’re kind of seeing them as the enemy or mocking them, and doing that isn’t gonna help your nerves at all. Gaia: So yeah, be excited and fight a bear! Gemma: Yes! Okay! So that’s everything for today’s episode. We learned lots about presenting your research like a pro and I hope you guys enjoyed it as well. Gaia: You can find us on Twitter and Instagram @otherdoctor_pod. Gemma: Yes! And please don’t forget to subscribe on your chosen podcast platform, leave a review if you’re enjoying these podcasts, because that really helps us. And as always, thank you so much to our lovely podcast team and the Doctoral School at Royal Holloway for supporting this podcast. Gaia and Gemma: Bye!
Episode 6
Dealing with Rejection in Academia with guest, Prof Saloni KrishnanSUMMARY In Episode 6 of The Other Kind of Doctor, Gemma and Gaia welcome Prof Saloni Krishnan to the studio to discuss how to deal with ‘the inevitable rejection’ as an academic. She shares her ‘Top Tips’ for bouncing back after being rejected, including collecting rejections and building a network for support. Then in ‘Brain Bites’, Gemma and Gaia channel the Myth Busters and tackle the age old saying, ‘Don’t go swimming after you eat!’ with a bit of humour as always. It’s been a long day…
SHOW OPENS Gemma: Hello and welcome to the Other Kind of Doctor podcast. My name is Gemma, Gaia: and my name is Gaia, and we are both on the journey of gaining a PhD. Gemma: A quick disclaimer before we start. We are in fact the academic kind of doctors. Gaia: Well, nearly doctors. Gemma: Yes, nearly doctors. But we’re not your medical kind of doctors. Gaia: So if you do need medical attention, please contact your GP. Gemma: Now, let’s get on with the episode.
EPISODE 6 INTRODUCTION Gaia: Hello! Gemma: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to episode six. Oh my goodness. We’ve been doing this for six weeks. Gaia: I know. Actually, seven. No. You’re right. It was six. It was six. I thought we missed one. But we didn’t. Gemma: Yeah, so, what are we talking about today, Gaia? Gaia: We’re talking about dealing with rejection. Gemma: Dealing with rejection, yeah, this is a big thing in academia. Yep. I think if you are not getting rejected in academia, well, good for you, but how, how first of all, but we’ve actually just finished our discussion with our guest today, Professor Saloni Krishnan, and she’s from the psychology department at Royal Holloway, but we have a really great discussion with her. And she’s actually super successful. She’s super successful. She made prof last year. So she’s a professor. And she has done some really amazing work, but equally, she’s also had a fair amount of rejection in her career. So she talks about her top tips to deal with rejection, her experiences and how to kind of pick yourself up. Gaia: Yeah, but before going there, we can take this as a chance to just talk about ourselves. Gemma: Yeah, that would be nice. We do like doing that. Gaia: So, how’s your week been? Gemma: Well, this actually leads quite nicely onto our podcast discussion today. Because this week, remember a few weeks ago, do you remember I said I was preparing my paper for submission? Well, it got rejected twice. Yeah, from two journals. So I’ve been licking my wounds this week but also picking myself up and doing other things, to pass the time- analysis and you know coding very exciting stuff. What about you? What have you been up to? Gaia: I’ve been moving. Gemma: Moving house. Wow! Gaia: I’ve also been working but you know when you’re moving and all your brain is filled with is just moving. I’ve been moving this week. Gemma: Yeah, well, when are you moving in? Next week? Gaia: End of the month, yes. Gemma: Well, that’s going to be fun for you! Gaia: Oh, so fun. But, anyway. Gemma: Anyway, that’s all from us. Well, for the intro. Yeah. But without further ado, let’s get on with the episode! Woohoo!
GUEST INTRODUCTION – PROF SALONI KRISHNAN Gaia, Gemma and Saloni: Hello! Gemma: We’ve got another guest on this week. So exciting. We are with Professor Saloni Krishnan. Saloni: Lovely to be here. Thanks for having me! Gemma: No offence Saloni, but we’re actually talking about dealing with rejection in academia. And that doesn’t mean that we think you’re a reject when we think like that. No, she’s very successful. Saloni actually made prof last round of promotion. So she is, yeah, super successful and we are all a bit in awe, really. But I wonder if, we start this with all of our guests, if you can tell us a bit about you, a bit about your PhD and kind of your career post PhD, I guess. Where you’re at now. It’s a big question. Sorry. Saloni: It is a big question. So I did my PhD at Birkbeck as part of the Center for Brain and Cognitive Development. I’ve always been really interested in language and language development and how this sometimes goes wrong and how some children struggle to learn their native language. So in my PhD I was mostly focusing on typical language and then I went on to do a post doc at the ICN where I amazingly worked with beatboxers and guitarists. So that was quite different t o what I ended up doing, but then I went back to my roots, so to speak, and worked with kids with Developmental Language Disorder, or DLD and that was as a post doc in Oxford and then in 2019, I came to Royal Holloway and started my own lab. Gaia: Nice! Gemma: Wow. That is a busy few years. That’s really exciting. Gaia: So you’re very successful, and we’re assuming you also got a lot of rejections. But before we go there, the reason we want to talk about this is because as academics, we’re all going to deal with lots of rejections, and the first rejection is always awful, because we were talking about this, and like in undergrad, people who go on to do PhDs, they’re always like, first of the class, always get firsts and then you get your first rejection and you’re crushed. I remember I didn’t get my PhD first round, I got it on the second round and I was like, my life is over. Gemma: Yeah. I think it’s because we’re just used to being perfectionists. We’re used to like getting everything right the first time. And then when my first public paper got rejected last week and it was very upsetting. But it’s just like, yeah, that first rejection hurt. So I wondered if you could tell us about, if you remember, the first time you experienced rejection in academia. Saloni: Oh it’s even more trivial than some of those. So I was coming from India where I hadn’t really done any research. I didn’t really know that much about what a research paper looks like. And I’d done this kind of thing on the side as part of my master’s where I was looking at like auditory environments and so on and how kids kind of looked for objects in these auditory environments. So we wrote this up and we sent this to a journal called JASA. Now, JASA, if you’re a speech and language therapist or an audiologist, is a very, very famous journal. But to the rest of the world, obviously, nobody knows what JASA is. So I was very excited. I like wrote up this paper and sent it. And they sent it back to me saying that, you know, I haven’t got that formatting correct. So my first desk rejection wasn’t even a content rejection. It was literally a format rejection, and then I had to like rejig the format and kind of sent, it JASA never took it. And I think at this time I went to a seminar conducted as part of my PhD where they were talking about editorial rates of acceptance and how at one of the journals that they were editing at the time Developmental Science, that the rejection rate was 80%. And I remember just being shocked. Gemma: Oh my god. 80%! That is really harsh. I mean, the formatting of journals, I didn’t realise this until I, like, submitted that paper. I mean, the first it was actually got two rejections because I just, we were aiming for a really high, like, big journal. You know, you might as well try. But yeah, all of the formatting things, you know, you need an inch margin, you need double spacing. It needs to be in Times New Roman. I’m sitting there like, does this really matter? But clearly it’s important for some journals, I guess. Saloni: Yeah, that’s changing a bit now, but I think particularly JASA was very much wedded to it has to be in this very specific format. Gaia: Oh, well, you’re a prof now. And you submit lots of grants. Do you still get nervous that you’re going to get rejected? And if yes, how do you cope? Saloni: Oh, I get rejected all the time. I think someone I know had this thing once about like collecting rejections. And I thought that was interesting because I think if you’re not getting rejected, you’re probably not putting yourself out there. If you’re not putting yourself out there, then you’re probably not taking the chances and challenges that you should be. We just got a big grant rejected and it was something we worked on for ages and I was really excited about and it’s part of academia and the quicker you can kind of learn to bounce back the easier your career as an academic will be. It’s not personal. Gaia: That was one of the questions! Gemma: That is, that is really, really nice and I think it’s important to kind of normalize rejection. I think it’s so, such an alien concept to other professions. One of our questions actually is why… Gaia: How do you not take them personally? Gemma: Yeah, how do you not take it personally? Obviously you invest so much time and I think in academia your research is your identity almost. And when you put, you know, you know, sleepless nights or whatever, if you’ve got a good work life balance, obviously that doesn’t happen. You know, it’s submitting up to deadlines and things like that. How do you not take it personally when someone’s like… Gaia: And how do you have motivation to like redo it all over again? Saloni: I guess I’m just coming off the back of a rejection, so maybe it’s good to remind myself of some of these things. The first ones are like really, really hard because you have no experience of having been rejected, I guess. I think that over time, if you’ve been rejected enough, you’re like, well, actually, I did get that big rejection, but I was fine in the end. I picked myself up and it was okay. And then it gets it easier to pick yourself up and make it okay. And you also learn what works for you in terms of picking yourself up. So for me, it’s like anticipating something new, thinking about new things. So whenever I submit something, I start working on something else. So that when the inevitable rejection comes… Gemma: The inevitable rejection! Saloni: I’m already in a space of being excited about other ideas and feeling like I have energy to do other things… Gemma: I think it’s nice to get excited about other things and to realize, you know, this grant application, this paper isn’t like your whole career, like you’ve got all of these other exciting things going on. Something I’ve been really struggling with in my PhD, because I do developmental research, is getting into schools and, and, and doing research with schools. And Gaia knows this, I’ve had many a tantrum about schools rejecting me or not letting me to do the research. It’s really frustrating. But actually like a couple of weeks ago, I had another school pull out two days before I was supposed to go in. It was brutal. But I actually came up with like a little research idea to kind of look at the barriers and facilitators of getting into schools. So that’s kind of like a good thing that came out of it. It’s like another, probably another side project I don’t have time to do, but again, it’s something to get excited about, I guess. Saloni: Yeah, for sure. That’s the thing about being resilient. So someone I worked with told me this is in the face of my fourth fellowship rejection that I was a very resilient person. And I just remember thinking like, what? Resilient? But I think looking back, I guess I stayed in academia and I like got that rejection, but I found another thing to do and then found another thing to do and found things that sparked interest and I was genuinely pleased to do so, I think figuring that out and just saying that actually this rejection isn’t the end of the world is, yeah. Gemma: And it’s a skill that I think you have to learn over time. Gaia always talks about the fact that when she got a 2:1 rather than a first in her masters, she cried in the toilet… Gaia: It wasn’t the lower grade I will say, it was the coursework. However, I did cry in the toilets in Founders. Gemma: She did. And I think but obviously now… Gaia: Don’t care at all. Gemma: It’s building that resilience and I think that’s what makes a difference between what makes like a good academic and academic researcher. Yeah, you could be really smart and be really good at everything but if you can’t deal with maybe some of the barriers or challenges that come your way, then you’re not really going to succeed, I guess, or put yourself out there in case you get rejected. Saloni: Yeah, or feel very bitter, I guess, like that things haven’t worked out, whereas actually you just have to be like, right, that wasn’t the right idea, or wasn’t the right package, or wasn’t the right fit. Got to try something else. Gaia: Yeah, reading the coursework back now, it wasn’t great. It was a 68, okay, but at the time, I was very angry. Gemma: Don’t read back on your past work. It’s horrible. Saloni: Well, but that’s also the thing, right? Like now, I mean, I used to get very upset about papers getting rejected, but now I sit on the other side as an editor, and you can start to see really common things about why people might get rejected, or be like, you know, this, this just isn’t ready, or this isn’t at this level that it needs to be at or whatever. It gets easier ’cause you can see it happening more and more. And you also see the side that I guess you don’t see when you’re submitting as an author, ’cause you see all the successes, you see all the published papers, but you don’t see all of the great work that has been rejected in the background, ’cause that’s just not in your consciousness or awareness. Gemma: Yeah, I do think that it’s nice that you were talking about collecting rejections because even in like department newsletters and things like that you see all of these publications which are lovely and it’s really great to see all of the success of others but if you just had a grant rejected or, you know, desk rejected or something like that. Or just had a bad week. You’re like, oh, I’m never going to get my paper published. But yeah, you just can’t have, yeah. Saloni: Yeah, I mean, I know that feeling. It’s a hard feeling because it’s not a feeling that you want to kind of believe in, but I feel like one thing that other people do when they see that newsletter is I just try and write to people like especially if they’ve had a grant or a really cool new paper that is sort of like, I know how much work has gone into it to actually write and say like, well done! And I, I found that someone did that to me and I got really excited. And the cool thing is that when eventually your paper does come out, you’ve actually collected loads of goodwill along the way and you’ve spread some love as well. Gemma: Oh, that is so lovely. Cheers. I’m going to start writing. I’m going to start in like filling everyone’s inbox. Congratulations! They’re like, who is this weird PhD student emailing me? Saloni: But I haven’t been doing that of late, actually. So now I’m feeling a little bit bad about people I haven’t emailed with their successes… Gaia: Has she emailed everyone except me? Oh, I love that. Why do you think rejection is so prevalent in academia and so less prevalent in anywhere else? Saloni: I don’t know if it’s less prevalent anywhere else. I just think it maybe takes different forms. I mean, it’s really easy for people to lose their jobs in other places, right? That’s like ultimate rejection. But I think one of the nice things about academia is we’re trying to solve a problem to the best version or the best level that we could solve it right and that takes time and effort and I think we collectively want to agree that the effort that we make is the best possible way to tackle this problem. And we want our peers to be inspired and excited by that. The other thing is you’re competing for limited amounts of what’s very frequently taxpayer money in the case of grants, right? And there isn’t that much of it to kind of go around. So of course, some people have to win and some people don’t. The success rates for these things are between 10 and 20%. So I guess over the course of your career, you can have a lot more losses than wins. Gemma: Yeah, I remember it is definitely about celebrating the wins that you do get and even the small wins. So when I submitted that paper, I didn’t know if it got rejected or would get rejected, but I did, you know, have a little celebration about it. You know, it was my first paper. I’d actually finished writing it up. It had been two years in the process and actually, going through the process of submitting, which is a long process. I didn’t realize that it would be that long like do it filling out all the forms and doing a declaration of interest and all of that you know boring stuff actually pressing that submit button and getting a little email through being like you’ve submitted your paper. Oh my god, finally! And then I got an email three days later saying we don’t want it. Saloni: No, but I think you’re absolutely right. The things that you control and then you put in the work and the effort and like writing that paper and it will eventually find a good home but you celebrate the fact that you’ve done that and you’ve got the kind of completion point of that project. I think that’s one other reason that I think rejections really hurt is because what you thought was finished is not. It’s like right back on the top of your to do list. Gemma: Yeah, that satisfaction of crossing that off. Oh, no wait, I’ve actually got to do it again. Gaia: Just thinking about it right now. Sorry. Just carry on. Gemma: So, you mentioned earlier briefly that you’re, as being like an editor and a reviewer, does this change your perception of rejection and negative feedback? And do you think that changes? Obviously, you’ve been on the other side of being rejected. Does that change the way that you give feedback, or? Saloni: Yeah, I try really hard to kind of couch my feedback. It’s interesting from a journal point of view, right? Because if you actually give really specific feedback and the feedback is really, this wasn’t good enough for this journal, right? It’s not the kind of quality. But you say, these three things, then the authors will come back and say, but we fixed this thing. So now is it good enough? And so actually, sometimes you have to be a bit vague so that you can’t have the sort of no, we’re not going to go through this like 1000 times. So I think I’m better at realizing when no, It means no, but I’m also a little bit more confident about using things like appeals processes where it’s like, Oh yeah, actually they didn’t understand or they got this like completely wrong. And I’m better at calibrating where my paper would fit. As a PhD student, I had no idea where a piece of work should go, right? I was like, this is the best piece of work. I’ve done it. Like, so it clearly, it should be like in Nature or whatever. Whereas now I think I have a better sense of no, this was important, but perhaps not groundbreaking, whereas this is much more of a breakthrough result or much more of a breakthrough method. Gaia: That leads right to our next question, which is, are you more confident now when you, because you’ve been on the other side, so you’ve reviewed paper and you’ve written paper, are you more confident disagreeing with the reviewers now that you’ve been on the other side as well? Saloni: I had really good supervisors and they taught me to be pretty confident about disagreeing with reviewers right from the get go. And you’ll see that kind of, you know, obviously our confidence increases and you know but yeah, I feel like right from the get go, you don’t just do what the reviewer says. You always think about whether that’s the right thing to do and believe that ultimately, you know, that piece of work better than anyone else. Gaia: Nice. Gemma: I love that. So I think it’s good to kind of finish with a top tip for PhD students. I wondered if you could give us your top tip for PhD students that are experiencing their first rejections or almost like preparing them for the rejection world of academia, I guess. Saloni: Build a network so that when you get those, when you get the acceptances, you have people to lift you up and share with you. And then when you get the rejections, you’ve got someone to kind of, you know, say, are you okay? How are you doing? I think that’s really, really important to have these people who are like, you know, that rejection, that’s not personal, you’re still amazing you need that. And, you know, maybe you’re not a person who likes those networks, but, you know, figure out that thing that makes you feel amazing. And this is not one top tip, this is getting into a list of top tips. Gemma: We want all the top tips. Saloni: But I think sometimes you’ve got to have something else to lean into, that’s not necessarily academia or that’s not necessarily, just something that you can feel really good about or you know you can do and then you’ve got to do that, right? Just to kind of give yourself back the, I’m a valuable person! Gemma: No, everyone hates me. I really like that community aspect. And I think that is something that we definitely vouch for in the PhD community. I think doing a PhD can be a really lonely thing. And even if you maybe don’t have a PhD office, you work from home or you’re part time, if you can even, you know, have an online community or anything like that, that you can be like, Do you know what? I got rejected today. And they’ll be like, Do you know what? I got rejected too. Let’s, let’s go and get a drink down the pub or whatever. And then when you do something really does like happen that you really are happy about like having a paper accepted or having a grant accepted, then yeah, you can be like, let’s go and have another drink down the pub! Saloni: Yeah, there’s lots of drinks down the pub, huh? Gemma: Obviously you can not- you can do other things apart from going down to the pub. Gaia: It’s just what we do on a Wednesday. Anyway, where can people find you online if they want to follow you? Saloni: So I guess the lab website, which is encodelab.com and then on, I guess, Twitter, X, whatever we’re calling it. Gemma: That’s amazing. It was so lovely to have you on Saloni. And it’s so nice to have someone super experienced in successful-ness, if that’s a word, just invented the word there, and also, you know, just normalizing rejection in academia. It’s definitely made me feel better. Gaia: Same. Gemma: I’m ready to pick myself up and resubmit my paper to someone else. Gaia: For the 100th time. Gemma: All right! Saloni: It won’t take that long. It’ll find its home. Gemma: Exactly. It will. Aw, thanks so much! Gaia: Thank you!
BRAIN BITES Gaia: Brain bites! Gemma: Brain bites! Woo! What are we talking about today? For those of you who may not have listened to previous episodes, Brain Bites is a part of our podcast where we find some interesting research that we found that week. It might be completely unrelated to what we’ve been talking about for the rest of the episode, but it’s just something fun and interesting that we’ve found. Yeah. What are we talking about today? Gaia: So this week we’re going to talk about, remember when you have to go to the swimming pool as a child and your mum was like, do not eat like an hour before swimming? Is that a thing? Or is it just a myth? And we thought about this because I’ve been discussing this with my partner. I was sure you could not eat before swimming. Gemma: You gave him a lecture on it… Gaia: Yeah, this has been going on for weeks. I was like, you’re wrong, and I’m obviously right, and was I? Gemma: Well, we had a look and there’s two pieces of research that we found. In 2005, so a fair few years ago, researchers in Australia found that swimmers may increase their risk of experiencing a stitch or like cramp if you’re exercising fewer than two hours after a big meal. However, there was no evidence of a major threat to health. Gaia: So, in 2011, a review by an advisory panel of the American Red Cross found that there is nothing to suggest that eating before swimming constitutes a risk of drowning, so it can be dismissed as a myth. Gemma: So you were wrong. So you were. Gaia: I was. Gemma: You were wrong. I think you need to owe your partner an apology. Gaia: I will not. However, you listeners, please do not eat before swimming because if you do drown… don’t. Gemma: I don’t know what you were trying to say there. I think what Gaia was trying to say. Gaia: It’s been a long day. Gemma: It’s been a long day. I think what Gaia was trying to say is if you do drown, remember we are not medical doctors. Gaia: Ah, yes! Gemma: We are the other kind of doctor. Gaia: So do not sue us, but also don’t drown. Gemma: Yeah, don’t drown, but also don’t sue us if you do. Yeah. And that’s it for Brain Bites!
EPISODE CLOSE Gemma: That’s the end of the episode. Please don’t forget to subscribe and review our podcast. When we’re recording this, we’ve had two episodes come out so far. It’s been very exciting. It’s been really exciting. So yeah, please do subscribe and review. Thanks so much for Saloni for coming on today. It was really interesting and useful. Gaia: Thank you to the Doctoral School for funding the podcast and to our team for the support. Follow us on Twitter @otherdoctor_pod. Gemma: Yep. And our transcription can be found on our website which links will be in the description of the podcast. Yeah. So thanks so much! Gaia and Gemma: Bye!
Episode 7
Is Doing a Master’s Worth It?SHOW OPENS Gemma: Hello and welcome to ‘The Other Kind of Doctor’ podcast. My name is Gemma, Gaia: and my name is Gaia, and we are both on the journey of gaining a PhD. Gemma: A quick disclaimer before we start. We are in fact the academic kind of doctors. Gaia: Well, nearly doctors. Gemma: Yes, nearly doctors. But we’re not your medical kind of doctors. Gaia: So if you do need medical attention, please contact your GP. Gemma: Now, let’s get on with the episode.
EPISODE 7 INTRODUCTION Gaia: Hello! Gemma: Hello! Gaia: That was beautiful. Gemma: Doing a sing song this week, I’m just feeling really positive. Gaia: How come? Gemma: Well, last week I felt like I was dying of the plague. We actually didn’t record this week. We’re having to record twice this week because I was coughing my guts up and I had, I felt really… Gaia: It was so attractive. Gemma: I felt really poorly. So I think I’m feeling much positive. Now I can actually talk and sound like a normal human being. Gaia: Did you at least take some time off from working? Gemma: I did actually. Gaia: What did you do? Gemma: I watched some films and some TV. I actually watched that new One Day series on Netflix and I cried a lot. Gaia: Yeah, I’m not, I am never gonna watch that. I say, but I will. Gemma: It’s a really, really great TV series, but I really cried a lot on that last episode. Gaia: I’m gonna, I’m gonna try not to watch it, but I know that I will. Gemma: Oh, it’s really good. Maybe just don’t watch the last episode. Gaia: Okay, I’ll do that. I moved last week. Gemma: You finally moved house, congratulations. Gaia: Thank you. It was really stressful. But now I’m finally settled in in my new bed. Very nice. Gemma: Very nice. Oh, well done! You’re gonna put some new wallpaper up, aren’t you? Gaia: I will. Well, my partner will for me because I’m short. Fun fact. Gemma: Very short. You’re what, five foot two? Five foot three? Gaia: One foot. Yeah So what are we going to talk about today? Gemma: So we’re not talking about TV series or putting wallpaper up. No. We’re actually talking about whether we think, and this is just our opinion, whether we think doing a master’s before a PhD is worth it. Yes. This is an interesting topic because I didn’t do a master’s. I went straight from my undergrad to my PhD. Gaia: And I did. Gemma: You did do a master’s. So we thought we’d have a little chat about that today, and kind of what we think the pros and cons and our experiences have been. But afterwards, feel free to our listeners out there, to send in what you think. If you did a masters, how you thought it went if you think it helped your PhD journey, or, you know, if you didn’t do a master’s and how you’ve managed it. Yeah. Let’s keep the conversation going. But without further ado. Gaia: So professional, Gemma. Gemma: Keep the conversation going. Maybe I’m, maybe I’m just a podcaster now. A radio host. Radio, we’ve recorded seven episodes. I’m basically a radio presenter. Gaia: Let’s get on with the episode!
EPISODE TOPIC: IS IT WORTH DOING A MASTER’S BEFORE THE PHD? Gaia: So how come you didn’t do a master’s before your PhD? That was really bold. Gemma: It was really bold. And that was because I had never actually planned to do a PhD. Fun fact. I finished my third year of my undergrad and I was applying for jobs. I was looking and saying, Oh, what do I do? What do I do? And fun, funny enough, my supervisor, because I was an RA in my undergrad, a research assistant, my supervisor kind of sat me down and said, Gemma, I really think you should do a PhD. And I was like, really? I kind of perhaps had a bit of imposter syndrome being a first generation university student. I was like, I’m really not clever enough to do a PhD. You know, do you think I should? And she was like, absolutely. And I’ll be your supervisor. I know someone else who could be like – because she was too busy to be my primary or she had other stuff going on. So she said, you know, I’ve got, you know, this my colleague Dawn, she could be your primary supervisor. Let’s develop a project. And then we just developed a project. And then four months later I started my PhD. So it was a bit of a weird one. So I didn’t really have a chance to do a master’s. Gaia: Yeah. So it’s all her fault really. Gemma: It’s all her fault. No. It’s funny because if I hadn’t had that conversation, I absolutely wouldn’t be doing a PhD now because I had no plans to do a PhD, but honestly, it was the best decision I ever made. The reason I didn’t apply to do a master’s first of all, financially, I couldn’t afford it. So if you can, if you’re a UK resident, you can get a loan from the government for your fees. But they don’t give you a maintenance loan. So they don’t give you anything towards your living expenses. And at the time I wasn’t in a position to do that. So I decided I couldn’t do that. But if I had planned to do a PhD, I probably would have found a way to do a masters. If I’m honest. Because in my head, if I go back to third year of undergrad, I probably would have assumed that you needed to do a masters to do a PhD. And what about you? What made you want to do a master’s? What did you… Gaia: So the main reason? The main reason I did a master’s was, I wanted to do a PhD since I was in my first year of undergrad. Gemma: Really? Gaia: Yeah, well, I didn’t know what a PhD was. I just knew I wanted to do research. And I knew the PhD was that. I didn’t know what it actually was. So I was like, I need to do everything in my power to get this position. And I was like, surely if I get a master. It’s going to be easier. So then I knew I wanted to do a PhD in forensic psychology, so I went to do a master’s in forensic psychology. Gemma: Oh, and that’s how you ended up at Royal Holloway? Gaia: Yeah. Gemma: Love that. That’s really interesting. What do you think is the, like, the pros of you doing a master’s? What do you think was like a benefit? Gaia: Okay, I feel like there’s a few. First of all, straight after my undergrad, I was not ready to do a PhD. I still didn’t know what a PhD was. I researched it and I was like, I don’t understand. Gemma: Doctor of Philosophy, but I’m studying psychology. That’s something that really confused me. I’m like, why is it a doctor of philosophy when I’m studying psychology? Or you could be doing history, but you get a doctorate of philosophy. Very confusing. I still don’t understand the answer to that question. I’m gonna, I’m gonna be honest. Gaia: So yeah, I didn’t have enough, I feel like I didn’t have enough experience or confidence to do a PhD straight away. So I went on to do this Master’s in Forensic Psychology, at Royal Holloway, actually, and I feel like it was also good because I knew I wanted to do a PhD around eyewitness testimony stuff. But at the same time, I was also interested in the general area of forensic psychology. So it was really good to get like more knowledge about the general area, even though it’s not strictly related to my PhD. That clinical bit is still so interesting. I’m so glad I learned about it. Gemma: It kind of puts your research into context as well, doesn’t it? Rather than just, I think with a PhD, you become so focused on your research. And your tiny research, it’s kind of nice to, yes, specialize, but kind of have more of a broader understanding of your area. That’s a really good point, actually. Gaia: Yeah. Oh, I know, thank you. Another good point was, well, I didn’t know this going into it, but now I do. I feel like if you go and do a master’s in your specific area that you want to do, you’re gonna meet all the academics that are in the area and it’s gonna be easier to. Like, create a relationship with them and actually my supervisor in my MSc is still my current supervisor in my PhD. Because we did my master’s dissertation and we found some interesting results and we’re like we might as well do a PhD in this. So that was good. Gemma: That’s very handy! Yeah. And that makes sense actually because even if you, I mean your research that you did in your master’s really nicely followed on to your PhD. But even if for example, you were looking at an area or an area of research, you’re going to get used to that kind of literature or like the gaps in the research, even if maybe you’re not researching the area that you end up doing your PhD in, it kind of gives you a broader understanding of the what’s missing in the in the current… Gaia: And even on how to do research in general. Gemma: The different types of research. Gaia: Yeah, I was much more confident in doing research after my master’s than I was straight after my undergrad, a hundred percent. So I think those are some of the few pros that I can think of. What about you? What are some of the pros of going straight to a PhD after undergrad? Gemma: It actually took me a while to think of the benefits, but I do actually think there is. So the first, first thing that came to my head, which probably isn’t the best thing to say first, but you’re not in extra debt. So I was, would have had, if I did a master’s, I would have had to take out an additional loan from the government. And I’m glad I didn’t. Because when I look at my student loan number… Basically, I just prefer to ignore it because it’s such a big number. But yeah, so no extra debt. I think as well, you, for me, I’m going to get to my end goal quicker. So I finished my undergrad when I was 22, started my PhD when I was 22. And because my PhD is four years, I’m going to finish… Gaia: You were 23 actually. Gemma: Was I 23? Gaia: Yeah. You started your PhD in January. Gemma: Ah, okay. okay, I was 23. But yeah, I’m gonna finish when I’m 27. Is that correct, Gaia? Yeah. I’m 27 right now. So I’m gonna get there quicker, and therefore I’m gonna get on with the rest of my career quicker. Also, something I didn’t realize is that what, in your first year of your PhD, or the first year of my PhD, I was able to take some of the master’s courses, especially around statistics and things like that. I was able to attend their seminars as a PhD student and still get that knowledge. Yes, I didn’t get the master’s qualification out of it, but still I was able to pick and choose which modules would inform my research. Gaia: And who cares if your master’s after you’ve got a PhD? Gemma: Oh, don’t say that. I think it’s still important. Like for example, I went to not even statistics, I went to an eye tracking seminar and things like that. So yeah, that’s always really good. Sometimes as well, I didn’t, it’s not applicable for my PhD, but some PhD programs are four years full time and you do your first year is a masters. So it’s like an all in one. Yeah. So, but you’re not getting the debt that you would from a masters if that makes sense because it’s included in your PhD funding. I can’t really speak more about that because it’s nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with my PhD funding anyway. And also I think for me, I felt a bit more confident going straight into a PhD because I was a research assistant for two years in my undergrad. Gaia: That’s a good point actually. Gemma: So from the beginning of my second year to the end of my third year, I was a research assistant working on you know, conducting a, a research study multiple research studies, meeting academics, things like that. So I had confidence in presenting my research already and actually doing the research. So, I guess the extra experience that you got in your master’s I gained during my undergrad. Gaia: That’s such a good point. Gemma: Yeah. What was kind of the negatives do you think of doing? Gaia: Well, the one main negative was something that you actually mentioned, which was I just lost two years. Well, I didn’t lose. Gemma: You didn’t lose two years at all. Gaia: So one year I did my master’s and then another year because it was COVID, I was just away for a year, which was great. But then again, I started my PhD two years later, which now I don’t regret at all. But at the time I was having like mental breakdowns about it. I was like, Oh, I’m going to finish my PhD when I’m when I’m going to finish it? 29. It’s scary. But now I don’t regret it. But at the time, this was a point of contention in my brain. Gemma: Yeah, I think even, I think as PhD students, even for me, and I’m finishing earlier than you, I’m thinking, Oh, my God, obviously, I think a lot of people think PhD students, we’re still students, and we’re still at school taking exams and stuff, even though we don’t, I think, when you’re older, you see all of your friends that maybe aren’t in academia getting, like, working a nine, you know, working a job and, and have done all of their qualifications. So you kind of feel a bit more like a student for longer. Gaia: And obviously it doesn’t actually matter when you finish your PhD. It doesn’t. It’s just, I feel like all academics have this thing of having to do everything super quickly, otherwise they’re a failure. Yeah. Yeah. Gemma: Yeah. And yeah. It can feel like you’re a bit behind, but yeah. Gaia: Don’t regret it though. What are some of the cons of not doing a master’s? Gemma: So some courses you actually need to have done a master’s to do the PhD. That, I think that’s a big con. I think I was very lucky in the fact that my undergrad sufficiently prepped me for my PhD and I, my PhD program didn’t need me to have done a master’s, but I think a lot of the time you do need to have done a master’s. And I think as well, when I started my PhD, it’s probably just a self confidence thing, but I did feel a little bit behind. So obviously you had done your master’s study and that was, you’d kind of already done almost a literature review because you were really familiar with the area and I was going into it brand new and I felt, oh you know, I’m really behind. Obviously you catch up in plenty of time, but I think that was just a a self confidence issue for me. So I was kind of thrown in the deep end with that. Gaia: I feel like I see that with lots of people who start a PhD right after undergrad, for the first few months, they feel like everything is going too quickly, but then they get used to it. Gemma: Yeah, yeah. Those first few months, I did feel really out of my depth. And I think it’s if you’re kind of person that can adapt quite quickly, I think I can, you know, it only took me like a couple of months to kind of find my feet. But I think if you’re someone that maybe wouldn’t be able to do that, then having that extra qualification behind you might help. You might also, even if you’re, you don’t, even if your PhD program doesn’t have a requirement to have a Masters, you could be disadvantaged in the application process if you’re up against someone with the same experience as you and they have a Masters. Obviously, if you do really well in your interview and your application is amazing, then it might not matter. But, you know, that’s something to consider as well. Sometimes people can publish their master’s dissertations as well. So, that gives you kind of more of an insight into the peer review process and things like that. I say it’s a disadvantage, you end up learning that anyway, you’re just learning it at a different time. So, you know, I’m learning about the peer review publishing process now and I’m just starting my third year. And that’s fine. I’ve learned it eventually. And I think like you said, you can, having more of a context of the area you want to go into, you’ll meet the academics you need to, meet your supervisors, you know, things like that. But, yeah. Yeah, I wondered what the careers websites recommend. So obviously it’s great us talking about our experiences, but we can only talk about so much. So I looked at the Prospects Careers website and this, Prospects is a UK based website that talks about lots of different career options and things like that. And one of the questions they like question answer thing they had on there was do I need a master’s to do a PhD? And they said that the majority of institutions require PhD candidates to possess a master’s degree plus a bachelor’s degree 2:1 or above. However, they do say that some programs do allow you in without a master’s. If you’re self funded if you’re a self funded PhD student or if you’ve got significant professional experience, you can obviously, you can be let in with lower grades or without a master’s as well. As well, they said, so this is what I was talking about earlier when I said you can have a four year, full time PhD. What that is, is that you can initially register for a one or two year MPhil, which is a Master of Philosophy or an MRes Master of Research. And then if you complete your MPhil or MRes, then you can be upgraded to a PhD program and then do your three years. I think that’s what that means anyway. Gaia: Something else that’s really important is to have some suggestions on why it can be a good idea to do a Masters before a PhD. So we looked at the Master’s portal website, and they have some really good suggestions. So first of all, a master’s can help you see if you’re ready for a PhD, again, doing more research, interacting with academics. Second of all, as Gemma mentioned earlier, you’ll probably have a better chance of getting a PhD position if you have a master. Not necessarily, but it can be. Gemma: I mean, I got on. Gaia: Yeah, you got on, so anyone can. Gemma: Brutal! Gaia: If you have a bachelor’s degree, which is not in the field that you want the PhD, your PhD in, you need to do a master’s in order to get into the PhD. Yeah. So you need to have a master’s for that. Yeah. As our sound technician, Ryan. Gemma: Yep. Ryan actually, fun fact, tell you a bit about Ryan. He did a undergraduate degree in history, history, and then he did a master’s in psychology. So then he was able to enter a new field. And that’s how he’s got into his PhD program. Gaia: Good job, Ryan. And then finally, in some countries like USA and Canada, you can actually transfer credits from masters to your PhD. So if you do a master’s, you can actually finish faster. Gemma: So that actually counteracts what you were saying earlier about how we… Gaia: But we’re in the UK, aren’t we? Gemma: Yes. But if we’ve got because we have got listeners from Canada and the USA kind of counteracts what Gaia was saying earlier where she’s going to get her PhD later, but in some countries, yeah, you can use your master’s as part of your PhD and then you end up doing your PhD in like two years. Gaia: Nice. So, what would you do if you weren’t sure on whether doing a master’s was a good idea? Gemma: So, I think the first thing to do is speak to your personal tutor, if you’re an undergrad. The careers people in your university, or the head of the, master’s program you’re thinking about, or the postgraduate research lead as well in your department and just see, you know, a, you know, what they expect, what typical PhD students have when they come in. If they say, okay, we only admit people that have a master’s, then obviously that’s it. That’s your answer right there, but they might be able to put things into more context for you. Gaia: Yeah. Something that I did as well was talking to academics in my area. Yeah. And most of them were like, you’ve probably going to have a better chance to get a PhD if you’re a master’s, but they might not for whatever area you’re in. Gemma: Yeah, absolutely. And also just having a look at the entry requirements on PhD courses. Most universities have websites with stuff. So yeah, have a look at that. What would be your top tip for you know, people that have done a Master’s and are starting a PhD? Gaia: So, going back to the point of feeling like you’re running out of time. I think it’s really important to remember when you’re surrounded by all those 21 years old, you need to remember that you didn’t lose those years that you were doing your masters, you were actually just training, and that’s going to help you during your PhD. Yeah. What’s your top tip? Gemma: So my top tip for people who are entering their PhD that haven’t done a master’s would be to ask around to see if you can attend some of those extra Master’s seminars or training courses, especially if you’re feeling less confident about your research. I think for me, attending those in my first year really helped kind of gain confidence to be able to and just knowledge about the research in general.
BRAIN BITES Gemma: Brain Bites! Gemma: Brain Bites! Woo hoo! Woo! So what are we talking about today? What’s our brain bite for today? Gaia: Does going out in the sunshine help your wellbeing? Gemma: Yeah, I think this week has actually been really sunny. Gaia: It’s cold but it’s sunny. Gemma: It’s cold but it’s sunny. I think we’re getting into spring. Gaia: It makes me so happy. Gemma: You know, it’s really nice. And we’re having more sunny days. So I wondered if this was, if this actually helps our wellbeing. Gaia: Well, does it? Gemma: So we found a systematic review by, excuse my pronunciation, Taniguchi et al. in 2022. And they looked at the external natural environment, including sunshine exposure on public mental health. Gaia: So they showed that exposure to sunlight, spending time in green spaces, and physical activity, all had a positive impact on people’s mental health, including depression, anxiety, and stress states. Gemma: So, get outside in that sunshine, put those sunglasses on. Go for a little walk. Gaia: Get those freckles. Gemma: Get some freckles. And hopefully we’re all feeling a bit more positive of it going into as we’re going into spring. EPISODE CLOSE Gemma: That’s everything for today, guys. I hope you really enjoyed this episode. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on your chosen podcast platform. Leave us a five star review. And where can people find us if they want to know a bit more behind the scenes stuff? Gaia: On social media @otherdoctor_pod. Gemma: You can also go to our website which has all of our transcriptions on there as well. The link will be in the description. Gemma: And a big thank you to the Royal Holloway Doctoral School for supporting this podcast, as well as our amazing podcast team that help us put on this podcast for you guys. Thanks so much! Gemma and Gaia: Bye!
Episode 8
AI in Academia with Professor Chris WatkinsSHOW OPEN Gemma:Hello and welcome to ‘The Other Kind of Doctor’ podcast. My name is Gemma, Gaia: and my name is Gaia, and we are both on the journey of gaining a PhD. Gemma: A quick disclaimer before we start. We are in fact the academic kind of doctors. Gaia: Well, nearly doctors. Gemma: Yes, nearly doctors. But we’re not your medical kind of doctors. Gaia: So if you do need medical attention, please contact your GP. Gemma: Now, let’s get on with the episode.
EPISODE 8 INTRODUCTION Gemma: Hello! And welcome back to another episode of the Other Kind of Doctor podcast. Gaia: How was your week, Gemma? Gemma: I don’t know, what have I been up to this week? Marking. Gaia: You’ve marked, you’ve been marking so much. Gemma: I feel like I don’t, I do actually do other stuff apart from marking… Gaia: But when, it’s like when you’re marking, nothing else matters. Gemma: Yeah, yeah, so that’s been consuming my thoughts quite a bit. Went to my first inaugural lecture last week. Very fun. That was really fun. Gaia: Oh yeah, I was there. Gemma: You were there! I was like. That was really fun. Yeah. So Inaugural Lecture is a lecture that professors put on it’s like an event when you get promoted to be a professor you have like a lecture and you invite all your friends and family and it’s like a really positive vibe. It was lovely wasn’t it? It was really good. What have you been up to? Gaia: I’ve been basically not doing anything, but my cat that I have in Italy has had a fight yesterday with his sworn enemy, Oreo, the cat. So there was a big event that happened yesterday. Actually, they didn’t even fight, they just yelled at each other. Gemma: Oh, you should video that. Gaia: Oh, my mom did, I’m going to show you later. Gemma: Maybe we’ll put it on the Instagram and Twitter, your cats arguing when this episode comes out, that would be hilarious. Gaia: So we have a guest today. Gemma: We do, we just finished our interview with professor Chris Watkins. He’s a professor of computer science at Royal Holloway. And we’re talking about… Gaia: AI in academia! Yeah. It was a really interesting conversation. Gemma: It was. So Chris has had a really successful career looking at lots of different things, but something that he’s consistently been interested in is AI way back in the 1980s, did he say? So yeah, it’s a longstanding interest for Chris and it’s a really interesting conversation. So I hope you all enjoy it. Gaia: So yeah, let’s go to the interview!
GUEST: PROF CHRIS WATKINS Gemma: So we’re really happy to welcome Professor Chris Watkins, who is a professor of computer science onto the Other Kind of Doctor podcast today. Very exciting. We are really excited to have you. Thank you so much for coming in to talk to us today. Gaia, what are we talking about today? Gaia: We are talking about AI and academia. Which scares a lot of people, but it’s also exciting in a way. Gemma: And Chris has done some really fantastic work with AI, and we thought he would be really interesting to talk to just to get a research perspective and someone who deals with this stuff all the time, but is also a professor, so understands also the challenges that we were chatting a bit about before we started recording, the problems we’re having with exams, and academic integrity, and things like that, so I think you know getting your perspective is really interesting here. Gaia: So let’s start off, just tell us a bit about you. What was your PhD in? What are you doing now? Chris Watkins: Oh, well my PhD, that was such a long time ago, back in a different world. I, in fact, did my PhD in the psychology department, and I started off doing experiments. And I found my first experiment was completely scooped. I did my experiment and then I came into the department and I saw the new issue of Perception on the side and there was an article in it. Someone had done my experiment! Down to the same materials with circular filter papers, little diagrams with black lines and red lines, just as I had. Gemma: Oh my God, that is every academic’s worst nightmare. Chris Watkins: I thought, Oh, well, you know, this is a sign. My supervisor had left and gone to America and nobody had noticed. So I didn’t have a supervisor for about 18 months. I know, doesn’t it sound good? Gemma: I don’t know what I’d do if my supervisor left me. Chris Watkins: Oh, it was freedom. I’ll tell you. You have to experience it. It’s great. I had a nice office above the chemistry lab. I’ve been slightly, people figured out I wasn’t quite doing psychology. I showed much too much interest in artificial intelligence. And I mean, it was a nice office. We had a pet lab rat. And eventually, I sort of realized that I hadn’t really done anything. That is the disadvantage of not having a supervisor. You probably don’t do anything. You sit around having great dreams, not doing anything. So I went off and got a job in a research lab thinking I’d failed. Oh. Oh, I know. Then as now, you could get jobs in AI having failed your PhD. It’s totally fine. And and then eventually I, I did my PhD, which was on, it was on reinforcement learning. And I was really thinking about how rats ought to learn, mathematically speaking. And I don’t think they do learn like that, but nevertheless, it’s a very neat theory and it became very well known. So then after a while, I was taking the train down from North London to near Gatwick Airport where the lab was. And I think I saw the film Wall Street. And I realized that the life of a city trader seemed to be more glamorous in every way than that of a junior researcher in a rather dingy research lab. So I, I started buying the Financial Times at Waterloo Station and copying out the names of banks. And I started ringing them up and claiming I could predict the stock market, which was completely wrong. I’ve never done it. And but in those days, you rang up and you sounded plausible. Then you’d speak to someone. First of all, ask for the head of quantitative research. And you got through. And you had 30 seconds with the head of quantitative research who said, I think you might want to talk to X and [hang up]. And I’d say the same thing, too X. And I’d say, I’m Dr Chris Watkins. I’m at Philips Research Labs. And I think I can predict the stock market. They’d say, I think you want to talk to Y [hang up]. So I got them the line. And eventually there’s a rather junior person who said, Oh, yeah, right. Yeah. They I mean, they hired me three months ago. I was doing astrophysics. Well, I know what I could take you to lunch. And so I took a day off sick and go in and go have lunch with someone rather like me, and they would tell me what to read and what answers to give to interview questions. So I did better the next time. And then eventually I got a job in hedge funds and so I was in hedge funds for five years. Gemma: And what are you researching now? What kind of research are you doing at the moment? Chris Watkins: I’m really interested in the relationship of learning and evolution. And I think it’s quite a lot to be discovered. And I’m interested in, I mean, in many ways, our behavior is innately specified, but how, how does innate specification of behavior develop? Is there something you can say about that from a priori reasoning? And in order to get to there, you need to kind of do genetic algorithms, right? And I’m trying to do that. Gemma: It’s very exciting. Yeah, that’s really cool. So obviously, within the last couple of years, especially in 2023 and going into 2024, AI and Gen AI has exploded and everyone’s talking about it. You know, right from, I’m not quite sure my grandma’s been talking about it, but even like my, people who aren’t in academia, who aren’t in computer science talking about AI. And I wondered what interests you about AI and how long you’ve been kind of in researching it. Obviously you said, you mentioned there that you were kind of interested in it back in your PhD days, but what interests you about artificial intelligence? Chris Watkins: I suppose I’ve always wanted to know how the mind works. And the way to study that seemed to me was to do AI. That it’s extremely difficult to go in from the outside with psychological psychology experiments. You do one experiment and then you push to another one. Then you think of another alternative explanation. You do another one. And before you know it, you’ve done experiment after experiment. And I did. You sort of haven’t got very far in. Neurosciences… Well, I’m starting to read about that. But , the shortcut seemed to be AI. So that’s what I liked about AI. But the, the new AI is really shocking. Now, I think that people outside the field think, oh, that’s cool. Alright, we can talk to computers now. Oh, that’s great. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Mm-Hmm. people who had seen over 30, hmm, 40 years, how difficult, how many unsuccessful attempts there were to get computers to understand and produce language, how complicated it is, are completely shocked and absolutely blown away by the success of GPT 3 and chat GPT and these other language models, which are now improving in limited, they’re improving in limited ways. Very fast. Yeah. Yeah. And And chat GPT was a real shock. The I mean, say that for about 100 years since Bertrand Russell on denoting that being this project that you would need to understand, represent what someone’s saying in terms of logic, that you could get the grammatical structure of a sentence, and, oh, no, then you’ve got to get all the pragmatics and kind of intentions as well, and mesh all this together, and then somehow you get language. And then these engineers just start building bigger and bigger networks predicting the next word. And they produce something far more, far more impressive than had ever been produced by the older techniques. And here we are. And even the people who produced GPT 3 were surprised if you read the original GPT 3 paper. It’s called something like Large Language Models Demonstrate One Shot Learning. They didn’t really realize what they’d got, and the technical success was extraordinary. Nobody had been expecting scaling up and just using more data to produce that level of improvement. But They haven’t. And the scale of these systems is absolutely extraordinary. So you can have a system with superhuman knowledge sitting in your laptop, and you can talk to it privately. It’s stupid, but it’s got superhuman knowledge. Gemma: Yeah, it’s, it’s… Gaia: it’s actually so interesting as well. So lots of people are scared about AI taking over academia. Do you think that’s justified? Chris Watkins: Well, there are, let’s see, I think there are a number of there are a number of aspects of that. The one that’s affecting most of us most immediately is GPT 4 can write pretty good essays. It can write essays which are good enough to hand in without embarrassment, with relatively little effort. I mean, maybe not just from one prompt, but you, prompt it, and say can you make it a little bit longer and say this as well, and so on.. And you get something very quickly, which is sort of structured like an essay, which reads very fluently. It doesn’t have any grammatical mistakes. It’s got correct punctuation and paragraphs. It has an unfortunate tendency towards bullet points. But nevertheless, you hand it in with a feeling- without a feeling of absolute shame. Yeah. Except the fact that… Gemma: You’ve cheated the system. Chris Watkins: Yeah. Totally cheated the system. And what’s even better is that you can make this essay longer than you otherwise would have and pity the poor marker. There’s a graduate student marking that, right? Yeah. Yeah. And they’ve got to read through… Gemma: Me and Gaia are marking it! Gaia: My God. Chris Watkins: Yeah, you’ve got to read through 15 pages of rubbish from- and you know that this took the student no, no effort to produce. Yeah. And you can’t prove it. Gaia: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You can really tell, but then you’re like, There’s no way I can prove this. Chris Watkins: Yeah. So what do you, I, what do we do about this? So, I mean, as we were discussing just before, well, one approach is to get tough and you say invigilation is the future that people, when people submit written work, it has got to be produced under invigilated conditions. Now, so people can prepare to write their essay, which is absolutely fine. So you’d say you’ve got an essay, now you’ve got two weeks to prepare. But it’s a really valuable skill to be able to get your thoughts into order and to say things concisely and to lay it all out. And then you give them two hours or three hours to write the essay under invigilated conditions. And then you’ve got essays that you can mark. And the joy is they’ll be shorter. That’s great. Yeah, I don’t know. That’s, that’s just off the top of my head, one approach to this. The trouble is there’s I think no way of watermarking what comes out of a generative text system with generative systems for generating pictures. There probably is, but it’s not technically easy because you can get rid of them. The trouble is that only some image generation systems would have an incentive to have secure watermarks that you could detect. So what’s more likely to happen is that people who are producing organizations that are producing real pictures, real images that have pictures that have really been taken of real people and things, they’re going to watermark those and the large organizations seem to be being quite responsible about making their generated images look artificial. So if you get I think it’s the image generator that comes with GPT 4, you’d never mistake them for natural images. Clearly. And, and so that’s reasonable. But of course, there’ll be third parties and open source image generation software, which are going to look completely naturalistic. But in academia, I mean, generative AI is in its early stages. There are various things to say about it academically. The first is I think was Chat GPT a year ago? Gemma: Something like that. Chris Watkins: I lose track of time. Is it a year or two years? Gemma: I think it was just last year. Chris Watkins: It came out just last year. Gaia: It does feel so long ago, though. Chris Watkins: It feels like such a long time ago. Yes. The only time in my life, anything similar has happened is when visual browsers came out. So I first saw a browser that could download images and format it with text. I can remember when it was. It would have been November, 1994, and you saw this and you thought, Wow, I mean, this was in Cambridge Engineering Lab. I was visiting somebody and they said, Look at this, And I said, Oh, that’s going to take off. And 1995 was the year of the Internet. So I actually spent that year in America. And at the beginning, nobody knew what the Internet was. And then you heard that everyone was talking. Then by the end of the year, you tuned into someone else’s conversation in a coffee shop, and they were talking about the Internet. Hmm. And so Internet applications then developed. What, the limit to the speed was how quickly people could learn to use them. Yeah. And and so computers developed, Internet applications developed. And I was sitting in a major American research lab and we discussed video on demand. Well, I mean, that’ll never happen. I mean, how much bandwidth do you need for that? Yeah. I remember going out in the evening to in New York and watching presentations by four small companies, each of which had a micropayment system. One of them was called Millicent, you could, you could pay down to the amounts of a thousandth of a cent. And I thought, that’s got to be the future. Well, it wasn’t. So it’s very hard to see what the future is going to be and there’s going to be twists and turns. And all of this, this, these large language models come out of, well, there’s one major breakthrough, which has been the invention of the transformer architecture in deep neural networks. Now, the transformer architecture isn’t particularly radical. I’ve just been teaching it, and it’s not really that complicated. And in my next lecture, I’m going to confess there’s a kind of black hole in the course in that you’ve learned about the structure of the transformer and everything. We want to know, why does it work so well? Well, we don’t really know. Gemma: I love saying that in lectures. Chris Watkins: Yeah. I mean, I’m keeping that until the end of term. So if you’ve had one breakthrough like that, it’s reasonable to suppose, and I think there will be other breakthroughs like that. What happens then? And to me, what’s a little scarier about these breakthroughs is just on what scale these systems are. Now, it’s been clear to people who could see that in understanding natural language, you, we, we effortlessly can use and in a huge range of knowledge of knowledge of facts, knowledge of theories, knowledge of cultural practices, and so on. Yeah. And we effortlessly and unconsciously use this to understand what we hear. And we really are using this knowledge. Because if you don’t have that knowledge, then you don’t understand, yeah. Can I give a little example? You can edit this out if it’s too boring. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s, I think I’ve got it by heart. This is from the 1970s. An engineer at MIT called Charniak. He was a very practical guy. He wanted, he said, he took actual children’s books. He said, okay, these have got to be simple. And he took actual paragraphs out of children’s books and said, How can we tell whether a computer’s understood this? And the idea would be you’d have to ask the computer questions about the passage, and it would have to reply, like comprehension tests. Chris Watkins: And there was one passage which was like this. It was Jack’s birthday. Ben and Jill went to the store to get presents. Jill chose a top. That’s a kind of toy, actually. Ben said, Jack’s already got one. He’ll make you take it back. Okay. Now, when Ben says, He’ll make you take it back, exactly what is Jill going to be taking back? And where? Right. Okay. And what this passage tells us, without effort, is that in the 1970s, there were American children who, when they, someone gave them, was so nice enough to bring them a present to their birthday party, would say, I’ve already got one of those. Can you take it back to the store and get me something else? That’s the implication of this children’s story. And if you don’t understand that possibility, yeah, you haven’t understood that tiny children’s story. Yeah. And so it seemed to be an impossible task to put that amount of knowledge into an AI system for it to understand. But when you’ve trained these neural networks on something like 20, 000 times as much text as anyone could possibly read in their life, yeah, then they have, in some sense, in some shallow way, encoded enough knowledge to be able to use it to solve questions like this and to understand at that level, which is now that’s scary because this is, you know, like the whole of human textual knowledge. Gemma: And I think this is what is scaring a lot of people about AI. It’s just the vast amount of data and knowledge that is in that. And how it can reproduce. It’s almost like, in terms of, you know, it’s thinking is beyond anything that, you know, I feel like AI you know, if it had the right prompts or had the right, you know descriptions, it’s going to, you know, write a grant proposal for me. It’s going to do this is really, you know… Chris Watkins: Well, it might not write the grant proposal, but it’ll surely write the the impact statement and the EDI procedures, the various other pieces of boilerplate text, which you want to put in not that badly. Yeah. Personally, I found it quite useful for writing multiple choice questions. Gemma: We use it in coding all the time. Chris Watkins: Well, in coding, it does very well for quite standard bits of code. And quite a lot of coding is you want to do something which hundreds of thousands of people have done before, but in order to know what to do, you’ve got to know exactly which package to load and what instructions to give, and there’s about 20 lines of code, which you really don’t want to have to invent yourself. You just want to find where some, where the tutorial is that shows you how to do that, and it’s really good at doing that, and I find it incredibly useful, and sometimes it sort of does more. But if you want to do something unusual then it’s not so good. Gaia: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Chris Watkins: So I program in a lesson in programming language. And I asked it a question about how I could do something and it made up the answer so convincingly that I spent two hours looking through the documentation to see where this was described. I said, well, that’d be really useful. So it doesn’t always… Gemma: It’s certainly got some flaws in that respect. Chris Watkins: And that particular one, what people call hallucinating, what they really should call confabulating, is that’s something which is, pretty tricky to fix. I think that’s quite, there’s quite a deep cause to that. Yeah. And it’s very tricky to get that fixed within the current architectures. Yeah. Because you, you want to be able to tell your system, well, actually, when I’m asking for a reference, I want something that you’ve definitely seen and it’s exactly the same as what you’ve seen. Yeah. Whereas, oh, right. Yes, all your training has been predicting things. And of course, you’ve got to have reasonable guesses of what you haven’t seen. So, of course, you’re going to generate it. So that’s the …. but as you said, it’s to say that it’s been about a year since the introduction of Chat GPT, and the sheer amount of money that’s going into the development of these systems is enormous. Gemma: Yeah. So yeah, definitely a big topic. I wondered if what you thought some of the ethical implications of using AI in research is. So kind of where, where do we draw a line? So you just, so we were just talking about coding, you know, maybe writing some multiple choice questions, things like that. When is it too much? To follow on from that, should we cite AI? I submitted a paper the other day, and it would say you had to make a declaration about whether you’ve used AI in research, which makes it seem like people are having to cite it or make a kind of declaration, but I would have thought that that was wrong and that you shouldn’t, shouldn’t be using AI that much in your research. Because it’s not yours. Chris Watkins: It’s an interesting one. I got, at its present stage, it’s not really going to produce sort of the original thoughts. Yeah. Yeah. That go into it. Nevertheless, it’s a tool for producing text, and you could argue that it’s comparable to a tool for doing statistical analysis or doing your, your, plotting your graphs. Yeah. And you probably say what statistical package you used. Yeah. It’s not hugely important that you say what statistical or stats package you used, but people will say that in the methods section. And they’ll say that’s something about the graph plotting. And so a use of AI is saying, I’ve got this data, can you please plot this, plot the following graphs? Or can you plot appropriate graphs for this? And it’ll do some standard plots. And I don’t think it’s that different from that, which means that it’s kind of nice to cite it, but you don’t really have to. Okay. I, I’m unashamedly speciesist at the moment, so I, you know, I think with the current state of AI, it is just laughable to say that these things are self aware or they have rights or anything like that. That’s just not true. So using it, I mean, people are definitely going to use it as a writing tool. I don’t see an inherent ethical problem in using it as a writing tool because you provide a prompt, you say what you want, and then you check it and you, you, as the ultimate checker and editor, you take responsibility for that piece of text and what’s being said. So you can get very embarrassed if you haven’t deleted bits saying as a non sentient large language model…. Gemma: Or when they make up references. I like that. Chris Watkins: Yes, that’s kind of hard to stop, actually. Gaia: So how do you feel about the future of academia now that we’re in this AI era? Is it as dire as people think it’s gonna be? Or is it? Chris Watkins: Oh, do you think it’s dire? Gemma: Yeah, we’ve spoken to loads of people who think that AI is like the death of academia and things like that. Chris Watkins: Oh, really? Why? Why do they think that? Gemma: Because it’s taking away, like, although it’s not taking away original thought, it’s kind of, AI’s doing our jobs for us in that, you know, doing that writing, where do you see academia going? Is our job, are our jobs going to be changing? So are we going to be doing less of that, you know, admin writing things? Are we going to… Chris Watkins: I hope, I hope so. The other writing gets much easier. I want to have a better language model than other people for doing the admin writing. I think it’s hmm. I know there are a lot of questions there, and many of them have gone out of my mind. So let’s try and think of some answers for these. I, I think that, well, most obviously, the primary, in many subjects or one of the primary ways of teaching people to think is to get them to read things, to think about it and then construct arguments in their own words and that process of thinking about it and then realizing as you write it, oh, yes, I hadn’t realized that. And that’s a good point. And I better restructure this. So this is how the argument goes. That is the key to clear thought. And, that’s an essential experience for people to have. So one shouldn’t… and that’s why I think it’s going to be necessary to have invigilated essays. I don’t think any of the other suggested solutions work. Yeah. Now, as for… oh, the other, the other thing we do as academics is mark. Yeah. Now, again, I think that you have to take personal responsibility for marking and I don’t know about applications of AI in marking essays. I’m sure there will be I mean, for years, I mean, there’s a lazy way of marking an essay where you see if the language flows. Chris Watkins: You read some paragraphs and all the commas are in the, and the person knows how to use commas and full stops and even a semicolon, so yes, you look through and your eye skips down from point to point. And you think, you know, they’ve mentioned most things. Okay, click A minus B plus or something. Yeah, I’m pretty sure AI could do that. Yeah. Whereas actually getting into it and saying, Have they properly used language? Yeah. Have they made a proper argument? Yeah. Do things connect? Well, AI perhaps can probably do that, but you might have to have more of a conversation with it about the essay. I think it’s, there were experiments done some time ago, just looking on marking essays, considering the essay as a bag of words, not actually considering the order of the words to the person, those essays, which used a decent collection of words educated vocabulary, you could train a little regression classifier, a regression estimator to estimate the mark pretty accurately just from the collection of words that was used. Chris Watkins: Now, of course, this isn’t marking the essay, and it’s kind of this would be very much subject to Goodhart’s law. If you started marking essays like that, I think the students would catch on. So an indicator, something can be a good indicator without being a good target. Yeah. And similarly in in, in marking, you need to be very careful using AI not to not to create bad targets. Chris Watkins: But having said that, maybe you get a reduction in labor because the part you could ask the AI for, you know, where are the really bad constructions, whereas some arguments don’t follow if you’re marking code, where is the bad code and it could help you find it. I mean, we’ve had systems that automatically mark code. So you, you get students to submit code and you then the marking system that has a set of inputs and outputs. It just checks if the program produces the right answers. But that is not a good way to mark code. Because you’re not marking the style of the code the the correctness for all answers, not just the tests that you’ve given, and so on. So it does only a fraction of the job. Gemma: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And it will be interesting to listen back to this podcast episode in a few years time and see, yeah… Chris Watkins: I’m laying down things for posterity this could date very rapidly. Gemma: So just to bring the conversation to a close, I wondered if you could give your top tip for a PhD student who wants to use AI in their work? What’s the best thing that they can do to utilize… Chris Watkins: What sort of a what sort of a Gemma: Gen AI go for. Chris Watkins: Gen AI. I think one thing I use it for is a first port of call, trying to understand things that you can’t quite Google. And it’s easy to forget. We’ve been living with a wonderful AI system called Google, which has been reasonably ethical and pretty safe for and it’s a completely new experience to be able to take out your phone at any time to ask any question and you get relevant links on the internet to it. Well, at the moment, Gen AI is a step up from that because you can ask it questions and you’re kind of annoyed if you get a stupid reply. It’s good enough. So if I wanted to know about who was the first behaviorist or something about psychology then then I can ask it and it’ll produce a reply, which is usually correct. Yeah. And you’re disappointed and it’s not. And this is extraordinary. Now, that’s going to get better, but I think incrementally and slowly. I think there’s going to be more breakthroughs and I don’t know what they’re going to be. Oh, we’ll, we’ll be able to ask you, you just speaking, you can already speak into your phone. Yeah. And get the, have a little chat. Do, do you, do you chat with it on your phone? Gemma: Sometimes. I don’t use Siri that much actually. But my phone’s really old ’cause I keep breaking them and I can’t keep buying them. Chris Watkins: Oh well when you got a, I think you can use something called Whisper. Okay. So then you can chat to Chat GBT with your phone. Gemma: Interesting. Yeah. Well I have to try that out. . So if someone wants to, find you online or see your research or anything like that. Are you on Twitter? Can people follow you? Chris Watkins: Yes, people can follow me on Twitter if they look for me and I don’t say much. And and I’m in the computer science department. I’m Chris Watkins. I’m easily findable. I went through a phase of putting on grant applications that Royal Holloway was a really great place to do interdisciplinary studies. Interdisciplinary research because all the other departments are within two minutes walk! And I realized that might not create quite the right impression to grant awarding bodies. I stopped doing that or it didn’t work. Gemma: Oh, well, that’s great. Thank you so much. Gaia: Really interesting. Gemma: Yeah, it’s really interesting. Thanks so much, Chris. Chris Watkins: Okay. Thank you.
BRAIN BITES Gaia and Gemma: Brain Bites! Gemma: Sorry if that was really loud. Gaia: I’ve been told people like the Brain Bites bit. Gemma: The Brain Bites singing? Yes. Okay, well we’ll have to keep doing that then. So this week I actually recently got a purple keyboard. Gaia: It is so cute. Gemma: And a, and a matching mouse. And I love it, and I feel like it makes me more productive and makes me write more. Um, , And my little tippy tap little keyboard it’s very satisfying. Gaia: But does it actually, or is it just you thinking that it does? Gemma: Is it just me buying stuff for no reason? Well, we did some research on whether having a tidy or an aesthetically pleasing workspace helps with productivity. And we found that personalizing office desks with aesthetic decor can help enhance a sense of belonging and pride. Having a personal touch on your office desk, such as plants or photographs you know, organizers, having all of this helps create an environment that employees can truly call their own. Gaia: Yes, and research by Dr. Craig Knight showed that having control over your own space can make workers happier and more comfortable at work, and it can increase productivity up to 32%. Gemma: Wow. So we should all have little, well whatever you like to make your office space feel nice. Gaia: Whatever colour keyboard you want, you should buy it. Gemma: Yeah, you don’t have to have a purple one. Maybe you could get a green one. You should have a pink one. Gaia: That’s what I was about to say. I’m gonna get a pink one! CLOSE Gemma: Well, that’s it for today. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the Other Kind of Doctor podcast. As usual, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast and review it as well. Where can people find us, Gaia? Gaia: On social media @otherdoctor_pod. Gemma: Fabulous. Our transcriptions for the episode are on our website, which is www. theotherkindofdoctor.wordpress.com. And as always, thanks so much to the Royal Holloway Doctoral School for supporting this podcast, as well as our fantastic podcast team. Gaia , Gemma and Chris Watkins
Episode 9
Entering Motherhood During the PhD, with Dr Sarah SampsonSHOW OPEN Gemma: Hello and welcome to the Other Kind of Doctor podcast. My name is Gemma. Gaia: And my name is Gaia and we are both on the journey of gaining a PhD. Gemma: A quick disclaimer before we start. We are in fact the academic kind of doctors. Gaia: Well, nearly doctors. Gemma: Yes, nearly doctors. But we’re not your medical kind of doctors. Gaia: So if you do need medical attention, please contact your GP. Gemma: Now, let’s get on with the episode.
EPISODE 9 INTRODUCTION Gaia: Hello! Gemma: Hello! And welcome back to another episode of the Other Kind of Doctor podcast. Woohoo! Woohoo! How have you been this week, Gaia? Gaia: Well, I’ve got a sore throat. Oh. And I’m feeling, I’m not being very brave about it. Gemma: Oh, yeah, she, she does look really sorry for herself. Gaia: Yeah. How has your week been? Gemma: I’ve, I have had an unproductive week. Well, it’s been productive in that I’ve been marking still. I literally finished yesterday. So now I’m desperately trying to catch up with all the work that I haven’t been doing in the last two weeks. But yeah, I’ve been alright. What have I been watching on telly? I haven’t been watching anything but I am listening to a new audiobook. Gaia: What is it? Gemma: Can’t remember the title. Gaia: That’s great content, Gemma. Gemma: It’s, it’s, it’s like a thriller that’s set in Scotland. So it’s a bit like moody. And it’s about like a murder investigation. Okay. It’s like a whodunit audiobook. It’s with a Scottish, like, narrator as well. Sounds, it’s really good actually. Gaia: I’ve been watching Love is Blind. So literally, same vibes. Gemma: Very sim, very similar vibes. Okay. So, what are we talking about today? Gaia: Motherhood in academia with Dr. Sarah Sampson. Gemma: Yeah, so we’ve just finished our interview with Sarah. And It was a really good episode I think, and I think it’s really important that we have guests on like Sarah who you know, have had, you know, these experiences. Cause there’s only, obviously only so much that Gaia and I can comment on, there’s only so much that we can talk about. Gaia: Very little. Gemma: Very little. Funnily enough we are, we don’t have the knowledge of everything in the world. So I learned a lot, actually, and it was really nice to hear Sarah’s experience and I’m sure it’ll be really helpful for lots of PhD students listening to this. Okay, let’s get on with the episode!
GUEST: DR SARAH SAMPSON Gaia, Gemma and Sarah: Hello! Hello! Hello! Gemma: Oh! Who’s this? Sounds like we’ve got another guest. Gaia: Who’s this? Who’s this? Gemma: So, today we’re really excited to have Dr. Sarah Sampson in the podcast studio today. And what are we talking about today, Gaia? Gaia: We’re talking about motherhood during the PhD. Gemma: Yeah. So we like to start this with every guest but we wondered if you could tell us a bit about you, when you completed your PhD and what your PhD was in. Give a bit of background. Sarah: Okay. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I’m very excited. Gaia: You’re very welcome. Sarah: So I did my PhD at Reading in 2005, I started it, so I’d kind of was thinking to go down the clinical route, but I then decided to do my PhD so I carried on my PhD from a research assistant post that I had been doing a few years previous which was examining emotional regulation and behavior in initially a sample of like three month old babies, and then they were kind of it was a prospective study. So, for my PhD, I used data from when the children were 12 and 18 months and then followed them up again at 5 years. So, I was specifically interested in early precursors of disruptive behaviour in children. So, that was kind of my PhD. Gaia: That sounds so complex. Gemma: It sounds really interesting, though. Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. It was an interesting thing because it meant I had, like, a load of data that I could use. I think the earliest stuff I used was, like, from when the babies were 12 weeks old looking at their emotion regulation and how that developed over time. And I was also interested in parenting behavior, so, like, how sensitive mums were and how that impacted on their children’s behavior at five years. Gaia: That’s so nice. Gemma: That’s so interesting. I love working with longitudinal data. It’s like, so interesting. And the little babies. The little babies. What was it like working with babies? Gaia: Were they bald? Gemma: Of course they were bald. Gaia: Some babies aren’t. Sarah: Yeah. Well, so when I saw them, they were like 12 and 18 months, so that’s quite a cute time. But trying to get babies to do what you want them to do. And some of the tasks were sort of quite mean. So , we’d give the baby a toy to play with and then we’d take it away to see how upset they would get. Gemma: Wow. Oh, that is brutal. Sarah: So it was a bit harsh and you had to be kind of quite flexible as to, you know, to get the best out of the baby. Yeah, it was, and kind of seeing the moms and the babies together, that was, that was good. But. You know, that was a massive task trying to code all, like, it was like about a 15 minute interaction that we did at 12 months, 18 months, and then a slightly longer one at five years. So that was pretty intensive when you came to coding that, but it was fun. Yeah. Gemma: Okay, so Sarah, obviously, we know you because we work in the same department. But we remember you mentioning why we brought you in is that you were pregnant during your PhD, or towards the end of your PhD. So we wanted to talk about, kind of, entering motherhood, or, like, submitting, your thesis whilst, you know, trying to manage all of these other things that you’ve got going on because PhD students are way more than their research. They’ve obviously got all of their own stuff going on. And I think the reason we wanted to look at this topic is because when people embark on a PhD, they’re typically in that kind of chapter where they’re kind of moving and have like big, you know, milestones in their personal life as well. Like not to talk about myself, but I am getting married this year. But you know, we’re, we’re doing in this age, we kind of, you know, end up doing, you know, other things. So, and, you know, having babies comes with that. So I think the kind of the first question would be kind of what was your experience of all of that? And the kind of, you know, How you found it, I guess. Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. So like you, like you said, Gemma, it is a time, and certainly for me, because I think I was about 30 when I started my PhD. So I was already married. And initially when debating whether to kind of do my PhD, I kind of thought, oh, that might work out well, because I could easily have a baby whilst doing my PhD. Gaia: Whilst researching babies. Sarah: Exactly. Anyway, as I was coming towards the end of my PhD, I decided that, not, that I could actually finish my PhD and work full time. So I’d taken a research assistant post and do my PhD so that was fun. And then in this, this time, so I was already busy with working full time, trying to finish up the first draft of my thesis I then fell pregnant. So I had the challenges of not only working, but feeling pretty rough. And so I was struggling to actually get on with my thesis. Anyway, I kind of muddled through and there was a little bit of miscommunication with me and my supervisor. I thought my draft was ready. So just went ahead and submitted it and she was like, It wasn’t ready, but at that point I’ve submitted. So as it materialized, I then had my viva when I was 36 weeks pregnant. So I had a month to go. So, and it was quite a brutal viva because obviously I’d submitted something that my supervisor wasn’t 100 percent happy with, which, you know led to quite a lengthy discussion during my viva where I was trying to defend what I’d done and how I’d done it which basically meant I had major revisions to do. Right. Which I kind of expected, but timing wise wasn’t ideal. So I didn’t do anything at that point and I then had my baby, so I had the challenges of home with this newborn baby and going, Okay, well, that’s it. There’s no, there’s no going back now. So I had the challenges of kind of struggling with like getting used to being a mum and kind of people thought, well, you know, your PhD is in babies. Surely that that that’s going to be much easier. But it was really, it was definitely a double edged sword. So I had all this theory that I’d written about and kind of best practicing as being a mum. And then when you’re struggling with a baby who’s crying and you’re tired and you know what is best practice and you’re like, I’m just muddling. So there was so much guilt and it really made me think about how I’d kind of evaluated these mums on their parenting style in a 15 minute window when I had no children. And I was really judgmental. And I was like, it really gave me hindsight that if I were to do that again, if I went back and looked at that, that parenting behavior again, I would probably totally, re-score it kind of being a bit more generous. So that was kind of that stage. And then they gave- my supervisor gave me a little, little bit of time. But basically then, when my daughter got to about three or four months, I then was really encouraged to get on and start working on my revisions. Gemma: How long did you have, so did your time off count towards your time to be able to do the revisions or was it something, was it like, so did you have more time because you’d had a baby or was it still the amount of time that you usually get when you have revisions? Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. It was, I would say it was a little bit more because they kind of didn’t start it. They kind of delayed my start time. But obviously at this point it’s now totally unfunded. So, you know, I guess in one way I was on maternity leave, but as it was. But the way I kind of managed juggling a baby and doing my PhD basically meant that I would have to basically pack up kind of a baby’s life in my car and drive down to my parent’s home in Somerset and it was very much a routine of wake up at like half past six, feed baby, get some breakfast, hand baby over to grandma and then work and literally work, stop, feed, work, stop, feed, work, stop, feed and you know, hope they have a nap. Yeah. And so my day was pretty much like that from half past six till like maybe ten o’clock at night. And that was, I wouldn’t have the weekends. It would just be let’s make the most of the time where I’m staying at my parents. And I would probably stay there for like two to three weeks at a time. Okay. And then going back home it, it just wasn’t really practical to kind of do much. But it, it kind of felt that you never really settled anywhere. So it was kind of like, Okay. I wasn’t like a typical PhD student, so I didn’t have that kind of support from fellow students. Gemma: Yeah, I was, I was just about to say that. It just seems like, not that you were, obviously you had support with your parents and things like that, but like, doing a PhD, it’s really difficult to have that support from people who aren’t in academia. And being able to talk about, you know, PhD stuff to others is, you know, that are going through that is, you know, I know I find it really beneficial. So that must have been, yeah, really difficult. Sarah: Yeah, and then on the flip side, I never really kind of jelled with my friends because I was kind of not there, so I kind of felt quite isolated yeah. So it was a challenge and I guess that took I think I eventually submitted again probably about a year later, so I had a good year of kind of juggling trips to Somerset to get chunks of work done. So that I would say I did that for about a year before I resubmitted. So it’s pretty full on. Gaia: Did you have any support from the university? And what do you think? What support should they provide, do you think? Sarah: I didn’t have any support as such. But then basically, because I kind of extended my time I should have been at university, maybe they didn’t feel obliged. My supervisor was kind of helpful to a point. But hers was very much, Can’t you just, you know, put your child in nursery? And it’s like, well, I can’t afford to put my child in nursery. And also she’s only little and I don’t want her to be in nursery. Gemma: And obviously if you, I mean, I’m a developmental researcher as well. You obviously, when you’re familiar with the research, like you said, you’re like, Oh, okay, well, if I make this decision, then that has this implications. And yeah, so I can imagine that kind of. Sarah: Exactly. That was my thing. It was kind of, I was very much of the stance of no kind of group childcare until they’re at least three. So I was like, I didn’t want to do that, even if I could financially afford it. But it, I mean, it did mean that Eliza used to come in into the department and have meetings with my supervisors and my secondary supervisors, and luckily it was like a, it was a developmental unit. So, it was nice. She could sit on the floor and play with some toys when she was a bit bigger. But, so she got the whole kind of university experience quite, quite soon. Gaia: That’s why she’s so smart, now. Gemma: Training her from a young age. Gaia: So, after your PhD, after you resubmitted, you decided to take a break. Yeah. Was that a difficult decision? How come you came to that decision? Sarah: So I’ll briefly go into this because I don’t want to bore the listeners. But so whilst I was doing my, whilst I was on maternity leave, I was meant to go back to work, but they moved my office and wouldn’t allow me to work from home. So my commute was then going to become two hours each way, which I said was not reasonable. So I had to go through a tribunal as well as my PhD and Eliza at this time. I also had to kind of raise issues with my work establishment at the time. So then I kind of thought I didn’t want to go back to work. And there were times when I considered it as Eliza got a bit older, but then I fell pregnant again. And then I just, I wanted to be with the children. And maybe in hindsight wouldn’t have stayed as long, but it was just kind of logistics. My partner at the time, his work didn’t afford me the flexibility to go back to work without putting the children into full time kind of nursery care, and that wasn’t really something that was prepared to do So in that sense, I do value that I did get to spend that time with the children but maybe longer than I would have hoped for. Gemma: Yeah. Yeah, so you briefly mentioned about the support that your supervisor was able to give you. Kind of looking back now, what kind of support do you think supervisors might, or what information do supervisors need to be aware of if, for example, they have a PhD student that is going, you know, entering motherhood and things like that? What kind of support do you think they need to be giving? Sarah: I think they need to be as flexible as possible and that whilst, you know, we might agree kind of deadlines for, you know, writing up your next chapter, that that isn’t always going to be feasible and if you’ve arranged meetings, again, your child is always going to come first. So there needs to be a huge amount of flexibility and maybe just kind of checking in that not only how your PhD is going, particularly if you’re a first time mum, sort of checking in on how you are doing as a person because that’s kind of really paramount in, in your mental wellbeing to actually get on and get your PhD done. Gemma: Yeah, absolutely. I think that. I think sometimes supervisors could get lost in like, look, just checking on the research progress. But I do definitely think that that kind of supporting the mental health wellbeing side of things is, is really important and that ultimately is going to make your research better. If you are in a better place and you feel more supported, you are gonna have better outputs than if you, you know, kind of do feel a bit cut off from, you know, that side of things. Gaia: So, after Eliza became a proper person, Gemma: A proper person? Gaia: Yeah. She’s a human now. You decided to come back in academia. Yeah. Was that a joyful decision? How did you come to that? Sarah: So, once both the children were at school, I kind of felt a bit more comfortable with looking for a part time role. So, I was excited to go back into academia. And initially I went back in as a research assistant, which was slightly, I’m not sure annoying is the right word, but I was like, I know I’m a postdoc, but I couldn’t find any postdocs. I need to get back into research. I’ve been out of it too long. Yeah. So I kind of felt a bit awkward because I felt like I wasn’t where I should be. And I was surrounded by like lots of young research assistants who might only be in their early twenties. So I did feel kind of quite old, but it kind of brought my confidence back. I felt kind of quite, this is what I’m meant to do. I felt more myself because I think for me, not for everyone, but sometimes being a mum you can lose your identity. So I did feel quite kind of positive about going back. Gemma: How long were you in your research assistant role for? Sarah: So I was in my research assistant post for two years. That should have also been working with babies but we had the pandemic so that all became online. Oh the joys. Yes. So I was there for two years and then I made the decision to go into teaching for kind of more stability and thought, yeah, let’s give that a go and see how that pans out. Gemma: How are you finding being a teaching associate? Sarah: Actually, I was surprised because there’s I don’t like presenting and people might ask why do you do that job then because you have to stand up in front of people but then you know you justify it yourself going well that’s a small part of what I do and so I just kind of get on with it. But I enjoy it much more than I thought that I would. But I would say I still have the same kind of difficulties I had when I went back as a research assistant because I’m a grade lower than where I should be and you know, I’m working alongside PhD students who are doing the same job as me who are, you know, maybe in their 20s. So I still kind of struggle a little bit with like where I should be. I’m feeling like not quite, I guess kind of sometimes feel like embarrassed as to where I am. Right. Like thinking, Oh, if I hadn’t have done that, I could be in a different position, but I kind of try to offset that by thinking, well, I did get to spend all this time with my children and hopefully that’s been positive for them as well as for me. Gemma: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you know, just from, I think knowing you the last two years, your confidence definitely has increased. I feel like, you know, whatever you go on and do after this, like you, I think it’s. I don’t know, it’s difficult to comment when you haven’t been in that position, but I feel like this, all of these experiences are going to inform what your later career is going to be like. So when you are, maybe go on and do like a postdoc if that’s teaching focused or research focused, and then, you know, if you go and secure like a lecturer position or anything like that, I feel like all of these experiences are going to make you a better lecturer and a better, provide better support to students that, you know, someone like me who hasn’t had all of these experiences, you know, I’m going to be coming at things from a completely different angle. Gaia: Yeah, I was thinking about that as well. You’re such a great teacher, way more than us. Gemma: Yeah, definitely. And then even like if you go and do developmental research again, like you said earlier, you’re going to be looking at this from a completely different lens, and that’s probably going to make you a better researcher. Yeah. Or definitely have more of a open mind about things for sure. Do you, something that kind of resonated with me when you were just talking there was kind of imposter syndrome, kind of feeling that kind of, do I belong? Like, am I where I’m, where I should be? Do you, do you think you’re experiencing that? Does that kind of sum up what you were saying? Sarah: Yeah, definitely. It’s like this imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome, can I do it? So thinking about, well, should I apply for, you know, a higher grade job at some point and then I can try and talk myself out of it, like going, oh, maybe I don’t have, have the skills. And even this year when I came back in September and I was asked to teach on the master’s course, I was like, oh no, the master’s, that’s going to be really hard. I can’t do that. So imposter syndrome is something that I do struggle with quite a lot. Gemma: Do you think that it’s, I mean we should probably do a whole other episode in, on imposter syndrome. Gaia: And we will, stay tuned. Gemma: We will, stay tuned listeners. But I feel like, especially, I don’t know maybe this is just my preconceived ideas, but if it had been a man in your position doing, maybe making a career, you know, a career, having a small career break and then coming back, I do think that maybe that experience or those feelings might not have been the same, but that is probably just my opinions. Sarah: Yeah, no, I, I mean, I kind of agree with that to a certain extent. So it’s kind of like I still feel like I’m the primary caregiver. So sometimes, you know, say for instance, if the children were poorly, I would feel that that’s my role to go and deal with that rather than, you know, a father maybe would do that less. So I feel that they could maybe establish, re-establish their career a lot easier. Gemma: Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah, I actually did some read some research about imposter syndrome. Sorry, giving you a little teaser to a future episode. But imposter syndrome is more prevalent for people who are from marginalized groups, women, and first time university students. As in, like, first generation university students. That would make sense. Gaia: So what support do you think university should provide to people coming back from a career break? Sarah: Again, I think flexibility is key and I’ve been really lucky here that, you know, my, my teaching hours generally allow me to get back home without having to worry, you know, that I’m going to get back on time. So I think flexibility is key, but also again, just remembering that we have lives outside of our work. And to be fair, I think like my line manager and the colleagues I work with are really supportive of that. And I don’t feel bad to say, oh, you know, could someone cover me? Or can we swap a session so that I can go and see my child’s sharing assembly, for example? Yeah. So that, that, that’s really lovely that I can, can do that. So yeah, I think it’s just remembering that we are more than just, be it your case, a PhD student or that we are just whatever job role we have here. And it’s in the department there was there are some forums about what it’s like being a mom and working, which has also been really helpful because then you don’t feel quite so alone. Gemma: Yeah. Having those sharing experiences, I think is really powerful and not motivating, but like encouraging that, you know kind of lessening that imposter syndrome. I think like sharing your experience with other people and, and, and even just seeing how they do things and, and getting ideas from them is really cool. Just to finish off I wondered if you could give a top tip for other PhD students that might be entering motherhood during their PhD, which is a big question. Sarah: That is a big question. I would say unless you absolutely have to, wait till your PhD is done, because there is that kind of saying that your thesis is like a baby. And when it is finally done, it kind of does feel – the amount of blood, sweat and tears you put into it, but if you are in the situation where you are having a baby, just make sure that you’ve kind of got some supporting system from a practical sense and just kind of try to keep in contact with your kind of fellow PhD students and, you know, have a, have a conversation with your supervisor about how that’s how you would like that to look like and what you think you could manage. Gaia: Nice. So, where can people find you online? If they want to. Now that you’re famous. Gemma: Now you’re famous, now you’ve been on the podcast. Are you on Twitter? Are you on anything? Gaia: I’m sure you can Google Sarah Sampson. Gemma: Do you have a Pure page on Royal Holloway? Gaia: You cannot find Sarah anywhere. You can’t find Sarah anywhere. Do not search for her. Gemma: You can only find Sarah on this podcast. You’ll just have to re-listen to this podcast. Sarah: You’ve got exclusive rights! Gemma: Well, thanks so much for coming in, Sarah. It’s been really lovely to chat to you and thanks so much for sharing everything you did today. It’s yeah, really, I think a really important topic to discuss. So we really appreciate it. Sarah: Thank you for having me and thank you for the kind words as well. Thank you.
BRAIN BITES Gaia and Gemma: Brain Bites! Gaia: Oh, that was hard to do. Gemma: Is that hard to do with your little sore throat? Bless ya. Gaia: Yeah. What are we talking about today? Gemma: So this week I am wondering whether pets are good for people’s wellbeing. And I say that because as listeners might know, I have four dogs. Yes, I’m insane. Gaia: Everyone knows that. Gemma: Everyone knows, because that’s all I talk about. I usually think my dogs are quite good for my wellbeing. They get me out, I get to go on nice walks. I get to have a little cuddle. But also sometimes they’re not good for my wellbeing. And I’ll tell you for why. At the weekend, my dogs ate my lovely focaccia bread. Gaia: Tragic. Gemma: If you, if anyone’s got a golden retriever, they’ll know that golden retrievers are thieves, especially young ones. Gaia: But they’re so cute, so it’s fine. Gemma: They are very cute, but they literally stole my focaccia bread off the side of my Gaia: You didn’t leave it on the counter, so really whose fault is it? Gemma: Okay, yeah, okay, it was my fault for leaving it on the side, but yeah, that wasn’t good for my wellbeing because I couldn’t eat my bread, which is obviously really important. Gaia: Similarly, but not at all, my cat once, so I was writing an email to my supervisor, and my cat walked on the keyboard, wrote random letters, and then sent it. That was beautiful. Gemma: What did your supervisor reply? Gaia: I do not remember. This was during my master’s, so it was still my current supervisor, but it was long enough. Long ago enough that he probably doesn’t remember, thank God. Gemma: That’s good. I’m surprised he took you on as a PhD student. Yeah. If he thought that you just wrote random letters and sent it to him. So we had a look at some of the research and what did they find, Gaia? Gaia: So, Wells, in 2009, found that even though the evidence for a direct casual association between human wellbeing and pets is not conclusive, the literature reviewed is largely supportive of the standing belief that pets are good for us. Gemma: So really, pets are good for you? Gaia: Yeah, even if they eat your focaccia. Gemma: Even if they eat my bread, my focaccia. But obviously if you don’t like animals, then they’re probably not very good for your wellbeing, are they? Gaia: Also, why would you not like animals? Gemma: A lot of people don’t. Some people don’t like pets and that probably would not be good for your wellbeing listeners. But if you do like pets… Gaia: Don’t, don’t get four dogs if you don’t like pets. Gemma: Yeah, don’t get four dogs if you don’t like dogs because that probably wouldn’t be very sensible. No.
CLOSE Gemma: Anyway that’s it for today. Hope you guys enjoyed another episode. We really enjoyed recording it. If you have any ideas for future episodes or you have a really good guest that we could bring on, please feel free to yeah, send us a message on social media or we’ve got a contact us part of our web page as well that you can fill in. Don’t forget to subscribe and review our podcast on your chosen podcast platform. Where can people find us on social media? Gaia: @theotherdoctor_pod. Gemma: It’s, that’s wrong. It’s @otherdoctor_pod. Gaia: I’m feeling poorly… Gemma: I told you, she’s feeling really sorry for herself. You can access all of our transcriptions on our website and a big thank you to the Royal Holloway Doctoral School for supporting this podcast as well as our fantastic behind the scenes podcast team. And that’s it! Gaia and Gemma: Bye!
Episode 10
Doing a Study Visit During Your PhD, with Pip BrownSHOW OPEN Gemma: Hello and welcome to the Other Kind of Doctor podcast. My name is Gemma… Gaia: and my name is Gaia and we are both on the journey of gaining a PhD. Gemma: A quick disclaimer before we start. We are in fact the academic kind of doctors. Gaia: Well, nearly doctors. Gemma: Yes, nearly doctors. But we’re not your medical kind of doctors. Gaia: So if you do need medical attention, please contact your GP. Gemma: Now, let’s get on with the episode.
EPISODE 10 INTRODUCTION Gemma: Hello! Ryan: Hello! Gemma: Oh Gaia, you sound weird today. Ryan: I’ve got a terrible cold, really bad cold. Gemma: You almost sound like our sound technician Ryan. Ryan: It’s funny, viruses will do strange things to you. Gemma: Very strange things. Ryan: They really will. Gemma: So Ryan is here today, our lovely sound technician and website manager, because Gaia’s really poorly. If you listen to last week’s episode, Gaia said that she was feeling a little bit under the weather. And now she is, she’s probably got the plague. Ryan: It’s really bad. Gemma: Yeah so we’ve got Ryan with us today who is subbing in. Ryan: I am here. Gemma: Very last minute, in fact. Ryan: I’m not as good as Gaia, I’m a bit slow, but I’ll try to keep up. Gemma: Ah, try and keep up with our bants we have on this podcast. Ryan: I will try. Gemma: So we usually start off by saying a bit about our weeks. Okay. So what have you been up to this week, Ryan? Ryan: I participated in a study today. Gemma: Did you? Ryan: I did. They asked me to try and pay attention to my heartbeat. And I realized I cannot do that. I, I just can’t feel my heartbeat without taking my pulse. Gemma: Oh, really? Ryan: And also, it freaks me out. So there you go. Gemma: Wow. You’ve learned something about Ryan today, guys. Ryan: I don’t like my own heartbeat. Gemma: That could be a problem. Ryan: I think it’s, I think it must be connected to, oh Sam Fairlamb would love this. Yeah. Fear of death maybe. Yeah. Mortality. Gemma: Maybe you should get in touch with Dr. Sam Fairlamb who does lots of research about this. A bit about my week, what have I been up to? Oh, today I was on a panel. A PhD Q&A panel for undergrads. Ryan: Oh, lovely! Gemma: They were quizzing us about what it’s like to do a PhD and funding and all sorts and I did plug the podcast as well. Did a little presentation and was like, go and check out my podcast, my and Gaia’s podcast, which is really exciting. Anyway. Enough about us, Ryan. This week we are talking about doing a study visit during your PhD. Ryan: It’s really good. It is really good. It’s a really good interview. Gemma: Yeah, we’ve just finished our interview with Pip Brown, who is a PhD student at the University of Warwick. Pip is very versed on study visits because they have been on two in their PhD so far, one in New Zealand and one currently at Royal Holloway. Ryan: Which is obviously more exciting. Royal Holloway or New Zealand? Egham! Egham! Gemma: Egham in Surrey or New Zealand? Anyway, without further ado, let’s get on with the episode! Ryan: Yes.
GUEST INTRODUCTION: Pip Brown Ryan, Gemma and Pip: Hello! Hello! Hi! Gemma: Ooh, who’s this? Sounds like we’ve got another guest in this week. So today we’re really lucky to be joined by Pip Brown, who is a PhD or visiting PhD student to Royal Holloway. And I wondered if you could tell us a bit about you, Pip. What is your PhD in? What have you been up to so far? Pip: So my PhD, I’m in developmental psychology and I work mainly on sort of the realm of teenagers and misinformation. So I look at how they make decisions about what to trust online, what goes into that decision, how they develop what we might call epistemic vigilance towards information online. I’m in my third year. Right, yeah, very scary, right smack bang in the middle of analysis for my second study and all sorts of exciting stuff like that. And I’m here at Royal Holloway to collaborate on my third study with Dr Beatrice Hayes. So we’ll be doing some of that online information work in the context of students and how students work out who to trust and looking at the phenomenon of you telling students information and then going into like their secret little WhatsApp groups and coming up with, yeah um, which is something that makes all lecturers roll their eyes when I talk to them about it. So we’re going to have a little look at that and see if they trust their peers more than lecturers. Gemma: What do you think? Do you think they trust us as lecturers? Pip: I’ve seen some real egregious examples of people spreading just crazy misinformation on the WhatsApp groups. So we had in my undergrad a whole big scandal where people had convinced themselves that you get 10 percent either way in terms of the word count. Gemma: Oh, I’ve heard that as well from students. Pip: Yeah, because that is the case in some other degrees. And so loads of people just like fell foul of that. And there are lots of other kind of families of misconceptions that you can see when you’re marking where you think that’s obviously come from somewhere. And so lots of people being like, Oh, my older sibling did this. Or I have a friend in sociology who does this and forgetting that they can go on Moodle and the answer will be there. Ryan: Yeah. I, well, good question. Do they trust us? I don’t know, Gemma. Would you trust me? Gemma: Always! Ryan: Okay. Okay. Yeah, I think what Pip said rings true. I suppose why they don’t go to Moodle, maybe that’s a question for Moodle. And designing good Moodle pages. Gemma: Yes, that’s a really good point actually. Ryan: But we won’t go there yet. No. No, that’s another day. Pip: Well, it’s interesting, it kind of relates to what some of Beatrice’s work on online self disclosure and how difficult students find it to interact with lecturers. So they would rather go to that Whatsapp group than email a lecturer for fear that somebody’s going to say that’s a stupid question. It’s the same thing with people putting their hands up in seminars and stuff. Gemma: That’s a really good point. So, we’ve brought you here today because you are currently on a study visit. Pip: I am, indeed. Gemma: Like we’ve just said. Yeah. And we kind of wanted to talk about doing study visits during your PhD. I’ve heard lots of people say how fun they are and how useful they are in building your CV and just your general academic knowledge and skills. I wonder if you could explain what your study visits have been like, and what do you actually do on a study visit? Because I feel like not many people might know that. Pip: Yeah, yeah, I mean, for my first study visit, I mainly did… Gemma: Yeah, because you’ve been on two, haven’t you? Pip: I’ve been on two. First, I mainly did singing, actually. I didn’t do a lot of research. But so I’ve been on an overseas Institutional visit. So I spent three months in the University of Auckland in Aotearoa – New Zealand – and I was working in a music lab out there. And I was sort of there essentially to help out with kind of data collection and to learn all I could about the work that lab did. My ulterior motive there was really also, could I thrive as an academic in this place? This institutional visit has been one that’s been brewing since me and Beatrice met all those many moons ago, and I met you, Gemma for the first time. Gemma: Quite, was it what, three? Pip: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was one of those, like, instant friendships. So we’re like, oh, well, we’re going to have to work together. Like it’s fate. And so we have just about managed, all of the stars have aligned, and we have managed to come up with a paper that kind of neatly fits our two research areas. So it’s, it’s good for kind of learning new research skills. I would say also, a large chunk of it is about developing your network and experiencing a new institution. You can very easily convince yourself that the university you work at, that is what it’s like, everywhere, and it’s not true and, I’ve experienced many different ways of working now and I have much more of a idea about the kind of workplace I would thrive in. So that’s really important for your kind of self development as well, I suppose. Gemma: Did you find that the New Zealand kind of culture and academic culture was different? Pip: Yeah, yeah, I did. Kiwi culture in general, I suppose, is I mean, the stereotype is that it’s more laid back. I did find in my day to day life, yes, it was more laid back. I particularly enjoyed I could go to a supermarket and not wear shoes. That suits me. Gemma: Really? Pip: Yeah, you’re making such a face. But I think the culture -wise the biggest difference, I suppose I found was the kind of biculturality of the Pakeha, so the European New Zealander, and the Māori culture as well because its university system is nominally at least designed to kind of uphold those two points of view and those two ways of teaching. So I spent quite a lot of time actually at the university next door, AUT and interacting with some academics from there, from one of the departments that was kind of tasked with like Māori pedagogy, indigenous pedagogy and advancement and culture. So, to give you a kind of little example, sometimes there you would find that a big meeting would start with a song. It would start with a waiata. Gemma: Oh, really? Pip: Yeah, because culturally you’re kind of obliged to follow up something of import with a song. Basically say, you either, like, I understand this, I support this statement. Or to start, to get everyone kind of in the best headspace to signal everyone’s kind of good intentions. I would not find this in this country. I think that’s a shame. So I found actually that the kind of way of doing things out there changed much more with my sense of like what was important for education. Gemma: Yeah. Well that sounds like that study visit was really important for you. Ryan: Yeah sounds like you had a wonderful time. Pip: Yeah, yeah. Ryan: Would you go back? Pip: Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. I didn’t really want to leave, but I, you know, I have my PhD to finish off, but… Gemma: Oh, that, that old thing. Pip: The old chestnut. But yeah, I’m kind of keeping half an eye on jobs out there. Obviously it’s a smaller place. But I did feel really like I could make a home there. Gemma: And now you’ve got those networks, right? Yeah, yeah. So if there was like any post-doctoral opportunities out there, you’ve got that kind of thing as well. Ryan: I feel like I should ask for Gaia. Were there big spiders? Pip: Do you know, there were not big spiders. There were two deadly spiders. Well, not deadly. There were two scary spiders. So there’s the White-tailed and the Redback. I think. I think I’ve got those right. And no venomous snakes apart from some sea snakes that wash up from Australia. So in terms of things that can kill you, they are doing way better than Australia. But they do have this insect called the Wētā which is, I don’t know maybe six, six to eight inches long, looks like a really really like hefty sort of stick insect cricket type thing. It’s very cool, but like you don’t want to step on one because it’s quite crunchy. Gemma: Okay. Okay. That’s good. That’s good to know for any listeners off to New Zealand. Ryan: And I suppose an important question that lots of people might like to know the answer to is how did you get the funding for this? Pip: So I am funded by the ESRC, so Economic Social Research Council, and they set aside a pot of money to go on a three month overseas institutional visit. And this visit that I’m on right now to Royal Holloway is basically just part of my PhD. So it tends to be, and this will, your mileage may vary depending on who you’re funded by, but they tend to fund visits that will not directly contribute to your thesis, ’cause otherwise that would be field work. And that comes out of its own separate kind of funding pot. So what I did in Auckland was quite separate to my thesis ’cause I was working on music cognition in infants. And I kind of pitched it in terms of actually this is very important for my academic and social development. So as a developmental psychologist, I hadn’t done any infant work. I was really wanting to do that. I was wanting to explore professional contacts as well. So your institutional visit can also be a way of saying, Okay, I’m going to mop up all of the stuff that my PhD doesn’t necessarily provide me. Yeah. Because we are so specialised but that’s not like how, how our brains really work. I know everyone has that one thing that they want to explore, you know. Gemma: That’s, that’s quite interesting. And was the application process quite competitive for that or was it? Pip: No, it was absolutely fine. Really. So it kind of came down to contacting the PI from the lab. He was lovely and said, you know, come on over. We’ll find something for you to do. . And, and really quite often the money is there and lots of PhD students don’t take advantage of it. Okay. But it’s, it’s, you know, it’s well worth doing because you get the stipend extension on the end usually. So it gives you a bit of breathing space as well because obviously you don’t do any work on your PhD while you’re out there. But that will still be kind of percolating away and it kind of influenced, I suppose my approach to my PhD and particularly my approach to teaching after I came back. So it does then in a roundabout way have an impact on your thesis. Gemma: So off the back of that, you said that you emailed someone in that lab. Did you email a variety of labs? Did you know you wanted to go to that one? Or and what kind of how do you approach labs? Because it’s a bit scary sending an email to a big important professor. Pip: It is nerve wracking. I mean three years ago, I would have found that really nerve wracking as an undergraduate. One of the nice things about getting older as a PhD student is you kind of think, Oh, well, what’s the worst thing that can happen? They will ignore your email. You know, it’s very rare that they’ll email back and say, ‘You dare approach me in my mighty lab!’ kind of thing. Gemma: I would, love any listeners that’s had, that’s had that response from a PI, please let us know. Because that would actually be hilarious. Pip: Yeah. So I contacted a lab in Wellington who I could see were doing baby lab work. And they said, Oh, well we’ve not got anything really going on, but you know, the music lab is happening in Auckland. And then I approached Sam and realized actually that I had been a participant in what they do, lots of kind of citizen science, global citizen science stuff. And I realized that I had been a participant in some of that research quite a while back, which is quite funny. And literally just pinged off an email. And yeah, I just, that has always been my approach. It’s just to be quite optimistic, to hope for the best, be friendly, be personable. And the worst that can happen is that they say no. You know, and I, I’ve kind of always been quite happy just to contact other people and say, look, I really admire your research, or it’d be really good to talk or whatever. Which I didn’t realize when I first started is actually what networking is. Networking seems like this really weird artificial thing where you’re going and you are kind of, it’s almost a bit like, um, like pick up artistry in a way, and then I realized, Oh, actually, it’s just being nice and talking to people. Ryan: Yeah, yeah. It’s definitely a skill. Yeah, yeah. Gemma: I’m still getting used to it. Yeah, yeah. The thought of going up to people in conferences makes my skin crawl. Like, I really, like, I love, like, once that conversation gets going, and you’re just like talking about your research, and you’re talking about all these things, Yeah. It’s, it’s fine. It’s just that, especially if you don’t know anyone, making that first step to be like, yeah. Hello, I’m a PhD student. Yeah, yeah. Please, please ask me some questions. Can I ask you some questions? But, yeah, I think, I think you’re right. You know, don’t think of it as like an artificial thing. Just be, you know… Pip: Yeah, just be yourself. And my top tip conference-wise would be actually like, wear something really distinctive, like a really distinctive shirt. Gemma: Like the shirt you’re wearing at the moment? Pip: Like the shirt I’m wearing at the moment. Ryan: That is a wonderful shirt. Pip: Thank you. Gemma: It is green with big flowers on it. Pip: It’s great. And that means that people will come up to you and say, I really like your shirt. And that is a conversation starter. Provide people with conversation starters. Gemma: Oh, I’ve got to think of something in my wardrobe that I can wear to my next conference then. Ryan: I really hope this spreads and the next conference we go to, everyone looks incredible. Just bright colours everywhere. Pip: I love that. Ryan: So you mentioned that you can, you know, take a year out and then it kind of gets added on to the stipend at the end. Yeah, yeah. But I was thinking about the flow, you know, when you’re in your PhD and you’ve got the project flowing, how do you hold on to that flow whilst going away for a year? Pip: It is tricky. Because it would, it took a good month of adjustment when I came back from New Zealand in particular, because you’d kind of gone from thinking how I could build a life out here and then you’re going back to the UK and you land with a bit of a bump. But for me, I was in a good position because I had more or less finished my study one. I had done my first draft of my introduction as well. I could park it there and then come back to the second stage of my PhD in the autumn. So it actually bookended the end of my, I suppose the end of my second year. I think. I get very confused now. Gemma: I think all the timelines just merge into one when you’re doing a PhD. It’s just this one long thing. Pip: Absolutely. So for me, it kind of enabled me to have a really good breathing space, but that is something to think about because you can do an institutional visit too early, I think, in your PhD, or too late. I think that, you know, second half of second year is quite useful. Because it allows you to kind of really take stock. And then if you want to radically change anything, you’ve still got time. And also gives you the mental breathing space to be like, I’m kind of sick of my subject at the moment. I need to spend some time doing something completely different. And then you can come back to it and think, Oh, I feel fresh energy for this. Even if that energy is only, I’ve got another year of this and then I can go back to New Zealand. Not that that’s the case for me. I love my subject. Gemma: Sure. Ryan: You’ve already booked the tickets. Gemma: I love that. So I wondered, obviously you’ve obviously had a really good experience and that’s really great. But I wondered if there were any challenges that you experienced, either during the study visits or in terms of the application process? Obviously, you said your work with Beatrice was like a really long thing. Was that a big challenge? Pip: Yeah, I mean, it was mainly the ethics application was the big challenge with that. It was pretty smooth in terms of we like we kind of vibe on the same level. So the actual process of coming up with a study was quite straightforward. It was the getting that ethics application together in time to be in the right place in the year to recruit students. That’s always a thing with developmental psychology. For my first study visit the most challenging thing, obviously, I was on my own on the other side of the planet, getting accommodation sorted was kind of quite challenging because there’s all sorts of red tape and stuff you’ve got to go through. The one thing I felt was that you know, you upend your life and you have to fit in with a lab that is sometimes a really different environment for you. I was used to being on my own, working on my own projects. I’ve done that really since undergraduate. And I obviously have like a fantastic supervision team. But it wasn’t really the team working, team lab that I experienced in New Zealand where we were kind of on Slack all of the time and it was much more, it ran much more like a tiny business. Okay. And that was a real, real learning curve for me. And so initially I felt kind of, Oh dear, I’ve come here. What can I offer this lab? Because I’m coming in the middle of all of this work that’s going on. And eventually I found my role and my role was kind of helping out in kind of practical ways and using my skill set as someone who recruits participants. Yeah, but initially I felt that that was really difficult. But I knew for me, what always helps is music. So I decided, okay, well, I am going to join one choir, two choir, three choirs. They stack up and make an effort to learn a little bit of the language and to learn some Māori songs and to join a choir that was at the marae of the university next door. And that ended up in some ways being much more important than the academic side of it. Yeah. And certainly informed my attitude to teaching when I came back and attitude to music making in general. So I would say go out there, know what it is that you need to feel safe and comfortable. Try and recreate that wherever you are. And have the knowledge that it’s kind of three months and then, then you will be kind of back in the swing of things. So make the most of it, but don’t be disheartened if you’re, if you’re homesick. Gemma: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that’s really important. Ryan: Yeah. Excellent advice. Thank you. I I couldn’t agree more that like moving to a new place can be incredibly daunting. It takes a bit of time to settle in. Yeah, yeah. I am going to ask a question which you kind of already answered. But I think it’s still, I wanted to maybe focus on it. Can you think of a time in a PhD when it would not be a good idea to do? Pip: Beginning of year one, I think. I think hold that year of reading and faffing sacrosanct, because it doesn’t feel like it at the time, but it is really important. It kind of, yeah, it allows you to brew stuff that will only become apparent to you later on. I would say, it’s difficult. I mean, I would maybe avoid doing it in the midst of writing up, because it could really disrupt your flow. Lots of funding bodies have rules about which year you can do it in anyway. But also, you kind of also perhaps got to give it a chance to inform some of your attitude to your thesis. If you do it too late, then you can think, Oh God, like this institutional visit has shown me that actually my priorities are x, y, z. What do I do? I haven’t got time. If it’s nothing at all to do with your thesis, that’s less of a problem. And I was doing work on lullabies as a health intervention for newborn babies which was very, very sweet. Gemma: So we like to finish off all of our episodes with our guests by thinking about what your top tips for a PhD student that wants to do a study visit. Pip: Oh, I would say, because my top tip for a PhD student is always think of this as an apprenticeship in research methods. Hold on to that, apply that in your study visit as well. If you find actually you are not meshing with the place that you’re working or you’re struggling in any way, you can think, okay, well, this is a kind of apprenticeship in working with different labs, because even if you are having a tricky time, that shows you, okay, well, what I need in the future is XYZ. So my top tip would be think about what the study visit could give you, you know, in, in the future, post-PhD. maybe as much as you’re thinking, how is this going to contribute to my PhD? And this is maybe three top tips actually. Gemma: We love all the top tips. Pip: It’s also, you know, if you have a research area that you feel that you’ve sort of slightly neglected in your PhD, like my other prong of interest is music cognition. This is a great opportunity to actually say, you know what, it makes me better as an academic to have these, these interests. It might not seem that it’s connected to my PhD thesis, but it is all connected because it’s all about how I learned to be a better researcher and a better teacher. Gemma: Oh, fantastic! Ryan: Really exciting! Gemma: Really good top tips. Pip: Thank you! Ryan: It makes me want to go on one. Gemma: Yes. I know. I’m getting ready to send a little email to a PI now. Be brave! Pip: Yes! Ryan: So I suppose before we say goodbye, where can we find you online? Are you on Twitter? Pip: I was on Twitter, I’m now, you can probably find me on Twitter because I can’t get into my own account to delete it. So you can find my ghost Twitter at something like at snap crackle and pip. Ryan: Oh, okay. It’s drifting out there. Pip: Yeah, yeah, just, just drifting on the ether. I have a LinkedIn but I don’t check it. Do you know what? Just email me. Okay. It’s pip.brown@warwick.ac.uk. Gemma: There we go. Send Pip an email if you want to chat a little bit more. That’s all we’ve got time for today, but it was so lovely having you on, Pip, and I think you’ve given some really excellent advice that we can take away to all go on study visits and make the most of this PhD journey that we’re all on Pip: Thank you very much, thank you for inviting me!
BRAIN BITES Gemma and Ryan: Brain Bites! Gemma: Oh, it sounds weird without Gaia. Ryan: Sorry. Gemma: Her little Italian accent. Ryan: I’m sorry. I let the team down. Brain Bi-…no. Gemma: No, you’re not going to be able to go that high. So I thought when I was thinking about Brain Bites this week, that Gaia’s not very well. Ryan: This is true. Gemma: And we need to give her a bit of a shout out. So I thought we could think about research that might link being sick and taking time off, but also feeling guilty about taking time off because you’re sick. Ryan: Oh wow. Does that make you more sick? Gemma: Probably, yeah. Because I was speaking to Gaia and she’s actually messaged me to say she’s still working on her code. She’s still trying to work. And I was like, honey, stop it. Yeah. Will she listen to me? Probably not. No. So I’m trying to find some research that proves her wrong. And Ryan, what did the research find? Ryan: So the research found Dr Cynthia Zelis commented that based on their study, people like Gaia and students, PhD students working from home working remotely, they actually have a greater sense of guilt for taking sick days than someone who would work in the office. Gemma: Interesting. Yeah. So Dr Zelis elaborates on this by explaining that this might be because PhD students or anyone who works remotely, they don’t need to worry about, you know, taking a day off because they might make someone else sick. Right. Because they’re just working from home, right? Yeah. But they might, this might make them feel that being ill isn’t a good enough reason to take a day off. Because you don’t have that motivation, oh I don’t want to go in to make someone else sick. Yeah. I’ll just carry on working a little bit at home even though I feel ill. That means they’re more likely to feel guilty if they do just take the whole day off. Ryan: That does make sense. Gemma: It does make sense. So, basically Gaia, stop working and go and have a nap or something. Ryan: There you go, please, Gaia! Have a nap. The research says have a nap. Gemma: Yes, literally.
CLOSE Gemma: So that’s it for today, guys, and I want to say a big thank you to Ryan for stepping in for Gaia. Ryan: I tried my best. Gemma: Maybe we’ll just scrap Gaia and keep you on every every week. Ryan: There would be riots in the street. Gemma: A lot of little old Italian people would come and riot at our doors. Ryan: Many more, many more would kick me out. Gemma: So don’t forget to subscribe and review The Other Kind of Doctor podcast. Really means a lot to us. Don’t forget to check out our social media, which is @otherdoctor_pod, as well as our website which has all of our transcriptions and lots of other news behind the scenes, any vacancies we have as well, you can apply on there. I want to have a big thank you to the Doctoral School and our amazing podcast team for all of the work that they do. Ryan: Thank you, team. Gemma: Thanks so much. Bye! Ryan: Bye!
Episode 11
Changing Academic Fields, with Ryan JefferiesSHOW OPEN Gemma: Hello and welcome to the Other Kind of Doctor podcast. My name is Gemma… Gaia: and my name is Gaia and we are both on the journey of gaining a PhD. Gemma: A quick disclaimer before we start. We are in fact the academic kind of doctors. Gaia: Well, nearly doctors. Gemma: Yes, nearly doctors. But we’re not your medical kind of doctors. Gaia: So if you do need medical attention, please contact your GP. Gemma: Now, let’s get on with the episode.
EPISODE 11 INTRODUCTION Gaia: Hello! Ryan: Hello. Hello. Gaia: That was not Gemma. Ryan: No. It’s not Gemma. Gaia: Who is it? Ryan: It’s Ryan. Gaia: Again! Ryan: Yeah. Gaia: So Ryan’s here again. Because Gemma had to watch her dogs, which is a good excuse. Ryan: It is a good excuse. Gaia: And last, two weeks ago I was dead, so Ryan was here. So basically he’s becoming the new host. Ryan: No I’m not. Gaia: You have such a soothing voice, it’s like ASMR. Ryan: Oh, you make me blush. I have to look away. Gaia: Ryan is very cute for everyone listening at home. He’s adorable. Ryan: No. Gaia: So what did you do this week, Ryan? Ryan: This week I have been working on getting one piece of hardware to talk to another piece, and I’ve had some success today. Gaia: Good job. Ryan: Yeah. I’m happy. Gaia: Ryan works in that big square that’s in the parking lot in case you’re at Royal Holloway. Ryan: Yeah. The big cube next to the car park. Gaia: Mm-Hmm. Ugly. Ryan: That’s my office. Gaia: But useful. Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. Gaia: Yeah. I went back home last week and played with my five to ten cats. Ryan: What is it, five or ten? Gaia: It’s five, but sometimes new cats just arrive and you can’t just turn them down. Ryan: A cat picnic. Gaia: Yeah, one of them gained two kilograms since I last saw him. Ryan: That’s impressive. Gaia: Yep. I couldn’t, I couldn’t hold him like a baby anymore. My back hurt. So anyway, Ryan is not just here to host, he’s here as a guest as well. Woohoo! Ryan: Yay! Gaia: He’s very nervous. Ryan: This is a bad idea. Gaia: No, you’re gonna be great. Ryan: Okay. Gaia: Everyone cheer for Ryan. Ryan: Wait, do I have to ask myself questions? Gaia: No, I’m going to ask you questions, Ryan. Ryan: Okay, okay.
GUEST INTRODUCTION: Ryan Jefferies Gaia: So, this week we’re going to talk about changing academic field, because Ryan, you studied history in undergrad, and then now you’re doing a PhD in psychology. Ryan: That’s true, I did. Gaia: Who are you? What are you doing? Ryan: Yeah, so you know impostor syndrome…. Yeah, um, yeah. So I suppose, yeah, some people change kind of academic paths, don’t they? At some point they go, ooh, I’m going to go down this route. I just ran away from academia after my undergrad. Yeah, I did history at UCL, and it was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot. Gaia: You look like you would do history. Ryan: Yeah, I did. Lots of very clever people on the course. I learned a lot from them. And then I was, you know, as you do, decided I wasn’t going to do history anymore. And, well, for the next six years, I did lots of things. Gaia: Oh, what did you do? I know this, but I want the people to know. Ryan: So, so many things. Obviously I had to pay my rent, so I had multiple jobs. Not at the same time. Sometimes at the same time, which ranged from working in Muji on Tottenham Court Road. Gaia: Nice. Ryan: Yeah, selling clothes and what else did I do? I worked in cafes. I worked as a hairdresser for a bit Gaia: What? I didn’t know this. Ryan: You didn’t know? You didn’t know this? Gaia: Did you cut hair? Ryan: Well, I didn’t get that far. Gaia: You washed hair? Ryan: I washed hair, and massage, I washed hair, conditioned. Gaia: Oh, that’s my favorite part. Ryan: Coloring, a bit of coloring. Gaia: Really? Ryan: Yeah, yeah, I did highlights And I did cut my brother’s hair. I started to cut hair, just towards the end. And then I got offered to go back and work in a bookshop called Massolit, in Hungary. I worked there for a few months before, and they needed someone to look after the place. So, I went back to work in this bookshop, and then I fell madly in love and got married. And then, yeah that’s the story of my life. And then, and then I decided to do psychology. Yes, yes. Try and follow that. Gaia: I haven’t done any of that. Ryan: That crazy route I’ve taken. Gaia: So why did you want to change field? Ryan: I suppose it was a, a kind of personal project I was working on. And it was some research and, and I realized that my kind of humanities background just wasn’t quite you know, cutting it when it came to the kind of research I wanted to do. It was a lot more about, kind of, human behavior in the now and today. I wanted to know a bit more about the brain. About cognitive psychology. So, I decided, yeah, a master’s would be the right thing for me. Obviously, my partner, Niki, helped me think about it as well. Gaia: We love Niki. Ryan: Gave me some good advice. So, yeah. Gaia: So, when you chose your undergrad, where you 18? Ryan: Well, yeah, 17, I suppose. Gaia: Yeah, I was talking earlier today with Gemma, and we’re like, it’s insane that people have to choose what they’re gonna do in their life at 17. Ryan: Oh, it’s, yeah, it’s difficult. I did, I did biology A level and history and what was the other one? English literature. Gaia: Of course you did. Ryan: And so I was very into science and also the humanities. So it just was history won the day because there’s no maths in history. And at the time I was a bit afraid of maths. I’ve kind of overcome that fear through the masters actually helped me- Yeah. Oh yeah, I came out of it and I started teaching statistics. Gaia: I teach statistics and I’m still scared. Ryan: I know, I’m still a little bit scared of math. But I think it’s good to be afraid of something a little bit, because it makes you think harder about it. Gaia: See, I almost did physics, but this was before I realized I can’t do math. So I can understand the not knowing what you want to do when you’re 17. The thing is, I wanted to do many things. Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I loved stories and I love history for the stories and also it is human behavior, just dead people. Gaia: Very true. Ryan: And so there, you know, there are links there. And I also kind of wanted to go to London escape the countryside. So, you know, you have lots of different reasons, I think, for choosing your course when you’re a teenager. Gaia: So true. I came to Royal Holloway because it looked like a castle. Ryan: There you go. Gaia: So, you went from a very humanities subject to a scientific subject. Ryan: I did. Gaia: How did you go about it? Ryan: I, I think because I’d done biology at A level, I was in a better position to do that than some people might have been. I think if you’d done nothing but humanities and then tried to do a master’s in psychology, it would have been a bit harder. Actually, I did a conversion course because they weren’t quite convinced my- They looked at me like, well, yeah, you did biology a long time ago, mate. So maybe you should do a conversion. So I did a year conversion and some of the people in my course were from completely, you know, humanities backgrounds, business backgrounds, and they found it really hard. Gaia: Yeah? Ryan: Yeah, I think just the kind of massive shift in language that you use. I think it’s like learning a new language in terms of all th is terminology. So I knew a bit about cells. I knew a bit about neurons and knew about these kind of things and how they work. I remembered all of that from A level where for someone who’d only done humanities, that’s fresh and that’s scary. Gaia: Oh, that does sound scary. Ryan: Yeah. On top of all the maths that you had to do doing stats by hand and then yeah. Gaia: You did stats by hand? Ryan: Yeah, of course I did. Oh, oh, for the conversion course, yeah. You had to do an exam by hand. Gaia: Really? Ryan: Actually, they made you do an SPSS test, live, like an exam. Gaia: Oh my god. Ryan: Yeah, that was terrible. I was like, you know, having to concentrate really hard on the numbers on the screen. You know, in a three hour exam. Gaia: Did you do 1 plus 1 on the calculator, just to be sure? Ryan: Of course I did. Yeah. Yeah. Gaia: I used to do that every time. Ryan: Every single tiny piece of math. Yeah. On a calculator. Gaia: So how come you went directly to a master’s instead of really doing an undergrad? Ryan: Because I think I had the option. I think it would have been, it was, I was doing it part time in the evening at Birkbeck, which is wonderful by the way, if anyone needs to do a master’s in the evenings and I thought, you know, it’s a good place to go. I was working full time at the same time. So after work, got on the bus, went to school. I did the lectures. Went to school. And yeah, so that’s why I did the master’s. I think an undergrad would have been too intense. And then after that doing a master’s and then doing a PhD. So it would have been long. Yeah, it was already long. Gaia: Did you knew you wanted to do a PhD? Ryan: I knew I wanted to go into research. Gaia: Okay, makes sense. Ryan: So PhD was on the horizon. Yeah. Gaia: So you knew what a PhD was? See, I didn’t know. I was just like… Ryan: I had friends from my previous courses who did like history and literature PhDs. Yeah. Right. Clever people. Gaia: So you told us about this a little bit, but how was it going from three years of pure humanities to bam, experiments? Ryan: Well, it was three years of humanities, six years of bunch of things. Bunch of things, including writing quite a bit of fiction and nonfiction for myself and research. What Yeah. Gaia: I’m discovering so many things. Ryan: Just, you know, stuff. Music. I made a bit of music. A bit of drama. Gaia: Did you publish fan fictions? Ryan: No, I didn’t publish fan fictions. I should have done. Gaia: You really should have. Ryan: I think I missed a chance there. Gaia: You still can. Ryan: So, it was lots of different things. So I suppose doing experiments was just another different thing that was exciting. I was really up for it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was. Gaia: When I was- this, for some reason, I just thought about this. When I was little, I did experiments, which were, so my mom gave me a microscope for Christmas, even though I wanted one of those those talking dogs . But I would squish bugs between the two glasses and look at them. Ryan: Did you squish them before they died? Did you kill them in the squishing? Gaia: Yeah. Ryan: So you, you, you film, you kind of watched them die under the microscope. Gaia: Well, they died immediately. Come on. Ryan: Wow. But that’s dark. That is really… Gaia: Yeah. I could have gone the serial killer route, but I just went the forensic psychology route. Ryan: I suppose, you know, using your powers for good. Gaia: Yeah. I don’t squish bugs anymore. They gross me out. Ryan: Yeah. Gaia: Anyways… Ryan: Um, Gaia: So this was going from humanities to science. Ryan: Yes. Yeah. Gaia: How do you think the opposite will be? Because I think lots of people think science, sciences are harder, but I feel like humanities… Ryan: That’s a good question. I think that the style of writing might be something you’d have to kind of get used to. Yeah, writing history essays and stuff is quite different from writing lab reports and reviews. Gaia: I don’t think I’d do very well. Ryan: It’s quite, I mean, you think that doing a science PhD is lonely, and I was sitting in a big warehouse for like six hours today all on my own. Yeah. But I had a robot with me, where, in history, there’s no robots to keep you company. It was just my books. Gaia: There are, like, ghosts of old people keeping me company. Ryan: No, that’s, that’s true. Gaia: Yeah, I think. I think that’s good enough. I think that’s like a robot. Ryan: You do end up keeping yourself company with the books, yeah. I think talking to yourself is definitely a pastime. Gaia: I feel like lots of people think sciences are harder, but then I see my friends are doing like literature, not even English literature, Italian literature. And I’m like, I could not do that. Ryan: There is a lot of free space to get lost in that world. Gaia: Not good for me. So you said you wanted to leave academia. Ryan: I did. Yeah. Gaia: So you fully thought you wanted to leave for like six years? Ryan: I full on had no idea what I was doing for six years, but I definitely didn’t want to do history academia after leaving UCL, but based on how it felt, I think to be an academic… Gaia: I t just wasn’t your thing. Ryan: It just wasn’t my thing. No, I’ve really admired the academics in the department, some of them obviously more than others, as you do. But I couldn’t see, one, I think I didn’t really see a place for myself there. There was no one encouraging me to be a history academic, maybe because they didn’t think it was right for me, maybe because there are, they didn’t want, I don’t know. I suppose, actually, that’s a good question. So, there are kind of other like TA positions and things in the sciences and research assistants in the sciences. Yeah. Which are a lot, obviously don’t really exist for history. So it’s quite hard. Gaia: I didn’t even think of that. Yeah. Ryan: So it’s quite hard to get in. You know, you, you, you can do kind of, I think there are ways, but it’s very much kind of not many entry level stuff going on and it’s not kind of that kind of feeling of, you know, Yeah. You know, I think it feels like you have to do a PhD and then you go on to lecture kind of thing. Gaia: That’s so true, I never thought of that. For those who don’t know, Ryan actually started here as a TA, so teaching associate. Ryan: Yes, I did. Gaia: And now he’s doing a PhD. Ryan: Yes. So yeah, I mean, and I think, you know, you’ve done research assistant roles, haven’t you? Gaia: Oh yeah. Ryan: Yeah, and Gemma has done research assistant roles. And so it gives you a feeling of what the science academic world is like, you know? And you… Gaia: It gives you confidence as well. Ryan: Yeah, it gives you confidence that you have a place there. Gaia: Yeah, you don’t just go straight into it. Ryan: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Gaia: Hmm. So then, how did you, so how did you know the difference between wanting to leave academia and wanting to just change subject? Ryan: Well, I, at the time, definitely didn’t think of doing a Masters or a PhD. And doing another course was not financially, like, viable. So, no one in my family had done a degree before. No one had done a PhD. At that point, I didn’t know what a PhD really was. Gaia: No one knows. Ryan: No, I didn’t know what doing a master’s would have meant. It was only, I think, I met friends later on who were doing kind of literature PhDs. I was like, oh wow, that’s kind of brave. And now teaching literature, so. But, no, I, I really didn’t think about changing, changing course. I just thought about finding, you know, finding something that, that worked for me. And that was trying lots of different things, which I think is healthy, maybe. Gaia: Yeah, you did so many things. Yeah. So much life experience. Ryan: Yeah, yeah, I met lots of lovely people. Gaia: Ryan is very wise. Ryan: I don’t know about that. Gaia: Not just because he’s old. He’s not old. Ryan: I’m quite old. Gaia: He’s thirty something. It’s fine. Ryan: I’m thirty four. Gaia: Yeah, that’s young. I just realised, what type of master’s did you do? Like psychology what? Ryan: It was just pure psychology. Gaia: I didn’t know that was a thing. Ryan: It is, yeah, yeah. Gaia: Huh. What did they teach you? Ryan: A bit of everything. Yeah. Well, I suppose, you know, I focused on cognitive psych for, for my thesis for my dissertation. Gaia: Yeah, that makes sense. Ryan: Yeah, and I worked and kind of did like voluntary stuff in a lab, so yeah. Gaia: You’re working in a lab now, so. Ryan: I am, yeah. Gaia: It turned out very well. Ryan: It’s, it’s good, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, life is good. Gaia: And now you have robots as friends, and you work in a building with cats in it. Ryan: I do. Gaia: Shoutout to TP and Cheeseburger. Ryan: Cheeseburger doesn’t really belong in the Bedford building. Gaia: He’s just outside, so it’s like, kind of, he’s there. Ryan: He’s definitely, you know, trying to steal TP’s turf. Gaia: I met him two days ago. He yelled at me. So now we’re in a fight. We’re in a fight, but it’s fine. Ryan: Okay. Yeah Gaia: So what are your top tips for people wanting to change academic field? Ryan: Top tips. I think that it is good to say that it’s never too late to change, I think. If you get the sense that what you’re doing doesn’t feel right, take a breath, you know, get a job that pays the rent for a bit and, and have a think. Yeah, give yourself some time to think about what really works for you. Gaia: That’s a good one. I was thinking today, if I had done three years of psychology and then figured out I wanted to do something else, I would have just died. Because I would have been like, I spent so long on this. But clearly, you can. And Ryan is doing very well. Ryan: You can, yeah. You can. You can change all the time. Gaia: And wash people’s hair, and work in a bookshop, and find the love of your life. Ryan: Yeah, finding the love of my life was definitely a goal, I think. Yeah. Gaia: You’re so cute. Ryan: I looked, I looked far and wide, you know. Gaia: And she was just there. Ryan: She was. Gaia: So where can people find you? Ryan: Oh I’m on the, I’m on, what’s it, what do we call it now? X, Twitter. I’m on Twitter. Ryan Jefferies is my name. Gaia: It’s Ryan N Jefferies. What does N stand for? Ryan: Oh, that’s a good question. So my mum gave me the middle name Nelson after Nelson Mandela. Yeah. Gaia: Ryan Nelson Jefferies! Ryan: Nelson is my middle name. Yeah. Gaia: Oh, that’s very cute. So find Ryan on X, Twitter, or whatever @ryannjefferies and you have an academic Instagram, right? Ryan: Yes. Yeah, I do. I do. I need to do some things with that. Maybe I’ll, maybe I’ll do something with it today. I’ll share a I’ll share a video of, of Gaia in the studio. Gaia: Please don’t. Ryan: I, I will. Gaia: Just share a video of Cheeseburger meowing outside. Ryan: Okay. Gaia: Right. Ryan: You can find me. Just send me an email. That’s what Pip said last week and I like that. That’s nice. Gaia: An email? Ryan: Yeah, that’s nice. Gaia: Okay, send him an email.
BRAIN BITES Ryan: Brain Bites! Gaia: So this week, yes, we’re talking about does having a creative hobby help you unwind? Yeah, I’ve been doing a lot of crochet lately. Well, I’m always doing crochet. I just forget I know how to crochet and then I pick it up again and do nothing but crochet for like a month. Ryan: Hmm, crochet. Gaia: Are you doing anything, creative? Ryan: Creative. Gaia: You skateboard. Ryan: I do. That’s kind of creative. Gaia: Kind of creative. You have to do different things. Ryan: You have to do different things, yeah. It’s quite creative with the environment. So, you know, you’re looking for places to do things. How to use the environment to the best effect. Yeah, skateboarding. Research from Exeter University suggests that skateboarding is good for middle aged people. Gaia: You’re not middle aged, right? Ryan: I’m kidding. I’m, you know, I’m getting the middle age, mid age crisis. I’m getting early, you know, I’m cutting… Gaia: You never know when your middle age is. Ryan: Exactly. So yeah, skateboarding is wonderful. If you like falling over a lot. And then succeeding. Gaia: Please wear a helmet, knee things, what are they called? Ryan: Pads. Gaia: Knee patches and… Ryan: Patches? Yeah, whatever you want to call them. Wear protection. All kinds of protection, when you skateboard. Obviously. I did a kickflip though. Gaia: You did what? Ryan: A kickflip. Gaia: What’s a kickflip? Ryan: It’s a trick that I’ve been trying to do now. I started skateboarding, what, two years ago? And you only really get to skate when it’s sunny, you know, so it’s not that many days. And I’ve been trying to do a kickflip for a while, maybe, two months. And it’s where you jump in the air and you make the, the skateboard thing rotate on this axis. So that’s the, what’s that, that’s the lateral axis. Gaia: Sure. Ryan: Well, you make it do 360, so it goes… Gaia: What? You can do that? Ryan: I can, yeah. Gaia: Do you think it improves your wellbeing? Ryan: I definitely think it improves my wellbeing. Every time I do it, I feel like I’ve just levitated to a higher kind of plane of existence. Gaia: Okay, that’s not what crocheting makes me feel, but it makes me feel Calm. And we have research to back this up. So, Julia Rosen stated that in 2016, Nature conducted a survey that said that many early career researchers work more than 60 hours a week, which I can relate to. Don’t work in the weekends, please. But, she said that getting involved in hobbies, like cooking, crocheting, doing flips on your skateboard, is beneficial for both your physical and mental health. So it can reduce blood pressure and increase a sense of belonging. And she gave some tips for starting a hobby, but we’re not going to list them here. We’re just going to leave them in the description below. Ryan: That’s lovely. Gaia: That Ryan will put in. Ryan: I will. Yeah. I think that they’re very good to do hobbies. Yeah. Gaia: I’ve also been colouring a lot. Ryan: I like to read, yeah. Gaia: Is reading a creative hobby or is it just a hobby, do you think? Ryan: Well, yeah, a creative hobby. I think it’s probably just a hobby. Depends though, if you like to write fiction then it’s a bit of both. Gaia: That’s true. Ryan: It’s kind of like research for your… Gaia: Next Brain Bite. How does reading influence your mental health? So anyway. Ryan: Oh, that’s a good idea. Gaia: Subscribe and review our podcast please. You can find us on social media @otherdoctor_pod and on our website at: Ryan: theotherkindofdoctor.wordpress.com. Gaia: Thank you, Ryan. You can find the transcription on our podcast. And as always, thank you to the Doctoral School and to our podcast team, including Ryan. Ryan: Thank you. Gaia: Bye! Ryan: Bye!
Episode 12
Overcoming Writer’s BlockSHOW OPEN Gemma:Hello and welcome to the Other Kind of Doctor podcast. My name is Gemma… Gaia: and my name is Gaia and we are both on the journey of gaining a PhD. Gemma:A quick disclaimer before we start. We are in fact the academic kind of doctors. Gaia: Well, nearly doctors. Gemma:Yes, nearly doctors. But we’re not your medical kind of doctors. Gaia: So if you do need medical attention, please contact your GP. Gemma:Now, let’s get on with the episode.
EPISODE 12 INTRODUCTION Gaia: Hello! Gemma:Hello! Oh my god, it feels so weird to be back. Gaia: I know. Gemma:Did you miss me? Gaia: Both of us and not Ryan. Gemma:I know, where’s Ryan? So sorry to all the listeners that are disappointed not to have Ryan back. Gaia: He has such an ASMR voice and we have Gemma:Whiny, annoying voices. Gaia: Yeah. Gemma:Yeah, no, it’s good to be back. How are you? Have you been? Gaia: After the death and after going to Italy for a week, I’ve come back. I’ve tried to work. Didn’t really work. And then I had so much marking to do. So, not great. Gemma:Not great. Gaia: How are you? Gemma:Yeah, I’m, I’m not bad. I just got back from two weeks of annual leave. Two whole weeks. It was bliss. Didn’t go anywhere. Oh no, I went up to Scotland for a couple of days. Went to a wedding. Not my wedding, but it was, did spend a lot of my annual leave planning my wedding. Gaia: Mm hmm. I did buy a dress for Gemma’s wedding yesterday. Gemma:Yeah, see, lots of wedding vibes the last couple of weeks. Which means that I have found it difficult to get back into the swing of writing and working. Gaia: I haven’t written in way too long. Gemma:Yeah, it’s actually embarrassing, which kind of leads us on to what we’re talking about today, actually, because we’re talking about overcoming writer’s block. Writer’s block. The joy we all know and love where you’re looking at a blank piece of paper and you’re like, what’s going on? Gaia: And you want to cry and then you just give up. Gemma:And you just close your laptop and go, go and do something else instead. It li nks to our first episode, actually, when we talked about procrastination. Yeah. This week what are we doing this week, Gaia? Gaia: So, we are talking about overcoming writer’s block, but we’re not just going to use our own ideas because we don’t know actually anything about it. But we’ve been in contact with Dr. Vicky Penn, who’s a Researcher Development Officer at Royal Holloway, and she sent over some key advice that we’re going to discuss. Yep. So thank you to Vicky. Gemma:Yeah, massive thank you to Vicky for helping us out with this one, because as Gaia said, we don’t know everything. Gaia: We know basically nothing. Gemma:Basically nothing. Um, it’ll be good to get on with the episode and see what Vicky has to say.
TOPIC: OVERCOMING WRITER’S BLOCK Gemma:S o, the first thing that Vicky said was to avoid the blank page as much as possible. Gaia: Easier said than done. Gemma:Easier said than done, but she said that we need to write a chapter plan then write a list of like headings and arrange these in some sort of like logical order and then write a sentence or two for each section, make some notes, bullet points, key points to include, just to give you kind of like a rough idea of where you need to go and what you need to do for that section of writing, which is quite a good thing. Gaia: Yeah, so basically instead of staring at a blank page and trying to come up with everything you need to write, just plan it first. I started doing that during my master’s because before that I would just like try to write the entire thing. Gemma:Right from the beginning? Gaia: Yeah. Oh, it did not go well. Gemma:No, I bet. Gaia: But now I just, I basically, exactly as she said, I make these bullet points and try to plan which order they’re going to go in and what each section is going to include. And then at that point, first of all, I feel like I’ve made progress because I’ve written something even though it’s bad. And then I already know what I need to write. So it’s less scary going into it. Gemma:Yeah. Anyone who starts a piece of writing from the first word. It baffles me. I can’t do that either. Gaia: It’s like that SpongeBob meme, where he writes THE, very big. That was me, in undergrad. So a second piece of advice that she gave us is free writing, which, I had never heard of before this, but Gemma did, which is basically take three to five minutes to set your motivation for the writing session and try to write continuously about what you’ll be writing today, why it’s important, any challenges, et cetera. And then try to write through uncertainty. So if you don’t know what to write at any point, write about your uncertainty or move on to a different topic. So it’s more an exercise about setting your own motivation than actually writing. Gemma:Yeah, so as Gaia said, I actually tried this technique. I actually found it a couple of months ago in a grant writing session. It was like a training session. And it really helped me kind of consolidate my thoughts and ideas and just improved my motivation to write. So it’s not necessarily, you’re not writing for your thesis, so you’re not writing about papers and things like that, but you’re just, just, you just have to sit and write. You’re not allowed to like press backspace, you’re not allowed to edit anything if you make a spelling mistake. Gaia: That sounds so scary. Gemma:It’s, it’s actually really kind of, not liberating, that’s not quite, it’s a bit less extreme than liberating, but it’s kind of like nice, like it takes the pressure off. So I was writing, I was I was like writing about some ideas I had and then like a thought popped into my head thinking what am I going to have for dinner? So I just like, tonight I’m going to have pizza for dinner or whatever. I’m not going to have pizza for dinner tonight, I wish, I had that last night. Gaia: We had pizza yesterday. Gemma:We did have pizza last night. Anyway, so yeah, that really like improved my motivation to write, which I thought was a really good technique. Gaia: And you’ve also been trying the Pomodoro Method, which is that write for 25 minutes, take a five minute break thing. How is that going? Gemma:Yeah, I really like the Pomodoro technique. I started this probably this time last year. Where you, it doesn’t have to be write for 25 minutes, take a five minute break, but kind of that kind of set up is quite good. Gaia: Do you set an alarm or do you just? Gemma:I actually have a, you know, I use Notion a lot. Gaia: Sure. Gemma:This podcast is not sponsored by Notion, but if you want to get in touch, please do. So I, Notion is like an online organization planner thing and you can like embed widgets in it. So I have a Pomodoro widget. Gaia: Wow. Gemma:It’s very fancy, but you can adjust the timer so you can have like, I tend to do, yeah, 25 minutes and then I have a 10 minute break because I need a… Gaia: I see people on YouTube doing it as well and you can like do it with them at the same time. Gemma:That’s quite nice. It’s like a study with me. Gaia: It’s like you’re doing it with someone else even though it’s a video. Gemma:Then you can have like a 5 minute break or 10 minute break and just get up, like stretch and just then you can go back to it. And I do this on, like things that I don’t like doing. I do it for marking actually. So I’m like, okay, I will mark this paper in 30 minutes, and then I’m gonna have a five minute break to get a, grab like a coffee or something and I’m gonna sit down like another, and I go through it really quickly really. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah highly recommend it. And I also helps because my Notion widget you can change the themes and the colors. Gaia: Oh, I love that! Gemma:So you can kind of make it aesthetic as well, which always helps So, linking on from that, so I said about giving, like, stretching, like, in my breaks, something that Vicky also said was, that it’s important to take a break so you can do something as active as possible, kind of. So that sometimes the writing block is because your brain is basically fried from being forced to think about like really complicated or complex problems. So kind of getting out, getting some fresh air, doing some physical activities really useful. Gaia: Unfortunately, I found that like going for a walk in the middle of the day or like going to a gym class actually helps, which is so annoying because it means I have to actually do exercise. But it’s like while you’re doing the gym class, it’s like your brain stops, stops like obsessing over the problem and then it somehow just solves it. It’s the same in the shower, really. Yeah. But… Gemma:Yeah, no, I love that. I tend to take my dogs for a walk in the middle of the day when I’m working from home. I think that’s a good thing about flexibility, in that way. Gaia: A hundred percent. Gemma:You can just. If you need to take a break from really complicated, you know, thoughts that you’ve been having just to kind of go out and get… Gaia: Just go for a walk at 4pm. Gemma:Yeah, lovely. Is that the middle of the day? I’m switched off by 4pm. Gaia: Okay, go for a walk at 11am. Unless you have a meeting in that case, don’t go for a walk. But it helps. So, another suggestion that Vicky gave us was you don’t actually need to write in chronological order, so if you get to a section and you don’t know what to write, but you have an idea of what to write in another section, just write that section instead, and then at least you’ve done something. Gemma:Yeah, yeah. I do this all the time, so I like to use like, filler words, so something I used to get stuck in all the time, was I’d be writing, and I almost knew of a reference that I needed to put in, and I knew what the paper said or something, but I couldn’t think of the names off the top of my head, so rather than going and finding the paper and taking ages to do that, I would just like write REF. Gaia: Have you ever forgotten the REF in, instead of putting the reference? Gemma:No, I tell you what I do, I do a Control F, so like a navigation in, in Word, and write REF. Gaia: That’s smart. Gemma:Just to double check that I’ve not left anything in, otherwise that would be embarrassing. Gaia: See, I just make them bright red, so when I go through it… Gemma:I make them red as well. Or I do this when I’m writing research papers as well. So if I’m writing the introduction, but I’ve got an idea of some, like, if I just want to like, I’m like, Oh, yeah, but this needs to link to my hypothesis. What’s my hypothesis again? I’ll go to the end of the introduction. Gaia: It’s concerning, you don’t know your hypothesis. Gemma:Listen, don’t judge me. So yeah, I think that’s really a really, really useful technique. This next point is called Hemingway’s Theory. So I had never heard of this, had you? Gaia: I didn’t, but I was doing it anyway because I’m so smart. Gemma:You are just so smart. Yeah, so smart. So what you need to do is write at a time that’s best for your individual productivity. So I think the point of this is you stop when you know what’s going to happen next. Gaia: Yes. Gemma:So almost like you don’t finish a sentence or you know what’s going to, your next sentence is going to be. Gaia, apparently you do this all the time. What do you do then? Gaia: Yeah. So when I write, and I have to like, go on a lunch break, I don’t stop when I finish like a paragraph, I stop in the middle of it, so then when, I like have a little bullet point on what I’m going to say next. And then when I come back, I know exactly what I’m going to write. And also I don’t feel like the daunting feeling of going back to writing because I know what I’m going to write, so it’s less like anxiety inducing. Gemma:I think there’s quite a lot of motivation to do that because I get like panicky when if I’m in that writing moment, I’m like I need to like finish all of the thoughts that are in my head. Gaia: That’s why I write the bullet points. It’s like three words and then when you go back you just actually write it. Gemma:Okay, oh well I might have to give that a go even though I clearly am having some problems with my brain thinking today. Gaia: It’s just late. Gemma:So the next two points kind of link to our previous episode on procrastination so if you haven’t listened to that, go back and listen, it was Episode One. Can you believe that? Gaia: Yeah, we were so young and naive back then two months ago. Gemma:More than two months ago. I think January we recorded that. Gaia: Jesus. Gemma:I know. So the first point is to break the task down into smaller steps. So don’t say I’m going to write the whole of my literature review today because that’s obviously not going to happen. You’re going to say, okay, I’m going to write this specific part of my literature review and I’m going to do it in three paragraphs. Gaia: Yeah. And the second point is build a community of support and accountability. And this also we talked about, and it’s something like, for example, if you’re writing with a friend, they’re there and they see if you’re writing or not. So you can’t really just go on your phone and watch TikToks instead. Gemma:Yeah, exactly. And also I think it’s nice to talk to somebody who might also be struggling with like writer’s block. So for example, we both just said at the beginning of this episode that we’ve come back from annual leave and we’re like, I don’t know what to do. Sorry to my supervisor who might be listening to this. But yeah. I think it’s nice to be able to have that support and community and to be able to be like, you know, I haven’t written in ages either. You know, I’m finding it difficult to get back into the swing of things. Gaia: God, it’s been so long. So now, we actually have advice from two authors. Woohoo! Authors, yeah, lovely. Yeah. The first author is called Rachel Aaron, and she wrote this article called ‘How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day’. Now, before you panic, she’s writing fiction. She’s not writing scientific papers. That’s why she writes so much. Gemma:That’s exactly what I thought when I looked at that. I was like, Sorry, this woman is writing 10, 000 words a day. No, it’s for fiction, fiction writing. Gaia: Yeah, which makes more sense. Gemma:But it does apply for your PhD thesis, doesn’t it? Gaia: So her point is that there are three main bits to writing 10, 000 words a day, which is knowledge, time, and enthusiasm. So knowledge is basically what we just talked about, which is just know what you’re going to write. So instead of writing a difficult scene in detail, just write the bare bones of it, and then come back to it later when you know what you’re going to write about it. Gemma:Okay. The next point was time. So keeping records for how long you write for and how much you write, regardless of like the quality of the word, work, sorry. So keep a running word count of the chapter or your section. It can help you see what techniques are working for you and what isn’t working for you. Gaia: Yeah, and the final bit is enthusiasm. And she talks about this saying that sometimes when she doesn’t really want to write, she just goes on and writes the scenes that she was really excited to write since starting the book, like love scenes. But of course, there’s no love scenes in my thesis, unfortunately. So maybe just think about how excited you were about writing your thesis when you first got the news that you were going to do a PhD. Yeah. Maybe include a love scene in your thesis. I don’t know. Gemma:I guess it depends on the, on the, on the… Gaia: I’m going to do that. Gemma:I don’t think it would be appropriate for a forensic psychologist to have a… So we’ve also got another person who wrote a blog about having writer’s block and her name was Katherine Firth and she talks about writing and this problem called the Perfect Sentence Vortex. So, it goes along the lines of, does this sound familiar? You sit down and write, you read over your notes to work out what you’re going to say and check up a couple of articles. You write a sentence and then you go back and you rearrange the sentence. Then you enter your bibliography or your reference and then you go and find another article to support your sentence and then you’re tweaking and polishing the sentence and, you know, three hours later you’ve still only written one sentence. Yeah. So to get over this, although it’s kind of like a never ending cycle, what you need to get used to is bad work, essentially. Gaia: Yeah, just write without going back and polishing every word. Gemma:Yeah, so lengthening your like writing phase. So there’s different phases. You’ve got your writing phase and you’ve got your editing phase and then you’ve got writing, editing and things like that. Lengthen the writing phase and then just do all of your editing. Gaia: Yeah, that’s what I learned to do after years. Gemma:Yes. Same. Okay, that’s it for today in terms of our area on writing block. I think it was helpful. It was helpful for me. Gaia: Oh yeah, it was helpful for me. Gemma:Um, so maybe I’ll go back and be motivated to… Gaia: Yeah, maybe I’ll go back and write a love scene. It’s okay. Gemma:In your thesis? Gaia: Yeah. Gemma:I would love to see your supervisor when they read that. Gaia: He’ll love it.
BRAIN BITES Gaia and Gemma: Brain Bites! Gemma:Oh, I haven’t said that in so long with you. Gaia: I know. I can’t remember if I made Ryan sing it last week. I think I did. Gemma:Did Ryan sing it? Oh, good. So when we were thinking about Brain Bites this week, we were thinking that we’d just got back from taking time off over the Easter break. Gaia: Much needed time off. Gemma:Much needed time off. And we’re feeling more refreshed, even though we’re struggling getting back into the swing of things, maybe we’re still in holiday, holiday mode a little bit. But we are looking forward to getting back to our PhD stuff. So, I had a look at some stats and research actually suggested that just under 61 percent of workers in the UK didn’t take all of their annual leave last year. Gaia: Yeah, I was one of them. Gemma:Yeah, same. I didn’t take, like, near enough my annual leave allowance last year. But it’s quite surprising that, like, such, like, over half, considerably over half of the people in the UK didn’t use up all of their annual leave when it’s, I mean, I sound like such a hypocrite now saying this, but you’re getting paid to take time off. Gaia: Yeah, but at the same time, at least me, I feel like I have so many things to do, I’m like, I can’t take it. Gemma:Yeah, well, I think this is the problem that a lot of people have that they feel like they’ve got too much on or they feel guilty about saying if you’re working in a team, taking time off. Gaia: Yeah, definitely. Gemma:And your team have to pick up extra work. However, using your annual leave is really important. Gaia: So we looked at many, many papers and they all suggested that taking your annual leave improves productivity, because of reduced stress. So working at maximum capacity for long periods of time has been linked to cardiovascular problems and high amounts of stress. So it’s really important to take your annual leave. Gemma:Yeah. So actually, if it increases your productivity, it’s going to be better for the business in the long run. If you actually just take, you know, a couple of weeks off, you know, recharge your batteries, you know, connect with loved ones, connect with family, connect with friends, Gaia: Binge watch a show. Gemma:Binge watch a Netflix show. I watched a lot of Netflix last week. Gaia: Yeah. Gemma:I did some crochet as well. Gaia: Did you? What did you crochet? Gemma:I’m making a blanket. Gaia: A whole blanket? Gemma:Yeah. Gaia: How big is the yarn? Gemma:A chunky, it’s a chunky yarn blanket. Gaia: We’re gonna get stressed with the crocheting as well. Gemma:Full time job.
CLOSE Gemma:Okay, so that’s it for today guys. I’m really happy to be back after our little break. So please make sure that you subscribe and review. Check out our previous episodes. Gaia: With Ryan. Woohoo, Ryan! Gemma:With Ryan and our other really fantastic guests. Yes. Don’t forget to check out our social media which is… Gaia: @otherdoctor_pod. Gemma:And also you can check out our website for full transcriptions of the episodes. Thanks so much to the Royal Holloway Doctoral School and our amazing podcast team. And see you next week. Gaia: Yeah! Gemma and Gaia: Bye!
PODCAST HOME 