I’m off for some much needed leave enjoying being a Disney adult this week, it’s really needed as between COVID and a broken foot the start of 2024 has not been kind. I’ve called upon a great friend therefore to help me out and write this weeks blog post, so I can focus on drinking cocktails and braving the Tower of Terror. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.
Dr Walker is a paid up member of the Dream Team since 2013, token immunologist and occasional defector from the Immunology Mafia. Registered Clinical Scientist in Immunology with a background in genetics (PhD), microbiology and immunology (MSc), biological sciences (mBiolSci), education (PgCert) and indecisiveness (everything else). Now a Senior Lecturer in Immunology at University of Lincoln. She has previously written many great guest blogs for The Girlymicrobiologist, including one on turning criticism into a catalyst for change.
I’ve written before on this blog about how inspired I was by the work of Professor Ian Davies and Aimee Pinnington on the introduction of clinical simulation to biomedical science education. Clinical simulation is used widely across medical training but to date, has largely been overlooked in biomedical science education. I signed off my last post on this subject with the intentions to build this into my own immunology module on the iBMS accredited course at the University of Lincoln. We are fortunate to have many Health and Care Professional Council registered members of staff across a wide range of disciplines teaching on our course, as well as a very active iBMS liaison committee with links to local laboratories. So I had many wonderful people to pester endlessly with my ideas for how to integrate more clinical simulation across our course. We already do a brilliant job of incorporating our own experiences as healthcare professions into our teaching through both use of case studies and work with simulated patients. My feeling is that enhancing this work with additional clinical simulation practical sessions can only further benefit our students here.
Immunology, in particular, as a discipline lends itself beautifully to clinical simulation as a learning technique. Students often view immunology as challenging due to its complex and multi-faceted nature. It can be seen as dry because we ask them to develop an understanding of abstract concepts and use a diverse array of terminology which often are difficult to pronounce and even harder to remember. I often remind students that though immunologists are quite brilliant, but we probably shouldn’t have been allowed to name our own findings – especially given how frequently we tend to rename molecules. Furthermore, immunology is a notoriously difficult discipline to find placement opportunities in, thus it is essential for students to have authentic learning experiences in this field whilst at university. As such, using clinical simulation to create realistic scenarios which foster active learning and emotional engagement can only help students with this dry, dusty old subject.
I might love Immunology so much I own the teacup, but it isn’t for everyone. Perhaps Clinical Simulation can change this.
One of the most significant barriers to the introduction of clinical simulation to immunology is the frankly exorbitant cost of the commercial reagents to laboratory practicals. Fortunately, my students here at the University of Lincoln have a dry, dusty old teacher (me!) who remembers the days when we made, rather than bought, all of our kit in the clinical laboratory. To that end, with the help of my favourite histologist Dr Issam Hussain and my delightful mBio student, we have been making ANCA slides and using antibodies to manufacture patient samples for clinical simulation. For those of you who haven’t come across ANCA testing before, this is the preparation of ethanol-fixed neutrophil slides which we use in the clinical laboratory to run immunofluorescence staining to help diagnose patients with autoimmune vasculitis. This is a particularly serious condition which often presents as a clinical emergency and is probably the most urgent test run in the immunology laboratory. The results can be highly subjective and difficult to interpret, with extensive follow-on testing required. The clinical decision is often made based solely on the patient presentation and this single immunology test. Thus, the reporting of these urgent results can be nerve wracking for the most experienced of healthcare scientists. The opportunity to practice this skill in a risk-free environment with a range of clinical scenarios offers the ideal space for students to make mistakes and learn from them without putting a patient at risk. Simulation of this work can help to build confidence and competence, and introduces our students to the concepts of clinical judgment and decision-making.
Figure depicting the production of ANCA slides, their staining and visualisation with a immunofluorescence microscope.
Before and after the simulation lab session we ran anonymous surveys to evaluate what our students thought of the learning experience. I was delighted to see in our preliminary review of the data that more than 95% of the students felt the simulation improved their understanding of both the techniques and the diagnostic process, and 98% felt that clinical simulation was a good learning experience. With a really significant number of responses, and so few negative comments, I feel my view point on simulation has been reaffirmed. Watch this space. I am now fully committed to the idea that we can really enhance the training of our future workforce of biomedical scientists through this powerful teaching strategy. And thank goodness the students enjoy it too.
An example of weak ANCA staining seen down the microscope during for a simulated patient. Students are asked to identify the staining pattern, and with some additional clinical information, make a decision about whether to report urgently or wait for further tests.
One of my brilliant PhD students had his first experience of responding to reviewers comments last week, and as we sat and talked it through I thought that it might actually be a useful topic to write a blog about. Now, Sam was responding to reviewers comments on a review, but I think a lot of the principles stand no matter the response is linked to. I feel the same way about responding to comments and reviews on any piece of work I’ve poured my heart and soul into, be that manuscripts, grants, a piece of guidance, a policy or a business case, or my current horror – book submission. It might be that I need to remind myself of this advice as much as I wanted to share it with you 🤣.
Getting the opportunity to respond to reviewers is a success in itself
No matter how rough it feels in the moment when you first open the email/attachment and read all those comments where the reviewers have blatantly failed to read your carefully crafted wording in the way it was intended remember this. Being able to respond to reviewers is itself worthy of celebration. It means you haven’t got a full on NO. It means that the people see there is value in what you have done, even if they believe that it could be improved with some tweaking. Anything that isn’t a rejection is worthy of allowing yourself a mini celebration, chocolate bar, glass of wine, cup of tea, before you tackle the trauma of starting to make the changes.
Put on your positive specs
Whilst I drink my celebratory cup of tea I always take a moment to remind myself that this is actually an opportunity, an opportunity to make something I care about better than it would be without this process, that it’s an opportunity for improvement, and that this opportunity is something to be seized and embraced. Who doesn’t want to deliver the best thing they possibly can?
Always be polite
Now, it can also be said that sometimes recognising that opportunity for improvement can be challenging. Sometimes, those responding can have missed something that you clearly stated in both paragraphs X and Y. The thing is, they won’t have spent hours and hours reading your writing, and they are unlikely to have come to know it in the exquisite detail that you do. I tell you this as the person who blocks out only an hour to review your precious creation as that is all my diary allows. The thing is, most reviewers are doing it for the good of the community/trust/committee. They are, in essence, doing us all a favour. Therefore, when responding to what they have said its important to recognise that, and always always be polite in your response that you write. You are a professional after all.
The moral high ground gives combat bonuses
I have, on occasion, seen reviewers’ comments that shouldn’t have gotten by the editor or panel. Comments that could be considered racist or sexist, or to be honest, blatantly are. I’ve also seen responses where editors return those comments and just added a comment of their own to say ignore them and don’t respond in the review. This later one is interesting to me, I feel editors shouldn’t return these comments and should really respond to the submitter to say they are not acceptable. When responding to these, I think it’s even more important to respond with grace. I separate out the science and deliberately respond to these with my science head. I then flag and escalate the rest of it, as if it’s a completely separate incident.
Don’t respond immediately
This is my top tip, my one thing if you only take one thing from this blog post. Never ever respond immediately. Open the email, read it once, maybe twice, to really ascertain what’s been said and see the response deadline, then close it and walk away. Nothing good ever comes from responding in the moment. I personally have a 48 hour rule. I will leave that email closed for at least 48 hours before I open it again, during which time I will drink that celebratory cup of tea and try not to dwell. After 48 hours, I’m allowed to re-open and read it again. If at that point I can read it without an overt emotional response I’m ready to respond. If not, I will give it another 48 hours. Almost always, after 48 hours, I open it and it’s nowhere near as bad as I had originally perceived with my emotional goggles on and I can just get on with a response.
Bite the bullet and get on with it
I know, I know. I just told you you need space to switch from emotional to logical response and to read what’s there in an analytical way, but you also can’t wait too long to respond. This is for a number of reasons. One, there will be a deadline for you to accept or reject what you’ve been asked to do, and you have already invested a LOT of time to get to this point. Two, you want to draft your response when the original submission is still relatively fresh in your mind as it helps with rebuttals and references. Finally, if you need more than two 48 hour breaks to get your head in the right space it’s likely that this is feeding into something bigger and you probably need to find a coping mechanism and to start processing what that is, and responding is a good way to start unpicking and reflecting on what’s driving how you feel.
Decide on the structure of your response
You’ve finally got to the point where you are going to sit down and start drafting your response. There are lots of ways that you can do this, everyone is different, but in case you haven’t had the opportunity before, I thought I’d share how I do it in case it helps.
There are two main pieces that I would work on in parallel, the response to reviewers document and the in-text changes.
Response to reviewers:
I do this in Word and always have my paper title as the header.
I open with a paragraph where I thank my reviewers for their helpful comments (whether you truly feel it or not, this goes back to always being polite, but in all honesty there’s usually a lot of good to be thankful for)
I then break my responses down by reviewer, so I will have a section headed reviewer 1, another headed reviewer 2 etc, also a general one for the editors comments if there are any
Within each section for each reviewer, I will copy and paste over the comments I have received. I then break down these comments. Some reviewers give you a lovely bullet pointed list, sometimes with line numbers, and so this is easy. Some will give you paragraphs of text where you then have to extract each point and effectively make a bullet pointed list out of it.
At this stage, I tend to remove commentary, things where they is no change requested. This gives me a working list to work from, and I will colour code this text so it stands out from my responses, which I will write under each bullet point. I tend to make the reviewers comments red, I don’t know why I just do. Then, when I start writing my responses, I do these in black.
You can also, at this point, identify whether several reviewers have given similar comments, and then you can cluster those changes.
It’s only really at this point that I can see the wood for the trees, and generally, it’s much less bad than I had initially thought.
In-text changes:
This one is pretty straight forward. You may not have this if you are responding to a business case or grant review as they will want all the information contained in the response document. This additional document is mainly for manuscripts and contains the changes that you make in response to the review in your original paper. I tend to highlight changes to the text in yellow and then make sure I cross reference back in my response to reviewers with line numbers, as well as any commentary, so they are easy to find. The main thing to remember here is, once you’ve completed your response, save off a ‘clean’ copy without the highlights as well as the highlighted version as some places will want you to upload both.
Read what is there not what you think is there
So, the above information is about how you prepare to respond, but how do you actually respond? The first thing, and I think this is key, is to read what they have actually said, not what you think they have said. This is where I find splitting the points to be addressed up really helps, as it enables you to read them in a different way.
Common features that reviewers want added/addressed include:
addition of references
spelling mistakes
improvements in unclear sentence structure
other nuance changes
For all of these the action is fairly straight forward, you just make the changes within the original document and write a comment in your response to reviewers stating ‘changed in text – line XX and YY’. If you get similar comments from more than one reviewer, I would address them in the order in which they occur. So reviewer 1 has a similar comment to reviewer 3, I’d respond in the reviewer 1 section and in the reviewer 3 section state, for instance, ‘already addressed under reviewer 1 in line XX’.
Decide where you line is
It’s actually quite lovely if you just get quick responses as described above, sometimes however the comments require a little more. Sometimes the reviewers will want new points addressed, or occasionally fresh data included. At this point you need to decide how much the paper in it’s current format is important to you to maintain. This has happened to me a few times. Normally the additional points made actually really strengthen the paper and I am more than happy to spend the few extra hours to add in, especially as they tend to be points I already had in drafts but was forced to lose due to word count. There have however been occasions where I disagreed with the reviewer on either the fact that certain points should be included or the way they had suggested that they be done. On these occasions you are entitled, and I have done, to include commentary under the reviewers’ comment where you state why you don’t feel that it would be a suitable edit. You will need to be polite and clear, and ideally evidence, why you don’t agree. The decision will then lie with the editor as to whether they agree or not.
Get a second opinion
Once you’ve completed your response, or earlier if you are deciding to rebut points, it’s valuable to get a second opinion. You should send your response documents to your other authors for sign off, but if you are a sole author you should still find someone to sense check. This process is important, both to help ensure that you have actually addressed all the points raised, but also to help ensure that your arguments are robust where needed. I have been on papers where the first author has returned the response to reviewers without showing it to the other authors, and on reading it I have seen the response hasn’t fully addressed the reviewers which has then led to another round delaying paper submission. Some papers have loads of authors and you, with their support, may not need all of them to comment, but they should have sight prior to submission and at least the 1st and senior authors should have fully reviewed.
Learn lessons for when you are reviewing in the future
My final point is that this is a great learning opportunity, not just on the subject matter, but on what and what not to do when you are reviewing papers, grants etc. I always try to review and write comments in a way that is clear and actionable for those receiving the comments, in a way that I would like to receive them if the submission was mine. I also think it is so important to consider what should and should not be included in your review. Most journals, for instance, want to know whether the level of writing is good enough for publication but I would never cross the line into making comments about the English skills of the authors, I personally don’t feel that’s appropriate, for me, I’m there to comment on the science. It’s crucial to consider what it constructive and what is not as part of this process. When writing a review it is so important to think ‘is it helpful?’ ‘is it kind?’.
I hope all of this helps you when you are thinking about the best way to take onboard comments as they come in. I would also plea that you aim to see them as an opportunity to improve and learn rather than something that puts you into a spiral and causes you distress. Just getting the opportunity to respond is a success after all!
It’s been just over a year since it was confirmed that I’d been made an Honourary Professor at UCL. It’s such an odd and yet brilliant thing to achieve the thing you never really believed would happen. Also, because I had dreamed but never thought it would be a reality, I don’t think I’d ever thought about what difference, if any, it would actually make. I thought I would, therefore, write this blog post to help all the dreamers, like me, who might benefit from some details about what it feels like after you’ve finally crossed the finish line.
Everything and nothing
I suppose the first thing to say is both that everything has changed, but in many ways nothing has. My job for all intents and purposes is exactly the same as it was, do clinical work and try to embed research along the way.
The biggest change is probably the level of respect you get from some people based on title alone. This happened to me when I made Consultant as well. You still get dismissed, or challenged (which isn’t a bad thing), but it happens less and somehow is generally done in a nicer way. This isn’t universally true of course, but the majority of interactions are smoother. In some ways this fascinates me, as I’m the same person. The social interplay linked to this hierarchy is something I’d love to go into more at some, but as much as it’s nice I’m not sure it’s how we should work.
The other thing has made my heart full on multiple occasions. I’ve had a number of people come up and tell me spontaneously how happy they are for me, which is lovely, but they’ve followed up with ‘you making professor makes me think it’s something that I can aspire for’, which is even better! I’ve had other people say I can’t be a professor because of my age, background, or gender, but not in a bad way, in a way where their eyes were opened as I didn’t fit the image they had in their mind. Frankly, I think this in itself is brilliant, being able to hold this space whilst being who I am and changing expectations is one of the reasons I fought so hard to get here. So thank you, thank you for helping me get here. In case you are fighting your own fight, and in case it helps, whatever happens next, the fight was worth it.
A world of unexpected opportunities
There are a few key ways that change has happened that I thought it would be worth talking about. Most of these are internal, but this first one is not. I do feel like I get offered more opportunities now. Now, I don’t know for definite that this is a consequence of me making professor, but the timing feels coincidental.
Within weeks of it being official, I received my first requests for commissioned articles from journals. I’ve never had these before, and it was so exciting I accepted the first three without realising that this wasn’t a one-off and that they’d all result in a heap of extra work. I’m glad I did. It’s been nice to spread the opportunity by picking awesome co-authors who haven’t had paper writing opportunities previously or where it benefits most, like my PhD students. The ones I’ve done have been brilliant learning and fun, but to be honest, are too much on top of an already full-on job. Writing them on top of this blog has been fairly challenging as I don’t get a lot of time at home as it is.
I also get a lot of invites to attend events and sit on committees, etc. These have always happened, but they happen much more frequently now. The same is also true with paper and grant reviews for organisations. The irony of some of this is that many of these opportunities are probably much more needed for those who are working to get established or still ticking the essential boxes rather than being wasted on me. I’m honoured, and I still get a lot out of them and feel I can contribute, but I’m not sure we should focus so much on defaulting to including the already embedded, maybe we should be opening those doors wider? That said, I’m frequently the only woman or scientist in those rooms, and so maybe these invites are just that? Still, I will try to pay it forward and spread the inclusion if I can by sending others and stepping back.
A certain kind of freedom
Most of the changes, as I said above, have been in how I feel and see myself. There is a freedom in feeling you’ve achieved something that felt out of reach. It validates the dream, and the sheer act of achieving one means that it inspires you to dream more and dream bigger. It also provides a level of freedom in terms of academic thought and process. I feel there is less justifying my research interests, removing some of the early hurdles you have to get over when starting any project.
There is also freedom to have a voice and express your opinions. Now, I’ve never been exactly meek about this. You read this blog after all. Being called a disrupter and boat rocker in the past is one of the reasons I didn’t think making professor would happen. Now I’m on the other side of the line, I feel even more empowered to stand tall as it would have been easier to not give it to me than it is to take it away. I think secretly everyone loves a little bit of disruption to the status quo.
A need to change my automatic yes
One of the things I still need to get better at and embrace more is the art of saying no. Interestingly, becoming a professor has really helped with this. All of the reasons why are touched on in the following sections, but this sits as an aspect within all of them. It’s changed my thinking about saying no as a negative thing, which I need to justify and flagelate myself over. Saying no to things I’ve come to realise can be an incredibly positive choice, both for myself and others. I’m embracing the power of no, and I would encourage you to do the same.
A need to change my mindset
One of the things that I wrote about in the original post when I made professor was about the fact that you have to demonstrate that you have achieved and ticked a fairly large number of boxes, from publications and grant funding to teaching and public engagement. In all honesty, some of these boxes will appeal to each person more than others. Many of them I love, and some of them are just key parts of the job. There are others however that I can now be more selective about.
I’ve always struggled with feeling like I have to cover all bases, as I didn’t have certainty about where I would end up. Career pathways in Healthcare Science were not very obvious when I started, and so you had to maintain and develop all aspects in case that’s where the job or opportunity would be. There is so much joy in knowing where that path has led, but also in having certainty about the fact that I have the power to now make informed choices about my next steps, as I know where I’ve ended up. Nothing in life is guaranteed, but being the master of your own destiny gives you the ability to choose steps that serve your purpose rather than trying to be everything to everyone. It provides freedom from the constant striving to please.
A redefinition of identity
Something that has been a challenge for me over the last few years has been linked to whether I’m still a scientist. This may sound odd, as of course, I still do a lot of scientific activities: writing papers, reviewing grants, sorting protocols etc, but I don’t DO science any more. I’m not in the lab wearing a lab coat processing specimens, I’m also not often there undertaking experiments. It’s taken me a while to come to terms with the fact that all of the activities that don’t take place in a lab are still part of what makes me a scientist. I find this one fascinating, as it took me ages to ‘feel’ like I was a scientist, and I went through a complete panic at the thought of no longer being considered one. The process of redefining my identity to include these new aspects has been been important, but not always straight forward.
A stronger sense of self
Titles shouldn’t change how you feel about yourself, they shouldn’t, your sense of self should not be dependent on labels. The thing is though, those labels sometimes make life easier. I’m still the same person I was before I became a consultant or a professor. I’ve not morphed overnight into someone different. It does however remove some of that constant need I have to prove myself and show to others I’m good enough, whatever that means. When I’m questioned and challenged, which of course does and should happen, it enables me to have slightly less self doubt. I’m not saying that questioning yourself is not a useful reflective tool, everything is good in moderation, but sometimes I can lean too far into that questioning. I feel like having gone through the external review process, by people who have never met me, and been assessed as reaching this level of knowledge and experience does give me a baseline level of confidence that I didn’t have before. This confidence translates itself into an improved sense of self assurance which is really helpful across my professional practice.
An increased sense of responsibility
Now, I’m not old and dead yet, but crossing this milestone has really made me think about what I want next, and what the next phase looks like. Over the last year I’ve come to realise that the crucial thing for me is about opening doors for others. I want others to be able to progress in a more defined way than I did, and to find some of the doors already ajar. They will face different obstacles, but I feel like that is how we move forward. I really feel that increased sense of responsibility to help those who will come after to me, and to pay forward the support that I have had along the way to others. Having ticked my boxes it’s time to help others tick theirs.
A new sense of direction
All of this has given me a sense of direction, one that involves not being afraid to be seen, and of embracing sticking my head above the parapet for the sake of change and for the sake of others. For the first time in my career I have a stable permanent post which means that I can afford to take risks in a way that I couldn’t have really contemplated before. I have privilege, that I recognise, own, and want to harness for the benefit of others.
I want to be in this position and still be me. I want to wave my geek flag, hold my head high as an obstinate head strong girl, and show that you don’t have to fit the mould in order to be successful. It’s one reason that this blog continues to be important to me. I want to show you can have self doubt and still progress. That you can make mistakes and learn from them, and that that’s OK. I want to stand tall and embrace being ‘Too Much’ to show you don’t have to compromise who you are to make things happen. That you can aspire and achieve more than you dreamed possible by being entirely, authentically you. I want to use the platform I’ve been given and hope that you will all join me along the way,
Last week I was part of a careers day for Queen Mary University of London, where I did my second Masters degree and where I currently act as an external examiner for the same Masters 15+ years later. I used to do these kinds of events all the time pre-pandemic but it’s been the first one I’ve done for some time. I know that many of the people who read this blog are already working scientists, but there are definitely some of you who are just starting out on your journey and so I thought I would share some thoughts in relation to some of the questions I was asked.
What is a day in the life of Clinical Scientist like?
I’ve blogged before about what a Clinical Scientist job is like as a Clinical Microbiologist. I think the main defining characterisation of Clinical Scientist jobs is that they are all quite different from each other. If you look at the NHS website it gives the following fairly generic description:
Clinical scientists research and develop techniques and equipment to help prevent, diagnose and treat illness.
Clinical scientists are healthcare and medical experts who support clinical staff in their work with patients. Their work is very wide ranging and can include laboratory work and testing, basic and applied research, management and teaching.
There are 4 main areas of Healthcare Science, each of which will have sub disciplines:
The day is a life for each is therefore pretty different. I work as a Consultant Clinical Scientist, and my training was within Microbiology. My Consultant post is even more specialised however, as my main area of practice is within Infection Prevention and Control. I love this as it means that I still maintain my practice within virology, mycology and bacteriology, whereas otherwise I would have had to choose a specific route.
These days I don’t get to spend so much time in the lab. My day to day involves supporting clinical decision making, managing outbreaks and infection risks, as well as supporting PhD students and research activity. I basically act as a hospital detective, trying to work out what is going on and solving cases of infection. I also sit on a number of national and international committees to try and translate some of the learning I experience and research into clinical practice. One of the things I love is that I run something called the Environment Network, that came out of my PhD.
What was my pathway into Healthcare Science?
My pathway into Healthcare Science was probably not that similar to most of you applying today, mostly because it wasn’t really something that was discussed when I was at uni and there were really quite restricted ways into the profession – things like T-Levels and apprenticeships just didn’t exist back then. My undergraduate degree was in Zoology, and although I loved it there were no real jobs in it. When I was an undergraduate I knew I didn’t really want to be your typical academic, where I thought you would spend your whole career looking at a single pathway in a lab, and that it wouldn’t really impact on the ‘real world’. I always knew I wanted to do something that changed things, that made life better for people, I just didn’t know how to do it.
When I graduated doing a master wasn’t really an option. I wasn’t in a position to pay for ongoing education – I needed to work. I then lucked out and was approached because the uni where I did my degree was looking for biologists to start on a new trial MRes that was focused on developing an interdisciplinary approach. They were developing a course called the Physics of Biological Interactions at Surfaces, and they wanted biologists to take it in conjunction with physicists, not only that but they were paying £10,000 tax free to anyone who would do it. I jumped at the chance, who wouldn’t.
During this MRes I discovered clinical research, research that was aimed at change and at making life better for patients. All of a sudden a new world opened up to me, I knew this was the kind of science I wanted to do. My best friend, who was a microbiologist, handed me an advert for a trainee Clinical Scientist job in London in Microbiology. Now, my project had included micro during my MRes, and I’d done one module of micro during my undergrad, but I was far from being a microbiologist. Despite that I took a leap of faith and applied for the job. There 240 applicants and 4 posts. I cried when I left the interview as I really wanted the job and I felt the interview was a disaster. Next day they called and offered me the job. I was shocked, so shocked I asked them why. The interview had been a bunch of scenarios, they replied that that they could teach me facts but they couldn’t teach someone how to think, and they liked the way my mind worked. That has stuck with me, and I bear it in mind as I interview to this day. The rest, as they say, is history.
What are the common routes available to people trying to enter into Healthcare Science today?
There are multiple points into Healthcare Science careers, which is great because no matter what stage of your career you discover them there is a route that will be appropriate for you!
College level entry
Discovering Healthcare Science careers early is great as it maximises your ability to choose your path forward and the amount of time that you can spend developing in this particular careers path. The main way to enter at this point is via T-Levels (I’ve written a separate blog post on these), as they enable you to build a good base and explore the different specialisms to help you make an informed choice.
Degree level entry
Degree level entry can look different depending on whether you are looking at going down the physiological sciences or life sciences route. For physiological science there are accredited degrees that enable you to access the Practitioner Training Programme, or PTP. This enables you to get work experience and training during your degree. There are also two different types of programme that in life sciences will support entry into the field as a Biomedical Scientist (BMS). Both of these include selecting Institute of Biomedical Science (IBMS) accredited degrees, but one includes choosing a degree that has a placement year so that you come out ready for registration, whereas the other will require you to do a registration year as part of work when you graduate (see post graduate entry).
Post graduate level entry
Once you have a life science (or other acceptable degree depending on specialism) the there are multiple routes into Healthcare Science:
Direct entry training posts – these include trainee BMS posts for those who have undertaken an accredited degree but still need the year in post to complete their portfolio.
Centrally recruited training post – these posts are traditionally either Scientific Training posts (STP), or Higher Specialist Scientific Training posts (HSST). STP posts involve training over three years to be a Clinical Scientists, and HSST posts involve training for 5 years (once already registered as a Clinical Scientist) to become a Consultant Clinical Scientist. STP posts involve further academic training to get an MSc, whereas HSST posts require working towards clinical exams and a taught doctorate.
In-post development and training, there are frequently opportunities to develop via informal routes when you are in post. If you have taken an accredited degree some posts will support you in completing your portfolio to get state registration whilst working as an associate practitioner (AP), or if your degree was not accredited, your employer may support you in taking top up modules that would then enable you to move onto the next stage of portfolio completion.
Finally, there are routes in via something known as equivalence or route 2 registration, especially for Clinical and Biomedical Science routes. These routes mean that you might do something like apply for a post when you have gained an appropriate PhD and over a period of years gain enough clinical experience to be able to complete a portfolio that demonstrates a similar level of knowledge and experience to someone whose gone through a formal training route. This is what I need for my HSST registration, as I already had a PhD and several years of clinical and academic experience.
Apprenticeships
I’ve put apprenticeships separately here as these are applicable to every level, although the Clinical Scientist one is not yet formalised. This means there are routes where you can be training and earning qualifications that support your career progress, as well as gaining valuable experience. These change periodically and different Trusts will support different ones, so I’m not going to list them in detail but I would encourage you to look at the .Gov website I’ve listed below so you can find the latest information and entry requirements:
Healthcare science assistant (level 2) Carrying out routine technical and scientific procedures and support within hospitals, doctor surgeries and other healthcare settings for a wide range of people. Apprenticeship category: Health and science
Healthcare science associate (level 4) Working in hospitals, primary care and other healthcare settings, carrying out routine technical and scientific procedures. Supporting healthcare science (HCS) practitioners and clinical scientists. Apprenticeship category: Health and science
Healthcare Science is obviously not the only way to become as a scientist as a career, there are a world of different types of way to work in science. Starting in one does not mean that you cannot transfer to another, and different career options may be appropriate at different stages of your life. What I’m really saying is don’t worry too much about feeling like you are committing to a certain pathway if you get offered an entry level job in one area when your idea may be in another. Gain learning and experience and don’t be afraid to move between if that’s the decision that is right for you. Here are a few I can think of off the top of my head:
Industry – pharmaceutical, manufacturing, medical writing and so so many others
Academia – university based, but there are plenty of different pathways within, including specialising in teaching or research
Public sector – this can include jobs such as Healthcare Science, but could also include other routes such as public health, food science, environmental science, and options such as science policy
Clinical – there are other routes that enable you to work with a clinical aspect to your role, such as clinical trails, without entering into Healthcare Science
Charity sector – there are numerous charities, such as cancer research, Wellcome etc, that employ scientists and really value scientific input, whether that’s in their grant structure, policy development or science governance
Communication – science communication and public engagement is a really important area, from writing for news papers to developing content for employers such as the BBC, there are a lot of options in this area
What are my top tips for science applications?
I’ve previously written about this is more detail in 2 blog posts, application tips and interview tips, which I hope will be useful. Below are some more general tips that might help:
Don’t be afraid to use non-science examples. Have you worked in retail and dealt with money or conflicts? Have you been a guide or a school council member, both of which show leadership potential? You don’t have to have spent a year in a lab to be able to complete the form
Be prepared to talk about your why? Why science? Why this job? Why this place?
Know how to complete the application form. If you are applying for an NHS job you will need to explicitly state how you match each point with examples. Do avoid recruitment bias it’s all done on a point based system. You can’t get points if you aren’t writing against the JD, so don’t waste word count on items that are unlinked
Make sure you tailor your application to the job. Generic CVs won’t get you very far and a generic NHS application form will not get you the points you need. It takes time but it will pay dividends
If you get an interview make sure you visit before hand. It will give you pointers as to what they are looking for and ensure that it also feels like the kind of place you want to work
Practice common interview question answers ahead of time
If you are interested in them supporting further development, like supporting portfolio completion, use your opportunity at the end of the interview to raise it. An interview is as much you interviewing them as them interviewing you. If something is important to you make sure that you raise it, then you can make a fully informed decision about whether the role is right for you
What are my top tips for career planning?
I’ve blogged before about the fact that I’ve not had the smoothest academic pathway and that I really believe that academic success does not have to define who you are. I really believe there are so many many ways to end up in a place and a career that is right for you. There is not one way to do something, but here are some principles that I hope might help:
Don’t think you have to have it all figured out – follow what inspires you and supports your passions and everything will work out
You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room – being tenacious gets you far further than being talented alone, just keep going
Do your research – if you want something invest the time to learn about it, if there is a specific job reach out and speak to the people advertising it to get to know them, the workplace and more about the job
It’s OK to try a number of different ways to get into the field, don’t focus too much on it being on the ‘right’ pathway, as long as it enables you to be gaining experience, and in an ideal world training, you are still moving forward even if you need to move horizontally later
Keep an open mind about training routes in, don’t rule out apprenticeships and vocational routes, even if you consider yourself to be more academic, they will let you gain experience at the same time as earning money and studying
Be open to the fact that you are likely to have to invest your own time. Working in science has enormous opportunities, but if you sign up to a Healthcare Science pathway you are also signing up to continuous professional development, some of which will likely need to happen in your own time if you want the best possible outcomes
Maintain a growth mindset – no matter what the stage of your career be open to still developing, be open to opportunities and next steps, and be prepared to keep driving yourself to be better
Take a chance on yourself – sometimes we are our own biggest barriers and the most important thing is to get out of our own way. Don’t talk yourself out of taking chances, don’t tell yourself you can’t or that things won’t work out so you won’t try. Be brave, take your chances and leap!
How can I get work experience?
Work experience in Healthcare Science can be difficult to acquire, don’t be disheartened though there are still plenty of ways forward:
See if you can gain experience within industry or academia as these both tend to have specific work experience programmes that you can tap into
Some professional bodies, such as Applied Microbiology International, Microbiology Society and the Royal Society of Biology all have studentship and placement grants. I’m sure there are many others. Consider becoming a student member if you can afford it, or reach out to someone you would like to have a placement with and see whether they could apply or support you to do so. These mean that you can have some living allowance, if like me you couldn’t do it without, and bring some money with you to do a short project. They also look good on your CV as demonstrate both commitment and application/grant writing skills
Ask one of your current lecturers if they have any project opportunities with them
Gain an entry level post and use that to gain the experience you need to support your next steps
Consider apprenticeships to gain some exposure alongside your qualifications
Consider volunteering in adjacent roles, most hospitals and care facilities have volunteer programmes where you can gain experience, but also give back
Remember, you don’t need extensive experience to support your application for an entry level role, even a cup of tea with someone who does the job will enable you have a better understanding of the role. A couple of days to a couple of weeks is an advantage but not essential.
Useful places to find more information
Below are some links that might be helpful in getting some further information and reading up about possible next steps. These are great jumping off points, but you should also reach out to mentors and people doing the different types of jobs you are interested in to get deeper information not listed on the websites. There will be an option that works for you, but not every option works for everyone, so the more research you do the better fit you are likely to find.
I was presenting at my first conference of the year last week, which is a sign that conference season is soon to well and truly kick off. I know that this often puts many of us in a state of anxiety. We know that conference presentations are important for both getting our work out there and also for personal and career development. Presenting however, can feel like quite a high stakes manoeuvre, especially if you are not comfortable with public speaking. With this in mind I thought it might be useful to share some tips that I have learnt, in the hopes that it might help with your next upcoming session.
1 – Know your audience
The first thing to realise is that we often make presentations about us, when actually they aren’t really about us at all, they are about the audience and what we are trying to achieve on their behalf. We are often given a fairly generic topic to speak on, or have submitted an abstract of what we wish to present. That’s great but actually probably doesn’t have enough clarity to start putting together the session. My first step whenever I’m asked to speak is to think about the learning objectives for the session. What might benefit the audience most? What are they expecting? Learning objectives act as a guidepost, and I will usually include them with the blurb I’m asked to write for the agenda. This means that people selecting their sessions will be able to make an informed decision about whether your session will work for them. Are you pitching an introduction level session or an update on the latest research that assumes pre-existing knowledge? You want to match your pitch to the audience that you are expecting.
It is also worth thinking about what kind of atmosphere is likely to be present? Is it a fairly informal setting where the session will be more discursive or is it a formal conference session where you may need to prepare for possible confrontational questions? Prepare for questions and queries whilst you’re preparing your session, try to think about the rabbit holes that the audience might want to go down and for any potential pitfalls where you will need to have a pre-prepared strategic response. If you’ve been clear about what the session covers and audience pitch this should be less of an issue, but it’s always worth being prepared.
2 – Be prepared to bring your authentic self
One of the things I’ve come to truly believe is that, no matter how formal the session, you should bring your whole self to it. I’ve written previously about how we should feel free to wear clothes that empower us, and conference sessions are no different. This can be something as simple as wearing your favourite colour, but whatever it is, delivering talks is easier when you feel good and empowered so do whatever you need to feel that way. My top tip is that whatever you decide to wear, ensure that it’s comfortable. I used to wear heels to speak but now I always wear flats, as I’ve decided that the pain isn’t worth it for me, especially when you consider how long you will be networking after your session.
The other place were I try to ensure that I also include something that is a little bit me, is within the presentation itself. Again, this can be levelled dependent on setting, sometimes I just choose a colour scheme or icon that speaks to me. Other things you can include are quotes or images that are meaningful to you. Again, it doesn’t have to be something big or in the face of your audience, but something that centres you and makes you feel more like you own the space you are presenting in. Sometimes however going big is the way forward, sometimes making something memorable is the right approach, it all depends on your confidence level and the setting.
3 – Judge your session
I’ve talked up above about thinking about how informal/formal the setting you are presenting in and how this can impact on your content. There are however other things that are beneficial to think about in terms of expectations for your setting. The type of session will dictate a number of things, as will time slot and room allocation. If you know the venue you are going to you may be able to predict numbers of attendees for instance, if you are allocated a room you may be able to find out whether its for 15 people versus 1500. High numbers of attendees will limit your options for interactions, as will being given a 15 minute time slot.
Common types of sessions include:
Debates
Research presentations
Topic presentations
Workshop
Plenary or keynote
Speed presenting
Poster presentation
Careers presentations
Panel sessions
There are obviously others but these are the main ones that spring to mind. Just from looking at the list you’ll be able to see how different ones will attract people with different levels of pre-existing knowledge or interest. There are some key questions that are worth asking to help you support judging your session when the email comes in. First, always confirm length of session and whether or not this will include time for questions. Second, ask about number and types of attendees both for your session and the target audience for the conference/meeting itself. Finally, as this will impact your options for engagement with large audiences, will there be free Wi-Fi available for attendees so they can access voting apps? Don’t feel like this information should confine your creativity and what you want to undertake but build any limitations into your thinking in order find solutions ahead of time. Finally, please please please never be the person that delivers a 40+ minute talk despite being given a 30 minute slot.
4 – Use the agenda to guide you
Once the agenda is released and you’ve starting to build the content of your session you can also use it to help in your preparation. Your timing and position on the agenda can influence the build of your talk. If you are directly after lunch, you might want to think harder about the engagement side to wake everyone up and get them back into the flow. If you are just pre lunch, you might want to stack some of your more exciting parts towards the end and build towards them to ensure you keep the audiences attention. If you are going first or last you probably need to start and finish with a bang.
The other area where the agenda can really help you is to see what others are covering, especially if they’ve listed any focuses or learning objectives in their descriptions. This may mean you can get valuable slides back if someone is talking on a similar topic ahead of you, and will therefore have given a lot of similar introductory slides, thus giving you more time to build on the subject in your slot. It can also give you ideas of areas to avoid, so that you don’t give too much overlap. One of the things to not do is be intimidated by anyone else on the agenda. If you are speaking/presenting you have earned the right to do so, it doesn’t matter if the person before you is Dame X or Professor Y, acknowledge what that might do to the atmosphere in the room (i.e. may mean you have a larger audience) and then plan as if they were any other speaker.
5 – Have a plan on how to engage attendees
Engagement can start before the event even begins. If you have a poster session for instance, you might want to share a picture of your poster and it’s location on social media. Sometimes I also find running polls can help with working out pitching your session, and also in building engagement so that you are more likely to get an audience. This can be especially important if your session is at an event where there are multiple sessions running at the same time and therefore you almost need to sell why someone should comes to yours when there is so much choice available. Taking some time to raise awareness via social media using the event # can be really beneficial under these circumstances.
Depending on the availability of Wi-Fi and session details you may also want to consider using tools or apps to support interaction with the audience during your session. You can use tools such as Mentimeter and Slido to build voting or other forms of interaction into your session. This approach is especially important if you are asked to do a workshop session. It’s also worth asking additional questions during the prep phase, such as the type of seating, to see whether it would support group discussions.
Even if you are giving a standard presentation without interactive tools you still need to think about how to engage your audience. There obviously many different ways of doing this, starting from basics like pitching correctly so you bring your audience with you. If you can bringing yourself to your session by using framing such as story telling it can really help, alongside the use of humour. You can even think if there are props that would be appropriate to support what you’re talking about, although you also don’t want to make it gimmicky. Whatever tool you feel comfortable with, practice using it as it will make sure your session is more memorable.
6 – Make sure you have a plan B
Things go wrong, they do, despite your very best endeavours. Having a plan B in your pocket never hurts. This can be as simple as having a USB with your slides on it with you in case they haven’t managed to load it before you arrive. If I’ve included videos or anything else ‘fancy’ in my presentation I will always have a plan B and C. Plan B is an extra copy of my talk without the ‘fancy’ bit in it in case it doesn’t work when I test with the AV tech ahead of my talk. Plan C is a script in my head that I can use to describe the video in case it worked on test and suddenly fails during the real thing. If I’m doing a smaller session, I will also sometimes arrive with print outs of my slides so that I can approach it old school if needed.
Having a plan B is especially important if you are using voting or something tech related. If your entire session is going to be based on audience participation you need to have a plan if no one there can get signal or access to Wi-Fi. It’s worth building this flexibility in when you are developing the session so you will not need to entirely wing it if the unexpected happens to you.
7 – Be prepared to push yourself
I’m just throwing this out there. You should be prepared to push yourself into a space where you feel uncomfortable. Growing your skills is a never ending task, even if you feel like you are a pretty good public speaker, there are always things to learn, improve and do better. Sometimes the very act of speaking is a sufficient push because it’s not an area in which you feel comfortable. If you are comfortable talking ‘science’ maybe also stretch yourself by bringing more of yourself into the session. Embrace the creative possibilities and strive to have more impact, build better engagement, be more memorable. Read and research on the topic of how to present better in the same way that you would read and research your content and find inspiration about the next thing you could try.
8 – Facilitate a relaxed state of mind
Having just encouraged you to step out of your comfort zone by planning your presentation I also now want to encourage you to remove the stress that can be present outside of the speaking component itself. I speak from experience. I once agreed to speak at 2 conferences on the same day, on different topics and in different cities. This was beyond foolish. There simply wasn’t enough time to get from point A to point B and I arrived to land on stage for the second session with 1 minute to spare. I’ve also learnt that travelling up on the day of a session doesn’t work for me, it just makes me too stressed. I now will always travel up the night before, even if I arrive really late, because then I can go to sleep knowing that I’m where I need to be rather than lying awake all night stressing about whether an act of god will stop me making it to my session.
I also comfort myself by reading up on the areas that I have identified during my gap analysis that I might get questions linked to, or to reassure myself – even if it’s a topic I know really well – that I have up to date information and references. Feeling like you are walking up to a podium prepared is the best way I have to remove any of my stress linked to presenting.
9 – Plan to do your own timing
This is one I have learnt the hard way. I don’t like clocks present in the corner of a screen when I’m presenting as I want to be looking out at the audience and connecting when I’m speaking not constantly looking down at a monitor, probably slightly influenced by the fact that I don’t use notes as it enables me to feel more organic. I know some of you will feel differently. I’ve learnt to manage this by having a phone with a big clock (on silent) with me when I present so I can see it as I move around. I know that there will often be Chairs or speakers who will signal when you have 5 minutes left. I personally find that I need to pace my session throughout, as otherwise at 5 minutes I could be left with waaaay too much to cover, and so I like to time check myself. The final reason I do this is that I have been caught out. I’ve turned up and started a presentation and realised there was no clock or timing device visible anywhere. The panic, for me, at that point is real people, it’s a real stressor for me. You may have a different thing that triggers you, but once you identify what it is, do your best to have a plan to redress it so it doesn’t distract you from the moment you are in.
10 – Use the opportunity to build your networks
This last one I think is really important, if you are given the opportunity to have a platform use it! No matter how nerve racking it is, no matter how much you may not like presenting. In fact, if this is not your naturally comfort zone all the better, go out and seek opportunities that enable you to do it more. With practice comes familiarity and skill development. Don’t feel alone in your discomfort, but do know that there will be something in you that can inspire and give confidence to others. The world needs to see more people like you, whomever you are, especially if you have the courage to bring some of yourself to the podium. There is not enough diversity present on agendas and that is something that needs to change, and we need to have the courage to do that together as a collective.
The other thing to bear in mind is that so much within health and science is dependent on who you know. It’s probably not fair but it is true. Connections and networks are where you gain invites and opportunities, and presenting and meeting people is a big way to build these relationships. Whether you do this by following the hashtags for the event on social media, by speaking to those presenting or partaking in networking and social events at the meeting, networking is key. For those of you, who like me, find networking challenging I’ve previously written a post which I hope might help, but presenting is often an easy way to do it as people will come to you and you already have a shared interest through the topic. Whatever your level of networking comfort it’s worth putting in some time ahead of the event to think what your strategy might be, and who you might want to catch up with.
I really hope that this post will help support you, no matter how many presentations you’ve done, to bring a little bit more of who you are to the room you are presenting in and to be a little bit braver in some of the choices you make when developing sessions. I also hope that by sharing some of the learning I’ve gained by making mistakes, or making life harder for myself, that you won’t make the same ones. If you have any other top tips that you’ve gained to support presentation preparation then please do add them in the comments. See you at the podium!
This has been a pretty amazing week, I was fortunate enough to receive the HIS Early Career Award from the Healthcare Infection Society. As the first woman and the first Healthcare Scientist to receive it, it was pretty wonderful. As part of receiving the award I was also given a 30 minute speaking slot. Now, unlike normal, the brief was pretty open which resulted in 2 things. First, a sense of overwhelming panic about what I should talk about. Two, a gradual realisation of what a privilege it is to be given the opportunity for 30 minutes as yourself and how invaluable such an opportunity is to represent yourself and others.
The other thing that happened was I spent some time thinking about how amazingly fortunate I have been in terms of external recognition in general. The thing is though, at its heart, it’s unsustainable. My husband is always telling me (tongue in cheek) that I have to stop winning things so that others can. No matter how much this is said in jest, there’s a lot of truth in this statement. When do we get out of the way so that recognition can be given to others? And what happens when that external recognition has become a benchmark in how you assess your own standing or success? This blog is the result of some of my musings on reliance on external markers of success, and what work we might need to do on ourselves whilst enjoying the recognition.
Recognition is amazing
In all honesty, I was never someone who won awards, not at school, not at university. It wasn’t really part of my psyche or something that I realised could happen to someone like me. After all, I’m a pretty normal run of the mill kind of girl. I work hard, but that’s my main feature. Then waaaay back in 2015 I was nominated for rising star award at the CSO awards by a kind Consultant Healthcare Scientist. I didn’t win, but it made me aware that such things exist. As Trust Lead Healthcare Scientist, I’ve always remembered that kindness and what it meant to me, and as a team we try to always ensure that we nominate as widely as possible for any external awards that come up. We even started the Healthcare Science Awards at GOSH in order to provide a similar kind of internal recognition.
Recognition is great. It’s a real confidence boost. It can also open doors (like to the Coronation) that you never thought would be open to you. Increasingly, awards and recognition are increasingly important for things like career progression and grant funding, so they are no longer just a nice to have. Now, sitting on/chairing a number award judging panels, I see how it impacts those in the running and how important those decisions are.
Recognition is also sometimes the only thing that gets you through. For a long time, there was not much acknowledgement of my value as a Healthcare Scientist internally. There have been some very challenging times. The external recognition I received was the thing that told me it was worth persisting, that I was doing something right when I spent a lot of time questioning myself, my value and my vision. The problem with this as a coping strategy is that recognition can become addictive, and as a people pleaser, you can come to believe that unless you receive it, you don’t have intrinsic value.
Acknowledge that we are trained into a certain way of viewing the world
Whether you’re a people pleaser, a gifted child, or someone who was just raised to strive, we are taught to see the world through a specific lens and to judge our success by it. There’s an always ‘onto the next thing’ mentality combined with a need to know we are good enough, as we secretly suspect that we aren’t. That specific lens can engender large amounts of success, but it can also make it hard to have a true appreciation of the facts, making external validation take on an increasingly significant role. But what happens when it stops?
I hate to break it to you, but there are only so many awards and qualifications out there, IPC and Healthcare Science are small worlds after all. What do you do when you have ticked the qualification boxes, and other forms of recognition are few and far between. This is especially true when you become a senior leader, and to be honest, no one is interested in tapping you on the back and telling you you’ve done a good job anymore. Doing a good job is assumed. Everyone will be quick enough to tell you you’ve messed up, but silence is where positive feedback used to be. If you are someone who needs external reinforcement, this is a lonely place to be, and it’s better to recognise it before you get there so you can have already begun work on your coping strategies.
There are benefits to the ‘onto the next thing’ mentality
One of the traps we can find ourselves in is that the ‘onto the next thing’ mentality can reap huge rewards. In competitive fields, such as academia and medicine, it can be an important driver to success. It allows you to dig that little bit deeper and be that little bit more focused. To tick the boxes that need ticking, and to sometimes tick them faster or more efficiently than would have been possible otherwise. This means that both the good and bad aspects of this personality trait get enforced, and whilst there are training competencies to be ticked and qualifications to be had, the negative side of this particular coin don’t feel so bad.
As time goes on however, and careers change, the boxes that need ticking are no longer so clearly defined, and the list of things to do has no end. The positive reinforcement produced from this way of dealing with the world therefore turns into a sense of failure and inability to see progress. The list of jobs never ends, and so a sense that it is because of a failure in ourselves, rather than the system we are working in, persists. We run faster on the hamster wheel in order to try to reach the finish line without realising we’re going in circles, and the line will always be just out of reach.
It will never be enough
One of the dangers when on the hamster wheel, therefore, becomes that we further lose sight of how to benchmark progress. This means we turn even more to others to guide us as to whether we are doing OK. Whatever OK is. And that’s a problem, isn’t it. No one really knows what we are seeking, especially when we don’t know what it is ourselves. Progress when early career may be challenging, but it is often fairly straightforward to define. As we develop, both ourselves and our careers progress and how we need others to feed back to us is frequently becomes less clear.
The other thing to note is that if you listen to the positive comments and hold them to be so significant, you will also listen to the negatives, and probably even more intensely. As the saying goes, ‘you have to take the good with the bad’. Now, listening to constructive negative feedback is an important part of developing. The sad thing is that sometimes it’s not so constructive, and that can lead to some pretty destructive self-talk, spiralling, and challenges with processing of the feedback you are getting. So, how do we move ourselves from the position where we hold the opinions of others in such high account, to where we can evaluate and add our own self reflection into the mix, in order to achieve a stable equilibrium?
Know that what success looks like changes
As I’ve said, what success looks like changes, and it may not look the same from day to day, let alone year to year. One of the things I’ve become increasingly aware of in recent times is that I want to achieve across my life. I’ve spent a long time focusing on achieving at work, but this means that my long-suffering husband has lacked support, and any non work achievements have very much been on the back burner. I want to regain some balance in my life. It won’t happen overnight, and progress is being made by inches, but that is what success for me would currently look like. Everyone is different and your idea of success may look very different to my current one, but unless you take the time to identify what it looks like for you you will continue to be driven by how others define it for you.
Beware of your self talk
I’m so guilty of staring at myself in the mirror and telling myself how stupid I’ve been or asking why the fuck I said that. I suspect that no one else talks to me as badly as I talk to myself, and when I do screw up part of me wishes people realised there’s no need to make me feel bad about as I’m already waaaaay ahead of anything they could say. The thing is, this is not a healthy way to treat myself. I am now putting in active effort to become a better cheer leader for myself. Before my talk at HIS, I took 2 minutes to tell myself that I could ‘do this’. I could appear like a grown-up and give a good talk. I tried to speak to myself the same way I would speak to my students and/or colleagues before they were due to do something they were nervous about. I gave myself the same compassionate time that I would give to someone else. This isn’t something that is an embedded behaviour for me yet, but I’m hoping if I continue to work at it it eventually will be.
Miss out on the best bits of yourself
If you live in a spiral of self critism or an echo chamber where you only value the opinions of others, you will miss out on the best bits of yourself. I’m a pretty weird person, but I think at heart we probably all are. I think I’m also pretty compassionate and loyal, as well as occasionally funny. It’s super cliche, but as I get older I do think that our relationship with ourselves is one of the best ones we can ever develop. It takes courage to stand and know your flaws and love yourself anyway. It takes time to see past that long list of flaws to see that many of them have flip sides that represent strengths. To honestly work on them whilst not constantly chastising yourself because they exist. If asked, I could immediately give you a list of the best qualities about just about everyone in my work and personal life. It shouldn’t therefore have taken me to my 40s to be able to produce an equivalent list for myself, but I’m a work in progress afterall.
Start by giving some conscious time to your thought processes
I made the shift (am making the shift?) by giving myself the gift of time and self reflection. When I react strongly, when I feel certain ways, I’m trying to just take a few moments to understand what drove me to behave or feel that way. My poor husband also spends a lot of time with me talking through just about everything. I personally need that verbalisation as part of the process to support my thinking. I should probably just get a coach and relieve my hubby of the process, but I trust him so much to call me on my bullshit when I’m trying to avoid seeing things I don’t like about myself.
I’m also allowing myself to care a little less about others think of me. There are certainly people out there who are not my biggest fans. The thing is that is their process, their decision. I used to try and bend myself into knots to change those opinions, but at its essence, I can’t control what others think of me. I can only control how much weight I give to those opinions. I’ve been described as marmite in the past, and just like you will never persuade me to like marmite, I suppose I cannot persuade those who find me jarring to like me.
Give yourself the pep talk you would give to others
I’ve talked about being aware of the way I talk to myself, and the occasional reassuring pick me up chat before high consequence moments. I’m stuck though by how much we don’t service our own needs in the same way that we respond and service those of others. At least once a day I will have a pep talk conversation with my colleagues or trainees. I may also have virtual ones in order to support my professional communities or friendship groups. Yet we don’t invest the same care, or energy into ourselves. More and more recently I’ve been prioritising the fact that if I feel certain ways that it’s OK to step away, get some alone time and give myself the same kind of pep talk that I give others. Now, in all honesty I don’t always believe the words I say to myself yet, hearing it from yourself is not the same as hearing it from someone else. That said, if we are setting benchmarks of kindness then those should extend to ourselves, not just others. I believe, like most positive change and habit formation, it will become easier the more I do it, and slightly less cringe inducing.
Give yourself permission
One of the biggest changes I’ve consciously made it to also give myself permission to feel the way I feel. Instead of telling myself to ‘get over it’ or telling myself how stupid I am for feeling a specific way, I allow myself to feel it and then to follow up with a question about why I feel that why. Asking why, with the aim to move towards resolution or at least greater understanding, rather than festering in denial. I think it’s important to acknowledge that we don’t live in this idealised space where we all feel good and confident all the time. If we wait on someone else ‘fixing’ us when we feel anything less than perfect then in some ways I’ve come to believe we’re not putting in the work. That’s not to say that I am not over the moon when someone recognises what I’ve been up to, it’s highly validating and makes so much of the extra hours and effort worthwhile. If we wait to be noticed and to receive that recognition however, and don’t strive to have internal validation that stands alone, we may not be able to receive it when we need it most.
If you are fortunate enough to be given a stage you are obligated to use it
Finally, from a recognition junkie, it is so important that if that recognition results in opening doors or giving you a platform that you choose to consciously use it. It is lovely to sit in the warm glow of someone telling you you are doing something right, but recognition offers more than that. It gives you a voice, a voice that you can use to shine a spotlight or to raise awareness. It is one of the reasons that I still strive for recognition, even having acknowledged some of my not so positive personality traits that it can amplify. If someone gives you a stage, stand on it and use it for the good of everyone who hasn’t been given one and who may not yet have a voice of their own.
As I continue the slow road to feeling more like myself again I thought it might be nice to have a guest blog from the wonderful Sam Walker on some of the things that have been happening in the research Girlymicro world, so you know I haven’t been entirely resting on my laurels and eating copious amounts of chocolate. One of my favourite papers ever is based on the release of cauliflower mosaic virus DNA into a ward space, to support prospective tracking of where organisms go, instead of trying to guess based solely on where we find them without origin data. Due to a number of technical factors this approach to improving environmental transmission pathways hasn’t widely been repeated………..until now!
Sam is a Doctoral Research Student whose research focusses on the development for environmental surface monitoring protocols to inform clinical risk assessments and infection control procedures. His project aims to develop an evidence base for the presence of nosocomial pathogens in the hospital environment, as well as model the transmission of pathogens in clinical spaces. He obtained an MBiol degree from Aston University in 2020, with projects focusing on C. difficile spore germination.
Infection Control Research
“I imagine the swabbing part will be easy, it’s the data processing I’m worried about”. I think I said this about a month before the largest, and final, sample collection campaign in my PhD project. Famous last words.
A little bit about me – my name’s Sam and I’m one of Elaine’s PhD students. I’m finishing off my third year now (crunch time!). My project focusses on developing evidence-based surface sampling guidance to inform infection prevention and control practice. Practically, this involves collecting a range of samples from different clinical spaces and seeing that they can tell us in terms of microbial communities and microorganism dissemination, then using this information to target guidance for designing the most effective surface sampling protocols. In order to best inform this, we designed a study which looks at the movement of microbial surrogate markers through several different wards at Great Ormond Street Hospital. This involved a lot of preparation and many evenings swabbing sites across four wards. As of last week, all this sampling work has finished and I thought I’d share a few reflections on what the experience of conducting research in an active clinical space was like.
Working across settings is amazing!
For many projects focusing on clinical practice, particularly ones relating to IPC, working in collaboration with a clinical institution is absolutely essential. As my project involves collecting evidence from clinical settings to then process and develop into guidance, in my case this work wouldn’t be possible without this collaborative approach. As the end goal of my project is guidance that will inform clinical practice, not only is it important that the evidence is gathered from clinical settings, but it’s essential we understand the routine challenges faced by IPC teams. We can design the best set of guidance with all the technical detail in the world, but if we don’t take into account every day IPC challenges and what implementing this guidance will actually look like, then in a way it would fall flat. Being in the clinical space also opens up the possibility for conversations with the people who live and breathe IPC all day – the hospital staff! Informal discussions we have had over the course of this most recent sampling project have given me completely new insights and ways to view the work we’re undertaking which I never would have thought of otherwise! Getting this insight from working in clinical settings will ultimately improve both the quality and utility of the work we produce.
Stepping out of my comfort zone
As a lot of project is lab-based, the trips outside of this setting into clinical environments can be a bit of a shock to the system. I’m used to, and probably most at home in, a quiet laboratory space with a few other people at the most, maybe the odd visitor and the trusty PCR machines. The majority of the time I make the journey from UCL to GOSH, it’s to meet either with Elaine or other members of the IPC team, or maybe to pick something up from the microbiology labs there. When it’s time to collect samples however, this is a completely different experience.
The units we looked at in this most recent piece of work we did were two outpatient and two inpatient wards, serving different patient populations. One of the first things I really noticed was just how different these wards all were. I knew that there would be some big differences, for example I knew that the cardiac intensive care unit would be a very different experience to the oncology day care unit. What I didn’t necessarily expect however, was just how different the two outpatient wards would be from each other, and how different the same ward could be on different days.
With these differences came a different way to approach the research at hand. For the outpatient units, that often meant waiting until all the bed spaces were free so we could go in and collect the samples from the environment. This wasn’t always possible though, and sometimes we just had to accept that we weren’t going to get all of the samples we set out to gather. This took quite a while to get used to – my inner laboratory scientist was wincing at the thought of lost data points. Being able to put this to one side and carry on was a skill that took a while to master, particularly when sampling with a team. No-one will thank you when you’ve been on the ward for an hour and a half and you propose “just waiting a few more minutes” to see if a bed space will become free. Having that skill to just move on however turned out to be very useful when collecting the data, as it meant we could focus more effort in the areas we could collect samples from.
All this boils down to how the space is used completely differently. The hospital is first and foremost for providing care to patients, and as a researcher I have to acknowledge that I am a guest in the space. Understanding and accepting that we won’t always be able to collect all of the 65 or so samples we planned to on a given day is just part of the process when conducting sampling in the real-world hospital setting. At first, I remember feeling like this may be frustrating when it came to analyzing the data, and that it would make interpreting my results harder due to data gaps. However, looking back on it now, I actually feel it makes understanding the story the data tells easier, and much more insightful. Being able to relate the information we gathered to how the space was used at the time of collection, even where samples could not be obtained, just makes the story all the more applicable to real clinical practice and, in this case, how microbes could move through the clinical space under all sorts of conditions.
Anticipate the challenges
While embracing the dynamic environment of the clinical space is really important for putting data gathered in these settings into context, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a fair share of challenges with it. Before I began the sampling campaigns, both my supervisors absolutely insisted that I pre-planned every tiny detail. Down to the exact number of extra swabs I would take for each day. And I cannot think of better advice when it comes to performing this sort of work. Planning is absolutely everything. One of the reasons missing some data points during collection didn’t impact the overall quality of the data was because we anticipated that we may miss some points each day, so planned to take extra to account for this. We planned a detailed sampling sheet, so we could not only check off samples as we took them, but could make notes as we went around the ward on the environment to help with the downstream analysis. I cannot stress it enough; thorough planning made the whole experience so much better.
One challenge of conducting this piece of work was the intensity of the settings. I have a very much academic background, having done my MBiol degree and gone straight into my PhD. In other words, I have no clinical training whatsoever. This wasn’t so much of a problem in wards which were not high dependency, however I really noticed this lack of clinical exposure when we did the sampling in the cardiac intensive care unit. I knew it may be a difficult experience, given the nature of the ward we were going in to, but it still was a shock the first day of sampling there. I’m incredibly grateful for the team I did this part of the work with, who had the experience to navigate the space as well as make sure I was alright being in the setting. I think that this support, alongside taking some time to reflect on the overall experience, was invaluable for this particular component of the work.
This leads me on to the other absolutely key point for doing this sort of research – having the right people with you. As academics, we often won’t have been trained in clinical practice. This can not only make some clinical spaces quite intimidating, but also can make them hard to read. For example, without a clinical understanding of what is going on in a bed space, it can be hard to know whether to ask if it’s alright to take a swab of the bed rail quickly, or if you should leave the space and move on. Having people with you who can help read these situations is so important, both for help with collecting the data but also for supporting the researcher. Another massive benefit I noticed was the links formed between me, the researcher, and the ward staff. Having someone involved who has experience in both worlds can really help break down any barriers on entering the space and help everyone understand the work that is being done, and how it relates to the ward.
Top tips for laboratory researchers gathering samples from clinical spaces
So, having said all that, my top tips on performing research in clinical spaces as an academic are:
Planning is everything!
Anticipate and embrace the unique challenges of this sort of research
Have a good team who can support you in the clinical space
And finally, get involved! Undertaking research in clinical settings is very rewarding and I would highly recommend it wherever possible!
I’m still laid up with COVID, and so today I’m missing out on a pretty great event. The London Healthcare Science Collaborative is running an event on the power of celebration (led by Betty Adamou) and women in leadership (led by Claire Walker and Ant De Souza). Whilst I’ve not been able to attend, it has caused me to reflect on the topic and some of the different thoughts and experiences I’ve had linked to opportunities for celebration.
I’ve gone through periods of my career where I’ve definitely not felt like I’ve been allowed to celebrate my successes. I’ve also gone through periods where the barrier to celebration has definitely been me rather than anyone else. Some days, I feel like I’m not allowed to even discuss or mention successes as it will be seen as ungracious or egotistical. In contrast, there have definitely been times, and other situations, where I’ve felt not only empowered to celebrate but that others fully engaged and amplified those celebrations. I’ve been thinking, therefore, why celebration is important and what factors can impact whether we choose to undertake it or not.
Marking your progress
One of the first reasons I think celebration is important and powerful is that it can be used to mark big transitions in life, whether work related or not. The challenge comes in deciding whether the event is ‘sufficient’ and worthy of celebration. It can be easy, at least work wise, to be so focused on an end goal or big picture that nothing is considered to be worthy of celebration along the way. The problem with this is that there is always another step, another target, and so if celebration is not prioritised, it may just never happen. My plea on this one is that we all support each other to celebrate the little things as well as the big things. Sometimes in life, merely getting out of bed is worth a celebratory cup of tea. At least that’s true right now in my COVID world.
Celebrating the journey, not just the destination
But why should celebration be prioritised anyway? One of the key reasons is that it is easy to forget how far you’ve come and to not sufficiently recognise your true progress if individual moments are not recognised. Ensuring that you take the time to celebrate is actually a key part of you recognising your progress and investing in some self care.
Recognising individual stages of progress can also help with the big stages. Sometimes, completing a task, such as writing a PhD thesis, can just seem unattainable. Breaking down the massive task into sections that feel more achievable and allowing yourself to recognise that progress can, mean the entire task feels more managble. It can also help maintain momentum and positive attitude during tasks that are particularly challenging or where it can be easy to become bogged down. After all, most of the learning, and therefore the reason to celebrate, occurs as part of the journey rather than just at the destination.
Owning your progress
We often talk about owning our failures and the learning that results from them. We don’t talk so much about owning our successes. Now, I suspect that some of this is down to imposter syndrome, and the stories we tell ourselves that our successes are down to luck and is ephemeral, whereas our failures are somehow much more real rooted in truth.
The thing is, if we are going to ‘own it’ we need to own ALL of it, the good and the bad. Your progress is yours alone, you are responsible for the things that don’t go well, but the flip side of that is that you also get to claim responsibility for the times when they do. Own it, celebrate it, for once let taking responsibility not be a burden but an act of celebration and joy. Otherwise, you may find that there are plenty of people out there who may take ownership of the good on your behalf.
Enjoy the moment
The other thing about taking ownership is that you should use it to buy you time to reflect and enjoy the moment. Trust me, if you rush through it, always onto the next thing, you’ll reach your destination, only to be aware that the journey has been a blur, and wishing you’d savoured it more. I was in such a rush to ‘get things done’ that I never stopped after one thing before leaping head first into another. In hindsight, that meant it took me longer to learn key lessons. It took me longer to see where I sat within the big picture. It meant I missed out on sharing my successes with those who had contributed or given up a lot to enable them to happen.
Celebrations are not just about you. They are an opportunity for you to give back and acknowledge the input and impact of others. By choosing not to celebrate, we also steal an opportunity away that could be used to thank and recognise colleagues, friends, and family, without whom none of this stuff would happen.
Extrinsic vs intrinsic recognition of success
One of the reasons I’ve written about owning my success is because this is a real work in progress area for me. Success and reasons to celebrate come in all shapes and sizes. I have gotten into the habit of needing external validation, prizes and the like, in order to measure how well I’m doing. These are lovely, but there are some problems with using this as a yardstick. Firstly, how many prizes and awards can you realistically actually win across your career, and are you suddenly worthless when they become unavailable? The other issue is that if we need others to tell us our value, rather than being able to see it in ourselves, you are are constantly in a vulnerable position, especially with people who would use that requirement against you. It is a necessary step in growth to be able to see that we have intrinsic value and to celebrate that, rather than relying on others to see our worth.
Integrate all the versions of yourself
One of the other big challenges I wrestle with is whether it is OK to be seen to celebrate. Is it boastful? Is it narcissistic? Does it end in arrogance? Here is where I have landed in my thinking. It is not a bad thing to share and celebrate your successes, as long as you also share and discuss the learning from your failures. Those people who only shout about the triumphs are within their rights to do so, but I think those shouts are much more meaningful if you’ve also journeyed with them through the failures it took to get to that success.
The other thing I’ve decided is that it is important to celebrate throughout all the aspects of who I am. I am a scientist, IPC professional, and academic, but I am also a wife, a daughter, an aspiring creative, and sister. Therefore, I want to show the depth of all of that when I celebrate and acknowledge the roles and importance of people across those aspects when the good things happen. It takes a village after all.
Understand the power of being seen
Having struggled with the whole celebration thing for some time, I have also come to realise something else. I celebrate not only to share success and say thank you to those who have helped but also to be visible to others that those attainments are possible. I know I say this a lot, but you can’t be what you can’t see. If you don’t know that a route is open to you, it is much harder to aspire to achieve it. If you only see medical colleagues winning a certain award, you may not think that you could get there as a scientist. We break new ground to make it easier for those who follow, but if no one knows about it, we are not fully completing the job. You never know who may see that tweet, read that blog post, or listen to a podcast. You may never meet or know the people you inspire, but by sharing and being visible, you will be inspiring someone, so don’t be afraid to be seen.
Let no one steal your joy
You will encounter people who will try to mute your celebrations, who attempt to steal your joy. I have been told my success makes other people feel uncomfortable. I know there is sometimes eye rolling at my social media presence. The thing is, that aspect will always be there, whether you celebrate or not. Whether you talk about it or not. Those comments and those people don’t go away. You do, however, have the power to decide how much they influence your decision-making. To decide how much power they have over you. How much right they have to stop the work you are doing or to dampen all the reasons I’ve written about that you should celebrate and be seen to do so. You can’t control the reactions of others, but you can control how they affect you.
Share and amplify the celebrations of others
Finally, celebration is not just about you. To really embrace the art of celebration, we need to see it as the gift it is. We need to amplify the celebration of others! When you hear of good things happening, buy that card or bottle of fizz to support the person who may be struggling to feel they can celebrate. When you see a social media post, share it and comment on it. Let the person know how happy you are for them and help to get the word out. Be genuinely happy, rather than challenged, by the success you see all around you. People are showing you what can be achieved, and you are inspiring others. Let’s truly be a community that values and celebrates success, not just our own but of everyone.
Rejection and my ability to deal with it have been on my mind a lot lately. This is because I finally got over myself and started submitting a book proposal linked to this blog and feel like I’ve now become the Bridget Jones of the submission world, overly obsessed with approval and external validation. The thing is only 1 – 2% of books get picked up, which shocked me as it’s even worse than the success for grants, which is about 20%. However, having lived in an academic world filled with rejection for almost 20 years now, it is not like rejection is new to me.
I blogged a bit about the idea of writing a book when I first started playing with the idea, but it’s been a while, and it’s hopefully progressed on a bit. I ummmm’d and ahhhhh’d about keeping the details of this phase to myself, as there is a literal 99% chance of failure, but that doesn’t really align to my values. It’s also caused me to actively reflect on rejection and how I manage it. As rejection is prominent across all areas of science (and life), I hope by talking about my tips for dealing with it, that I can share my learning and support others who may be going through similar things, whatever the source of the rejection.
Acknowledge that failure/rejection hurts and that’s OK
Let’s start by being honest. Failure hurts. It does. There’s no way around it. If it didn’t hurt, so many of us wouldn’t fear it so much. I have begun to think, however, that the reason it hurts as much as it does is because it forces us to have a look in the mirror and reassess, often with increased clarity. It forces introspection upon us, and that can be a challenging thing.
Failure is inevitable however, it’s a key part of the learning process, and the sooner we embrace that inevitability, the better placed we will be to deal with it when it arrives. Developing coping strategies and knowing yourself enough to manage your response is key. For instance, I have 2 key methods. First, I never only have a single plan. Therefore, if grant A is rejected, I will always have hope that grant B is still making its way through the system. Not having all my eggs in one basket keeps me sane. Second, I allow myself an indulgent 48 hour grieving period for failure. I allow myself to feel, to feel disappointed, to move through the self critical emotions without further self critique by forcing denial. 48 hours. That’s it. After that, I move to a more forward focused place. What’s next? What have I learnt? If I try this without the grieving period, I carry it with me, so I’ve learnt I need to move through the emotional aspects before my logical brain can kick in.
Find your support
As I’ve said, failure and rejection hurt, and like other forms of emotional trauma, your recovery is quicker with friends. From going out for cocktails during a breakup, to tea and cake when a paper is rejected, support is key. During the 48 hour grieving period, I may quite frankly need some bitching time. Some time to make the rejection about ‘the system’ rather than myself, to move towards depersonalising the failure. I may also need someone who can point out that the failure is definitely not as bad as it first appears and that the world is, in fact, not actually ending.
Put it into context
The reason the 48-hour grieving period is key for me is because all failure and rejection come with learning opportunities. The challenge is to get to the point where you can make the most of these. For me, I have to move from an emotional headspace to a growth mindset that’s more based in logic in order for this to happen. My emotions and passion drive my creativity, but when out of control, they act as barriers to seeing the big picture and where the learning lies.
Once I’m in a place where I can undertake a true review, there’s always something I can learn. Be that based on feedback I’ve received, be that based on how I’ve handled either the initial experience or my response to it, or the onboarding of more knowledge linked to the strategic landscape which will enable me to do better next time. Being open to this learning is what moves failure iteratively towards success, and if we don’t find a way to engage with it, we’re just doomed to repeat the outcome.
Evaluate when a ‘no’ is a ‘not for us’ – taking yourself out of the mix
Context is key. Without it, you can’t truly get to a place where you can understand feedback. There is, for instance, a big difference between a no and a not for us. I mean, I know the outcome is the same, but the process of moving forward is different. If something is ‘not for us’ it feels different. A flat ‘no’ can feel like a value judgement. It can feel like the idea/work is bad. A ‘not for us’ doesn’t feel the same. It means that the drivers and vision of the people who are assessing don’t align with your proposal. There are always more people, though. There are always other visions, and so this type of rejection is actually an opportunity, an opportunity to find someone who better aligns with where you want to be. I find one crushes my dream, the other opens a different set of doors.
Focus on what you can control
So much of the scientific and writing process ends in a place where we are not fully in control of the outcomes. That said, in the process, there is so much that you can control. You can control your approach, who you are submitting to, what your aspirations for the work are, and how you balance that with other pieces of work that you have in process. I find I need to trick my brain so that when I have something that has reached the part of the process that I have little or no control over, I am still working on another piece of work where I am still in control of the process, be that a paper, grant, blog post etc. This helps to stop me spiralling and obsessing about something I can no longer influence.
Have a plan A, B, and C
One of the key ways I’ve developed to maintain a sense of control is to understand there is never a single route to getting things done. There are always multiple ways to approach any aspiration and once you acknowledge this, you can make sure you include some of these alternatives in your planning.
The other component of this is to make sure that ‘the plan’ is rooted in realism, in both approach and time scale. There is nothing more disheartening than having a plan/approach that fails due to a lack of research/understanding. This is where your baseline skills as a researcher will come into their own. No matter the task, take the time to familiarise yourself with the barriers and options to ensure your plan is up to scratch.
Take inspiration from those who have succeeded
Big steps take time, and how you feel during this period is rarely static. There are times when I will love a paper, feel completely prepared for an exam, or feel like my dream could be a reality. Then, there are moments when I hate everything I’ve done and question why I thought I could ‘do it’.
At times like these, it’s worth looking to others for inspiration. For instance, Professor Julia Lockheart and Professor Mark Blagrove from DreamsID (https://dreamsid.com/index.html) invited me to their book launch earlier this year. Seeing their dreams made real was really inspiring and provided an extra push to just get on with following my own. When everything feels too far from reality, look to those who can demonstrate the outcome you are aspiring for.
When it’s all too much focus on associated goals
Sometimes, the dream itself is not enough. Running head-on at goal can, at times, be both painful and exhausting. When this becomes overwhelming, it’s sometimes better to choose to come at things sideways or progress associated goals for a while. For instance, if that paper has been rejected for the 4th time, it might be time to write a blog post on it and use that as a different opportunity to think about the core message.
This can be a really useful approach for the lulls that will inevitably occur, either because you’re waiting on responses or because you have to build yourself up to try again. These periods can feel like ‘dead time’, and trying to make more direct progress can just leave you feeling despondent. Understanding this and knowing how you can keep going in a different way helps.
Press the reset button – Decide whether it’s worth the pain – Return to your why
Despite all of these thoughts about how to manage rejection and carry on, I want to make clear that it is also OK to think about quitting. This sounds a bit strange doesn’t it, after all, in science we don’t quit. Except we do. Part of our growth is being able to reexamine our work, be that an experiment, paper, or project in light of new information. When you get rejections, then it is important to decide whether someone has spotted a fundamental flaw that you just can’t fix or takes the work in a direction you just don’t want to follow. This isn’t encouragement to throw the baby out with the bath water, but an acknowledgement that there are times when the right decision is to pause or discard a piece of work and that it’s important to acknowledge that as part of our processing.
Evaluate progress made
Once you’ve decided that you are still invested or that the piece of work you are doing still has value, to you or others, then it’s important to remind yourself of how far you’ve come. It will always be further than you think. This is easier if you had a plan when starting out, but even if not, you can spend 10 minutes just listing all the steps you have proactively taken in moving towards your goal. Listing your rejections and the learning from them is a key part of this evaluation process. Putting everything down in one place may enable you to see opportunities you might have missed or help develop your plan B and C options further. I would advocate doing this regularly, even in the absence of rejections, but it can be a particularly useful re-centering process when things feel hard.
Understand that the only way is through
Finally, if you’ve decided that what you are undertaking still matches your why, and that it is not flawed enough to walk away from, the only thing to do is JFDI (just f**king do it). Keep the faith, both in the work and yourself, and go all in despite how hard it can feel. Have a plan and take a single step at a time, until, before you know it, you’ve reached your destination. Anything worthwhile is worth the effort, and future you will thank past you for your persistence and determination. Have a hard conversation with yourself, and just keep going.
As summer draws to a close, results come in and we all think about what our next steps might look like it felt like now would be a good time to share a guest blog that has been written to help inspire what some of those options might look like.
Joanna Ward is a prize winning MBio student based at the University of Lincoln. She has recently completed her MBio and been accepted into a prestigious PhD programme, continuing under her MBio supervisors Professor Claire Hills and Professor Paul Squires.
A year in the life of an MBio student
As I come to the end of my degree, I have been reflecting upon my experience at the University of Lincoln, but in particular, my master’s year which I have just completed. As an MBio student, my degree consisted of a three-year BSc Biomedical Science course, before an additional ‘masters’ year in which I was fortunate enough to join the University of Lincoln Renal Group. Supervised by Prof Claire Hills and Prof Paul Squires, the group has research interests in diabetes, chronic kidney disease and cardiovascular disease. Specifically, they study the underlying mechanisms which drive disease progression, to better understand how we can intervene clinically and improve patient outcomes. I love these areas of research which aim to bridge bench to bedside– it epitomises everything I have ever wanted to do and I am driven everyday by the possibility of our research being beneficial to so many people.
After a disrupted undergraduate degree as a result of COVID, going into my master’s year I had very little lab experience and the thought of completing a lab-based project was quite a daunting prospect, but I was incredibly fortunate to be part of a team where there’s no such thing as a silly question and support is always at hand. I soon realised that I loved being in the lab and the research absolutely fascinated me.
Being part of a very active research group meant I spent a lot of time at the bench, conducting experiments and analysing data. My typical day in the lab would involve firstly checking on my cells; tissue culture forms a huge part of our research so getting to grips with the techniques behind it was a key part of being able to run the experiments. I used human kidney cells to create an in vitro model of chronic kidney disease which then allowed us to determine whether the drugs we were treating our cells with were having a protective effect. After this, I would run multiple different experiments throughout the day, these could involve techniques that include Western blotting, PCR and several different laboratory assays. Having a lab-based year through completing the MBio gave me the opportunity to develop so many different lab skills, something which I am hugely grateful for.
Aside from lab work, this year I have also developed multiple skills important to a career in science. One of these is keeping up with the literature surrounding our research topics, this is both essential but also difficult since papers are published so frequently and knowledge around specific subject areas can develop quickly. Creating a system which enabled me to keep up with this early on was something which made my life a lot easier as the year progressed so I absolutely cannot recommend this enough! Science communication forms a huge part of research, and through being lucky enough to attend the Diabetes UK professional conference, regularly presenting at lab meetings, research showcases and poster presentations, I have developed more confidence in public speaking. Importantly I have developed a greater appreciation for the ability to communicate our research to people in other disciplines.
I have had the most incredible year and have grown on both a personal and professional level, but this absolutely hasn’t happened by chance. I have been incredibly fortunate to be guided into the world of science by the most wonderful supervisors who have not only given me so many incredible opportunities but have also encouraged and supported me every step of the way. They have believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself and have made me realise a career in research is exactly what I want to do with my life. They are also incredible scientists who I look up to enormously- as an early career researcher you absolutely need mentors who are supportive and whom you trust, so having supervisors like this has been an absolute privilege. I have also been blessed with the most wonderful lab mates who have become some of my best friends and make every day full of laughter and fun. They have taught me more than they will ever know and couldn’t have been more supportive, reassuring, and hilarious. I look forward to every single day I spend with them!
My master’s has been an absolute joy, I would tell anyone considering doing an MBio to give it everything that you have, go above and beyond, be a team player and make the most out of every opportunity you are given. I am incredibly excited to see where my path in science and research takes me next and will forever be thankful to team Renal for providing the very best start in this.
During July I’ve posted a series of articles aimed at supporting PhD students and those thinking about entering research or undertaking a PhD. So that you can access them more easily, along with an example of some other posts that might also help, I’ve collated them all for you as a series of links here in a single post. Hope they help.
In the last of July’s posts focussing on PhD tips, I thought I should probably spend some time focusing on research questions and creating an environment that supports having ideas. This sounds like the simplest thing, but I think it’s often an undisclosed struggle for many and a source of silent pressure that might benefit from being acknowledged, especially when you’re just starting out.
I think this area probably ties into who you are as a person. I, for instance, have never found ideas to be a particular issue, but I think that’s because I’m by nature a starter and not a finisher. I often have too many ideas in my head to be efficient in any form of implementation. You may, however, be the other end of the scale, great at implementation, but struggle at the start with staring at a blank sheet of paper. Both of these traits have their unique challenges when it comes to finding ideas and taking them through to realisation. As with so much else, knowing how you interact with the world will probably help in finding the best pathway to success.
So whether you are being over or underwhelmed by inspiration and ideas, I hope this week’s post may help you navigate some of the challenges of finding your next research question.
Science is a creative process
As Scientific Director of the Nosocomial Project, I’ve spent a far amount of time now working with people who are based in what is acknowledged as a creative industry. I think one of the things that has struck me is that there is more that is similar in some of the processes within the Arts and Science than is different. Although science is often seen from the outside as a process driven area, at its very heart, and to be successful, it is actually based around ideas, questions, and developing concepts. Both areas require us to be able to ask new questions and sometimes see the world or challenges in a different way to those who’ve come before.
Creativity in itself is a process. It’s something that requires the identification of time in order to allow ideas to be inspired, developed and reflected on. This is true whether you are a natural ideas person, who needs this time to be able to sort and feel less overwhelmed, or someone who needs space to allow the ideas themselves for formulate.
Now, I’m not going to say good ideas because I believe you don’t know whether an idea is good or bad until much further down the line, ideas aren’t weighted at the start, they are just ideas. Sometimes, the most far out one’s turn out to be best and sometimes the most solid appearing ones turn out to be a waste of time. Which brings me to thought number one: inspiration shouldn’t involve a value judgement. Being open to ideas requires time and occasionally bravery, but the shifting process, where you consider whether an idea has legs, comes later.
Make time for inspiration
One of the biggest challenges I’ve found with the way I see this and even when I’ve been writing this blog, is the temptation to describe and discuss productive time. The thing is, the creation of time for ideas is key but often doesn’t feel productive. I think this is because the very word productive links the time to a value judgement about the ideas produced, whereas creating the time for ideas is where the value lies, whether those ideas end up being genius or merely a stage in process.
This is one of the challenges with science being a process driven environment, with a focus on outputs. If we are not ‘doing science’ time is considered to be wasted. One of the things I try to encourage in my students is that a walk in the park just letting your mind wonder, or staring at the rain through a window to free your mind, is sometimes the most valuable time you will spend during your PhD. Especially if you’ve come up against a tricky problem. Staring at something head on can only get you so far.
Sometimes it’s hard to be passive, I’m really not that great at just ‘being’. If you are like me therefore you may decide a kitchen disco is the best way to free your mind or to go for a run. Finding a way that allows you to distract your mind to enable you to see things in a different way, whatever way that works for you, is the main thing.
Spend time reading and reflecting
Occasionally, the pressure to solve things or come up with ideas can feel a lot like writers’ blocks. Staring at empty screens, lab books, or grant templates. Although space often helps, sometimes you need a kick-off point. I find reading (or going to listen to people speak) can often be helpful at this point. I’m not talking about reading for critique here but reading for inspiration.
Often, when we are reading papers etc we are reading it to evaluate how good it is or to support technical understanding. I think reading for inspiration is probably a different skill. It’s the opposite of the trying to focus on the details we normally do. It’s reading and almost actively listening and recognising those little side tracking ‘what if’ thoughts that we would often try to ignore.
When reading for inspiration, you may also want to try different content that you would normally engage with. You might want to read about your subject from a different disciplines perspective, for instance, infection control but from a human factors perspective. If you are working in a translational area, you might want to read about another use of the technique that isn’t within your specialism or some fundamental science papers. You may even want to read articles and blog posts from patients or advocacy groups in order to get a different perspective. The main thing is to be cognisant in your approach and be open to going down some mental rabbit holes to see where they lead.
Sometimes, you need to act on your thoughts
Once you’ve done your reading for inspiration and have your thoughts the next step is deciding what to do with them. This requires some form of action, often doing some further reading or sitting down to grow that thought, and specifically reflect and write about how that germ of an idea might grown into a more fully formed question or piece of work.
This step is not always easy, but I think it is the part that most of us are more used to as scientists. That said, there are some days where my mind is a hell to me, and I think if it was visualised, it would just be a cloud of buzzing flies. On days like this, I write. I write blog posts. I write postit notes. I scribble notes in books. Writing things down, even if not to do with my research thoughts, creates a little space so that I can see the wood for the trees. It empties my mind on specific topics so I can gain clarity on other things and do the development work needed.
If being overwhelmed isn’t your issue, this is probably the time to hit the reading for research portion of development. This is where you would read more closely around the idea itself and start to see what others have done, undertake your gap analysis, and begin to think about the practicalities of undertaking the work.
Be prepared for failure
A wise person once told me that ‘science is 80% failure’ and that ‘the earlier I got used to that concept, the easier my journey would be’. As you hit the evaluation phase of idea development, you need to be OK with throwing out or needing to redefine a bunch of the thoughts you had in the earlier phases. This is the phase where you take your researched concept and try to change it into a fully formed research question or practical experiment. It is also the phase where you find out whether your idea truly translates into something workable.
Although this part can feel painful, it’s actually the core part of being a scientist and where a whole heap of the learning that occurs. The more you do it the better you get at spotting a good idea in the earlier stages, and actually the easier it is to be inspired and have ideas as it’s a skill that needs to be developed like anything else.
Sometimes it’s better to just start
Because the question develop part can be painful it’s something that, if you are like me, you may procrastinate over. You may just want to sit in the lovely inspiration phase where all your thoughts are still possibilities. The truth of the matter is that it is easy to justify staying in the thinking phase as it can be hard to know when you’ve done enough thinking and prep to move an idea to the next stage. However, if you never try moving from an idea to a reality you will also never succeed, and so sometimes we all need to pull off the psychological band-aid and just try it out. There are also times when you just frankly need to stop being scared and JFDI it to see where it goes.
Appreciate the role of translational reasearch
In my kind of research, which is clinical as part of Infection Prevention and Control, I have found something else that sometimes helps. Sometimes it can be easy to become hyper focussed on scientific issues and challenges. On days when I’m stuck and just don’t feel a way forward I play a little mental game with myself. Now, it’s no secret that I spent a bunch of time in hospital and experiencing healthcare as a child, and I now work in paediatrics. I therefore run myself through different scenarios as a paediatric patient visiting or being admitted to hospital. Scenarios with different incidences, organisms, and experiences. Sometimes inspired by real patient challenges I’ve been involved with, sometimes entirely theoretical. I then try to use that process to better understand what might be important to me, what the significant moments may have been and where we could do better. I find that running this from a patient centred viewpoint can provide me fresh perspectives, which in turn enables me to have better ideas. If you don’t work an environment where you meet patients, but your work is on a specific organism for example, maybe reach out to an advocacy or similar group, to help you also get a fresh perspective, or even just speak to family and friends about their lived experience.
Don’t worry too much about everyone else
I wanted to finish by talking about something that has been a bit of a theme in my academic life and the main thing I have learnt to manage it. That is the fear or reality of ideas being taken by either those more senior or those with more power/access. I don’t think I can say with any good conscience that this doesn’t happen, I have myself previously come in to access my desk to find a senior PI searching it for my lab books containing data they weren’t working with me on.
The thing I’ve learnt is not to hold onto any one thing too tightly. This isn’t justifying the fact that this behaviour exists, it’s just the way I have learnt to maintain my mental health and wellbeing. There are times when you need to defend and maintain ownership of concepts, especially if something is key to your PhD. For the most part, however, I’ve discovered that I will always have other ideas, and there will always be different ways I can spin the original concept. Some of my best work has actually come because of the external push due to someone published some of our shared work as a solo author instead of together. It forced me to take the next thought step and develop more than I may have otherwise.
So I’d like to finish on the note that no matter where you are on your scientific journey, trust yourself. Trust your instincts. Trusts you will always have another idea. Trust that you will always be able to come up with a plan B. Trust that there are people out there who will want to help and support. Sometimes, developing and maintaining that trust is our biggest challenge as individuals working in science, but it is worth doing the work as it will provide long-term dividends both in and out of work.
Dear gentle reader, let me tell you a tale, a tale of a naive PhD student and of her nemesis, the notorious villain known as The Thesis. Grab a comforting beverage, as this tale is filled with both thrills and peril for your delectation.
The final 12 months of my PhD were tricky. I had simultaneously signed up to do FRCPath and a PGCert in education on top of thesis writing, which in hindsight was beyond stupid, but made a strange sense at the time. So I was writing not only a thesis, but a Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) portfolio as well, and trying to submit my thesis a year early in order to allow revision time for my final clinical exams. I’d also run into supervision challenges as my primaries vision of my thesis, both in the required level of content and how that content was presented, was different to mine. Needless to say, it was a bit a grim time.
Fast forward to my viva, I have submitted my thesis without supervisor sign off, and to be honest, there was a good chance I was entirely wrong and had set myself up for failure. The viva had lasted an hour, including having a cup of tea with my examiners. This is either a really good or hella bad sign, right? I’m standing outside the room whilst they deliberate, and I am seriously considering just running away as I’m in the midst of a full-on panic with my rational brain having entirely left the party. Suddenly, I hear them laughing, and I know that I am doomed. I’m about to just leave when the door opens, and they are standing there, staring at me expectantly. I have no choice, I enter the room to hear my fate.
The first words out of their mouths are “can you take a seat, we have some bad news for you and it’s probably better that you’re seated whilst we go through it”. At this point, I almost vomit, and it takes everything I have not to cry. I had been wrong. My primary was right, I’m a disaster, what was I thinking. I sit, and all I can think is that I just need to get out of this room and back to Mr Girlymicro, and the sooner I get it over with, the better. They look at each other and then at me, the external says “we have to ask for some changes and I’m afraid that they are substantial” they look at each other again pausing for what felt like forever before continuing “we need you to add an extra page of conclusions and it MUST NOT be more than 350 words”. They burst into laughter and shake each others hands and then mine. I stare at them blankly and ask them to repeat. When they are done laughing with each other they say, “also, when you have PhD students NEVER show them your thesis, show them a chapter of your thesis, that’s what a thesis should look like”. They then dump the examiner copies of my thesis into my hands to carry from the room so I can experience the weight….still smiling at each other, and the whole thing is over.
I therefore include my PhD thesis below not as an example of the thesis you should write, but perhaps as an example that is so long you might get away with a short viva and the examiners saying they never want to see it again. I also thought that this week I might include some of the lessons that that 12 month period taught me, as well as what I have learnt since from being both a supervisor and examiner.
Your thesis should tell a story, so be aware of what serves the tale
You may have a much better vision for your thesis than I did for mine, but whatever that vision is, it needs to involve telling your reader/examiner a coherent story. You may have done 20 small bits of work that you did because they were individually interesting, but when it comes to your thesis it’s time to put those together into chapters that read like you’d planned all of them together and a tale that hold logical progression from 1 chapter to another.
There are plenty of different ways to do this, and you can take any approach that makes sense for your work, but there are a few things to consider:
Think about having a thesis structure diagram so how your work hangs together doesn’t have to be intuited by your examiners, but is clearly laid out
Think carefully about the number of chapters and chapter order to ensure they are supporting the overall tale you are telling, be that of scientific discovery or adversity over failure
Try to embed being clear about your why and impact throughout, especially if you are doing a clinical PhD. Be conscious about picking the points where you can make your ‘so what’ clear
Rationalise what you should include to serve the story you are telling. You do not need to include every single thing you’ve done, in fact it could make it harder to read
Think about what purpose your thesis will serve
This one may sound a little weird, as surely everyone’s thesis serves the same purpose, to convey the work done during the PhD and provide a route for assessment. That is true. However, in terms of longevity, some thesis serve a different purpose. For me, as my research area is also in my area of work, my thesis is a manual I still go back to to remind myself of how to do pieces of work, such as decontamination validations. This won’t be true for some people. Some people write a thesis that will never be read again, and so the thesis is written to please their examiners as a primary function. Mine, as you’ve read, was less pleasing to my examiners, but acts as a reference text for me to this day, and so fulfils the purpose that I had in mind when I wrote it.
Know your process
We all work differently, but the more you understand how you work the more you will reduce your stress around thesis writing. Are you a, write it up as I go kind of person? Are you a, I need to have all the info to decide what my story it before I start gal?
My process was that, because I was still working clinically part time, I took a month for each chapter of my thesis. Week 1 I undertook a literature search and collated all the relevant papers, read them and made bullet points, week 2 I created figures and started writing, week 3 I finished writing the chapter, week 4 I edited and sent it out for comment. Repeat for 5 months, and I was pretty much done.
My PhD students are far superior to me, they are well read, keep spreadsheets of notes, as well as writing up as they go along. As I was balancing responsive IPC and my PhD that just never worked out for me. There’s no point in pretending to be in a category that you aren’t or wishing it were different. Discover how you work, acknowledge it, and then find a practical framework where you can use it to your advantage.
Do your research
Now we are getting the nitty gritty of what I had wished I had known before I started, and this part all comes down to research. There are a few things which I wish I’d invested more time in before I even started writing my thesis as they would have removed a bunch of the wall contemplation and anxiety, as well as saving a heap of time:
There are lots of different ways to structure a thesis, and as long as you obey the broad university rules, the detail of how you do it is up to you. Spend time looking at other people’s, as the best flattery is to borrow, to identify the bits you like, the bits you don’t like, and find inspiration for what works for your way of thinking. All of the UCL ones are available online, and I’m sure many other universities are the same
Learn how to make/edit writing templates, or find ones that are pre-done. This may be the old person in me but I just didn’t know enough about how to set up word or other document templates to auto generate lists. My poor friend came in at the end and spent 8 hours correcting my thesis so all of it would work and I didn’t have to manually change my indexing
Find reference software that you like and spend time making sure your inputs are high quality and not missing details. The last thing you want to do for hours pre submission is to correct hundreds of incomplete references as you didn’t check on upload
Know your university submission rules inside and out. You will hopefully never be in the position I was in, where I had to know what would happen if I submitted without supervisor sign off, but even so it is worth familiarising yourself. These rules will help you choose examiners, understand time scales, and be sure your thesis structure is acceptable. Best always to be prepared.
More is not always better
As much as my thesis was long at 95,000 words plus references, for a short time it looked like it might be even longer and I was going to struggle to keep it under the 100,000 word limit. I had an entire other data chapter to put in and just had a lot of self doubt about dropping it as I thought it was the ‘lazy’ option (BTW I often struggle as I think of myself as a pretty lazy person and so find it difficult to self check). The thing is, it didn’t serve my story, and I would have been adding it in just to show how much work I’d done. That really isn’t the purpose of a thesis so in the end I was persuaded to edit and drop it out. It was such a good call but required the help and support of others. Making sure that you are either able to do a brutal edit yourself, or can call in the support of someone else who can, will make your thesis so much better.
Find a critical friend
Which brings me onto having critical friends. These are the people you like and trust to tell you the things you may not want to hear but will make your work better. You need to find a couple of these who will read though and discuss your work with you, preferably ones who will also help edit as they go. You need people doing this who understand what you are doing and you have pre-existing relationship capital with, so it won’t destroy your friendship when they point out that something isn’t making sense and you haven’t slept for a week. Pre build these relationships ahead of time during your PhD, nurture them, they will stand you in good sted, not just for your thesis but for life.
Take advice, but have the courage of your convictions
Writing a thesis is like planning a wedding, once you mention it everyone will just start offering you advice. I understand the irony of this statement in the context of this blog post, but it’s true, and honestly no one is forcing you to read these words 😉 All of this advice can become very challenging, as the likelihood is that some, if not all of it, will end up being conflicting, especially if you have too much of it. It’s one of the reasons I suggest having just a couple of good critical friends, obviously in addition to your supervisors.
I would also suggest reviewing all of the advice you receive on the basis of three things before you take it onboard:
The level of knowledge and experience of the person giving it you in the specific task you are doing – accepting a history PhD’s thoughts on your genomic thesis may not be that helpful, although they may inspire a new approach that could work
Understand the drivers behind the advice – some people will give you advice just because they feel they have to contribute, and some people will genuinely want to help. Not all advice is benign, however, and so understanding the drivers behind it is key
Evaluate whether the suggestion works for the way your mind works – some people will have really good suggestions that don’t work for the way you process the world or your vision – ideas are like dresses, the same ones don’t fit everyone
Be prepared to find your own way forward as you are the person who needs to write it. Keep enough of an open mind to accept a challenge that will lead to improvement, but don’t try to incorporate everything, otherwise you will lose your voice at the centre of it.
Be prepared for revisions
It’s so tempting to think that if you put enough time into your first draft that you will be saving time further down the line. The problem is that that is not always true. Sometimes, spending a lot of time on your first draft just means you go further down an inappropriate rabbit hole. You can lose not only lose a lot of time when you have redo it, but it can also become challenging psychologically to make the change. Think me and the Adenovirus chapter, unnecessary agonising occurred which took up emotional band width and time. In the initial structural work up phase, it is probably worth therefore getting early commentary before you are too attached to a specific approach, so that if you have to pivot you can do more easily.
The other thing to note is that it will always take you waaaay longer to edit than you anticipated. For most of us, we have never had to work on a document this long, and so don’t generally have good projection skills for the length of time it will take. You will also want so many more versions and edits of your thesis than of any other document you’ve done, as you won’t want all those spelling mistakes coming back as corrections, and I for one didn’t realising I would be on ‘final version’ 20 something.
Finally, your supervisors and others reading and editing it will take much longer to get it back to you than other things you’ve sent on because they also have to find larger chunks of time than they normally would. It is also worth knowing ahead of time how many times your supervisors are prepared to look at it, so that you make the most of the opportunities you have and pick the key moments for input. Make sure whatever time you think you’ll need for editing is probably tripled on your project plan.
Remember to take time to decompress
I write this as someone who quite literally lost her hair and developed a bald patch during her PhD, make sure you take breaks. Your brain is processing vast amounts of information during your writing up period and it is easy to become laser focussed. That’s good but it can also be trouble. You need to walk away from a piece of work to see the problems and the gaps within it. From a basic point of view, you will get to the point where you read what you think is there rather than what it actually is there, and that is no good to you in the long run.
So, from someone who didn’t and still lives with the physical consequences, make sure that both your mind and body are able to do what it needed of them by ensuring you rest. Sometimes, all you’ll need is a day in the lab away from the laptop, but some days you will need to have a long soak or a walk in the woods to enable your mind to see what’s right in front of it when you return. Also, I highly recommend booking a holiday between submission and your viva date so you walk into that viva room in the best physical and mental shape you can.
Your thesis is YOUR thesis
Your thesis, like your PhD is one of the few times in your career where the work should be entirely yours, and at the end of the day you will be the person sat alone in a room to defend your choices. I’m not advocating ignoring your supervisors, they will have huge amounts of experience and it is always worth getting the benefit of what they have to say. If the crunch time happens however you can’t use the ‘my supervisor told me to’ defence when you are sat in that room and looking your examiners in the eye. Your work has to make sense to you and be presented in a way that you can walk someone else through and defend it, there’s a reason a viva is called a defence in the US. So, as much as it’s important to get the best possible advice, input and support, when it comes to being in that room you are alone, and so you have to own the decisions you’ve made and the work you’ve done. You will come out of that room all the more developed as a scientist because of it, and whatever happens you should be proud of what you’ve done.
In the end, this princess and general could have chosen to slaughter the villainous Thesis, but instead she adopted it and made it her friend. Now it serves her as a memory charm and library guardian for all the work that came before, and acts as a reminder for her to be kind to all those that are following in her footsteps.
The thing is, it will not have been the only bad science day I will have posted about. You see, science is wonderful, but some days, it can also be heartbreaking. Before the breakthroughs, there is often a period where it feels like nothing is ever going to work again. I currently have a few PhD students who are in the ‘I just need data phase’ and so I thought I would take this week to acknowledge how challenging it can be and share some things I learnt that got me through.
The results of your experiment do not define you as a scientist
I want to say this first, and I want to say it loudly and on repeat, especially for all of those PhD and other scientists who are currently struggling with experiment failure – failed experiments DO NOT make you bad scientists! I shall say it again – failed experiments DO NOT make you bad scientists! All scientists fail, some of us have failed for months at a time, and challenging science is the name of the game. If you were doing something that had been done before, you wouldn’t be doing PhD level work. Therefore, failure, far from being a flaw, is to be expected. The sooner this is accepted, the better your mental health will be.
It’s incredibly challenging some days, but we all have to remember that our success at ticking actions off our list does not define who we are as people. Science is also far more than undertaking experiments. Did you sign up and deliver some kick ass outreach? Did you ask a great question in lab meeting? Did you make your struggling peer a cup of tea or help them with a figure they couldn’t get right? Sometimes, when the thing we’re obsessing about doesn’t go right, that is all we can see, and we ignore all the rest that is going well, make sure to acknowledge the good stuff.
Sometimes, you need periods of failure to get to the success
PhD’s are apprenticeships in research, and all of the failed experiments are far from a waste. They are part of the learning. You will use them to create your method development sections of your thesis, and they will give you great discussion points for your viva. In fact, if you had a completely clean sailing PhD that might be the more unexpected thing if I was your examiner, I’d be forced to dig more about where your learning happened.
Also, and I hate to do this as it’s the most trite thing ever, but some of the best science comes from mistakes and screw ups. Think Fleming and penicillin. The main thing is the mind set through which we view the failure. If we take it personally and let it get in our heads, all we can see is failure. Some of my best science has happened when failure has made me take a step back and pause, and suddenly I’ve seen the problem in a new light, or it’s forced me to make connections I wouldn’t have normally thought about. Sometimes, we need to be sure we see the failure as an opportunity rather than the end of hope.
It can be soul destroying when an experiment you’ve worked on for weeks or months crashes and burns, but the thing I’ve learnt is that often that happens when I push through too much, or don’t give it the attention it deserves. For me, experimental failures can also be warning signs about the pace and intensity of my work and can, in the end, offer a useful way to self check and force me to review my working patterns to give me a better more sustainable pathway to success. If you are crying over a failed run, it’s probably an indication that you need a break or to work differently.
Know when to continue down the rabbit hole and when to pivot
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt during my time working in science and doing research is that sometimes you have to be prepared to stop what you’re doing. During my PhD I spent 18 months trying to separate Adenovirus from viro cells using centrifugation to reduce whole genome sequencing read loading towards monkey rather than viral DNA. You know what, I got a bit of a reduction, but not enough to make a real difference, and to get that I worked till midnight for months as that was the only time the ultra centrifuge was available. What I didn’t do was a) set some success criteria b) stick to them and c) have a cut off that was based on effort vs reward. I just carried on…..and on……and on for very little payoff when I should have just stopped.
There will be times when you just need to persevere, as the work you are doing in central to the project and definitely achievable (anything core should be designed at the project level as attainable). There will, however, always be other aspects that need to be evaluated for the resource they are requiring (time, money, etc) vs what they are adding to your body of work. There is no point in spending 18 months on something that will be 2 pages in your thesis, there is point in spending 12 months fixing something that will be a chapter or more.
So one of the main skills I’ve had to develop is the ability to step back and see where the piece I am currently working on fits into the whole, and I can then evaluate what level of effort it is worth. If you haven’t set your success criteria etc beforehand it can be super painful to reach this decision and to walk away. This can be why having a good project timeline for your work/project/PhD can be really helpful. It helps you make pragmatic decisions and gets you out of the weeds in order to help you move forward with a view of the work as a whole.
Some days, you need to walk away to gain clarity
One of the things that has helped me with the ‘rabbit hole or pivot’ conundrum is getting to know myself enough to understand when I am in a spiral. My willpower and persistence are probably the only reasons I’ve managed to get as far as I have. The downside to these aspects of my personality is that I become hyper focused on a goal and the fact that it has to happen, I get in my own way and can’t always do the needed reflection piece. The end result of this is that it takes me longer than it should to realise I should have stopped (this is true of everything for me, not just experiments).
Believe when I say that it is worth developing the self-awareness to be better at this, as combined with the self reflection skill described above, it will be a powerful tool throughout your career. For me, this involved knowing when I need to walk away and distract my brain with some trashy TV or process it by writing a blog. My husband wishes it was the decision to go and load a dishwasher or clean, but no one can have everything. Pre-pandemic it was also things like going for a run, although I have to be honest and say I haven’t got back there. Whatever your technique, it took me a long time to realise this was a key part of my process. I needed to distract my brain, and the very process of doing this enabled me to gain clarity. Far from berating myself for my prevarication, it was actually key to achieving my aims and objectives.
Know when to get support
Frankly, sometimes you can’t manage alone. In fact, in my case, I hardly ever can. It’s why I really believe that science is a team sport. Sometimes, you will need someone else to help you recognise that it’s time to evaluate. Sometimes, you will need the support of others as part of the reflection process, and when it comes to troubleshooting why things are not working, two heads are definitely better than one. Far from being a sign of weakness, seeking support and building networks so you have identified that support are key parts of your career development. There will always be people out there who have more experience than us and learning from them so we don’t just replicate each others mistakes is just good resource management.
Always have a plan b, and ideally c and d
As I’ve already said, failure is just part and parcel of science. There’s no escaping this fact. What I have learnt though is there are routes to being more savvy about anticipating that failure. I had a fairly horrid experience during one of my masters degrees, where the project was designed as just one thing that either worked or it didn’t. Inevitably it didn’t, and I was forced to write 10,000 words on 3 results. This taught me 2 valuable lessons, 1) never blindly follow a project designed by someone else, if you feel it isn’t right for you own the fact that it is your project and you need to input to get it where it needs to be, and 2) never design a project that is entirely dependent on plan A working, as the chances are it won’t.
Taking a modular approach to any project design will enable you to combine parts that work and still have an over arching narrative that makes sense and enable you to succeed, even if individual components fail. If you are designing a project around a core component that you are then attaching spokes to, that component needs to be guaranteed in terms of process success, even if not result outcomes, as you can discuss the results in the context of your work, but you can’t risk not being able to get them. Take time to map this out and to undertake a SWOT analysis, so you can pre-plan for how you will manage any failures. That way you won’t lose time panicking when things go wrong, as you will have a defined pathway already.
Don’t benchmark against the success of others
A lot of the way in which we experience failure is defined by how we emotionally respond to the context of that failure. Sometimes benchmarking against others can be helpful, but more often than not if you are already feeling challenged it can just add to the pressure you are already feeling. I think this especially true when taking a PhD, as both you and your project are highly individual. It can be to look at others and their outputs and not compare, but the truth of the matter is you are likely comparing apples and oranges. PhD’s by their very nature need to be unique pieces of work, and so someone can appear to be killing it but their track record will look different to yours as they might face their challenges in the future, or may have to justify their work in a different way. So look to peers for support rather than affirmation of your progress, as every pathway in different. Otherwise you can make a challenging time even worse for yourself.
Know that we have all been there
I started out by saying that failed experiments do not make you a bad scientist and I want to finish by saying that the way I know this to be the case is that I have yet to meet any scientist who hasn’t spent dark days dealing with failed experiments, or just failure in general. No matter how lonely it feels in the moment, know that we have all been there. That may not make it feel any better, but I hope it empowers you to reach out and let your supervisors/peers know how you are feeling in order for them to support you through it. No one should judge you in this, because in judging you we would be judging ourselves. Science can be a really lonely profession, but it doesn’t have to be, and so reach out to your networks, and if you can’t reach out to them reach out to me. The better job we do of supporting each other the better placed we will be to create work that matters and improves the world just a little bit.
It’s that time of a year, the time of year when I get a number of appointments put into my diary from people who want to talk about doing a PhD. This will range from undergraduates, where I’ve taught on their course, to established healthcare professionals with over a decade worth of lab or clinical experience. I thought it might be useful, therefore, to write a post where I go through some of the stages of discussion that take place in these meetings in order to help anyone else thinking about the same thing.
Over the last decade I’ve spent time talking with a lot of people who come to me saying they want a PhD and my first question is always why? I ask this not just because it is the question you will always get asked in your PhD interviews but because your answer will determine a number of things, some of which I’ve covered below.
How much thinking have you done?
Starting a discussion with someone where you ask why they’ve decided to do a PhD is a good way to check how much thinking they’ve done about a) what a PhD actually is and b) how it will enable to them to achieve their aspirations, a PhD is not the end game after all, it’s a step on a pathway. Now, if someone is an undergraduate, they may be focussed on a PhD as the next educational step and not yet have clarity about where it will lead. However, for someone whose already a working scientist, this question holds a lot more weight as they are more resource limited (in terms of time) and probably need higher levels of clarity prior to committing. The way someone answers this question (and it’s one I also use in interviews) helps me gauge how far along in the thought process someone is. In an interview, it also helps me gauge how committed someone is, as they have invested the time to really think about their why and how it serves their purpose and values.
This then leads onto some more specific questions:
What subject of PhD? are you looking to progress via a scientific route or via other channels in leadership or education.
What type of PhD – if you are coming to me as a Healthcare Scientist looking to progress a traditional research doctorates are no longer your only option. You can now undertake a professional doctorate via a number of different routes.
Where do you see a PhD taking you to in 15 years time? Which doors will it open? Are any of these restricted by doctorate type?
Why now? What are the opportunities or support you have available to you now. How have these changed (if you’ve been in post) to allow this to be an option now and how might they change in the future? Could any of these changes impact you in the time course of the PhD?
Thinking about what route to PhD you will want to follow is key. Some, like fellowships, come with substantial resource in terms of matched salary and both educational and consumables funding, but are highly competitive and will likely take you over a year to prepare. Others are much more under your control, like self funded, but require you to have resource of your own to begin with.
The route that might work best will therefore depend a bit on where you want to end up, but also on personal factors, such as finances and available time. Some of these routes may also limit progression down certain pathways, if you want to become a full research academic for instance you will probably need a research PhD rather than a taught doctorate. If you choose your route without knowing your why you could therefore close off some possibilities without truly being aware at the time:
Unfunded route, where you register but undertake an unfunded PhD alongside your post. Often your employer will pay your PhD fees and you apply for consumables money
Self funded route, where you take time out to do your PhD but you fund your own fees and consumables, usually in an academic department
Stipend funded, the route most people think of when undertaking a PhD. You apply for a project where the funding and requirements of the PhD have been set out by a supervisor. These are more like fixed term jobs where you deliver on a set of parameters
Fellowship, this route in probably the most competitive and requires substantial preparation. On the other hand it can offer a route by which you can undertake a PhD whilst still retaining your salary, and have access to funding for training and consumables
Training post, this route will often offer a taught doctorate rather than a traditional research PhD. It is also a way in which you may be able to develop clinically at the same time as developing leadership and research skills, and so might be the most appropriate route if you are aiming to undertake a PhD in order to get a specific role
How much research have you done?
When I talk about research here, I’m not talking about the academic kind, I’m talking about the fact finding and speaking to people kind. One of the ways I can often judge how seriously someone has thought about undertaking a PhD, and establish how far they are along with the process, is talking in a little more detail about what kind of research questions they are thinking of and the practicalities of undertaking a PhD in that area, such as what institution? or what supervisors? This is where the nitty gritty really starts to matter:
What thinking have you done on your research question, how far is it progressed? Do you have a broad subject like Clinical Microbiology, a more specific subject area such as Gram negative sepsis, or something really developed, such as comparison of molecular detections of antimicrobial resistance techniques and their impacts on antimicrobial prescribing decisions. There are pros and cons about having reached different levels of thought. It is good to leave enough conceptual room where your supervisors can support you in ensuring that your research question is both achievable and of PhD level. Coming in with only the broadest level of thinking however, tends to imply you may not have thought about it enough and may limit how much support and sign posting someone can give you, as it will be harder to tell which funders might be interested or academically where it might sit.
Who are you thinking in terms of supervision? Have you approached anyone? Making the right supervision decision is key, not just in terms of topic but also in terms of PhD experience. It is therefore always worth doing your due diligence in terms of research who is working in the area, but also in asking what is their working style? What is the experience of others in their lab? Can they help you in the kind of career path you are envisioning for yourself? If you want a clinical career you may not want to go and work with a fundamental scientist, as their networks will be different and may not support your trajectory.
What institution are you thinking of? Have you read up or spoken to others about what is like to study there? Institutions, like supervisors, tend to have a specific style, and it may be one that works for you but it also may be one that doesn’t. Your institution in some ways may be determined by your supervisors, but you may have the option if you are doing a combined clinical/academic placement to choose. You may also want to bear the institution in mind when identifying your supervisors in the first place and use it as part of your matching criteria. Sometimes, you may also have no choice in institution, especially if you are studying linked to a training scheme – in which case, be aware of travel or other requirements, when decided your route to PhD, as it may impact your experience.
Have you thought about the realities?
PhDs can often be idealised as experiential learning, the reality of them can be very different however, and I’ve already posted about the challenges of the second year slump. The truth of it is that all PhDs are challenging, and sometimes I think that achieving a PhD is more a measure of stubbornness and refusal to give up than of academic competence. There are some things that can be made much easier if you think about them and how they will work for you and your life style before you embark on this particular journey.
The first of this is how will you balance a PhD with your other life commitments? Each of the routes to a PhD have different pros and cons. If you don’t have loads of money in the bank, and like me don’t have a lot of savings, then doing a self funded PhD may not be an option for you. Other options, like a PhD with a stipend, may also be off the table, if you need your current salary to make ends meet. This in itself may determine which route you take. You may have resource in terms of finance but not in terms of time, you may therefore want to self fund or do an unfunded PhD, in a way that enables you to stretch the process out over several years, so your annual time commitment is less. On the other hand, you may be time limited and need to get it done in the next 5 years, and therefore not have the time resource to put all your eggs into the same basket and apply for a fellowship that takes a year to prepare and has a 20% success rate. Being honest with yourself about the different drivers is essential so that you can make the right choices in terms of route.
It is also key to know what kind of learner you are, I’ve already posted a bit about learning agreements, but even in the absence of one you still need to be aware of your needs. Do you need a supervisor who is going to have a lot of pastoral time? Do you want to be in a group with plenty of other PhD students so you have access to peer support? Do you hate micro management and pretty much want high level accessible support when you need it, but a light touch the rest of the time? These things will determine what kind of supervisor and setting you will need to identify, and the questions should be asking (outside of the scientific) in the process.
Finally, and this one is oh so important, what’s your end game? If you want to end up as a Consultant Clinical Scientist but have little interest in a research career, a taught doctorate may be right for you, it will not be the right choice if you want a Clinical Academic career however. If you want to follow a clinical pathway you may want to ensure that this aspect is retained in your research question, to enable follow on post docs and other progression that supports your clinical role. Not to harp on, but if you don’t know your why no one else can, and it can mean that you make decisions that close future routes rather than keeping progression pathways open. Also, did I mention doing a PhD is hard? If you don’t know your why it can be super challenging to just keep going when the tough times do arrive. If you know your why however, at least you can cling to that vision and end game in order to get you through.
I hope this post helps show that there are many different choices open to you if you are thinking about undertaking a PhD, but that it’s worth doing some thinking and fact finding as part of the process to make sure you make the decisions that are right for you and your life style. For those of you who decide to jump down this particular rabbit hole here are some things I wish I had known when I started, and good luck, you will rock it!
This post is in honour of international women’s day, I hope by talking about this and sharing some thoughts it will make us all more able to stand up for ourselves and support others in moments like the one below, when we encounter the mansplainer in their natural habitat.
I was at a conference last week, and I was struck yet again by the number of questions that were asked that were commentary and not indeed questions. I paid attention, and, in this case, 100% of those undertaking this behaviour were older men. The reason I started to pay attention was because the first session I attended was filled with a panel of young female scientists. The Chair of the panel, however, was an older man, and when this commentary occurred from one of the attendees, instead of shutting it down, he actively participated and even exacerbated the issue. Not only that, but the commentary was also inherently incorrect and was not even helpful. I must admit I found myself becoming pretty infuriated and later found other women who’d been in the room who found it equally maddening. So this week I thought I would channel some of that science rage into a productive place and talk about survival in the world of the mansplainer.
NB please note I recognise that there are also some women that exhibit these behaviours routinely (and we probably all do periodically). In this post I talk about mansplaining as the behaviour and not linked to gender, unless I’m recounting specific personal experiences.
In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve also had a fair amount of men recently lecturing me about what it is I do and do not know, as well as some ‘interesting’ comments on my blog. I therefore may not be feeling as balanced about this topic as I would otherwise. The thing is, it’s not like it is as unusual as it should be, and you would think, therefore, that I should be less bothered by it. In fact, the opposite is true. Now I’m aware and see it happen to others. I’m even less tolerant. I’m pretty fortunate that it only happens to me 3 or 4 times a year to a level that irritates me. It happened less when I became a Consultant, and I suspect that it will happen less (to my face) now I’m a Professor. Even so, with all of these benchmarks of knowledge and experience, it still happens. So here are my thoughts on living in the world of the mansplainer and how we might all work together to make it more tolerable.
Don’t worry little lady
Let’s start with talking about some classic mansplaining that has happened to me. I’m partly starting out with this because I had a really lovely male boss who just didn’t believe that these things happened as no one had talked to him about it. By putting it down here prior to talking about what we can do in response, I hope to contextualise some of what it’s like for any allies out there who have experienced it less as individuals.
My all-time ‘favourite’ example of mansplaining that has happened to me was an email sent to myself and a female colleague that actually started with the words ‘don’t worry little ladies’. The email in question was sent in response to a query about engineering standards. Now, these days I would respond with ‘that’s Professor Little Lady and I am worried so please explain………and what you are going to do about it’. At the time, though, I was completely thrown by how 4 words could effectively minimise my years of experience, my authority to ask the question, and impact my feelings about my ability to follow up. In my defence, I did follow up and insist on further information and a review, but something so small could actually have impacted my ability to do my job and would never have been undertaken with my male consultant boss. These comments, therefore, are not insignificant when, especially in healthcare, they could lead to a reduction in safety. That said, did I escalate? No, did I forward the email to his boss and explain? Also, no. It’s so normal that it never even occured to me. I suspect if I had, it would have just been called ‘banter’ and waved off.
One of my other favourite things (not really) is when I’m called into a room to have a technical discussion, and when it becomes apparent I’m not convinced by the argument, the room full of men call in yet more men, not to enhance or bring more information to the discussion, but because they somehow believe that having more men in the space repeating each others words will somehow intimidate me or force me into conceding that their science is suddenly correct. I do not enjoy conflict and I generally believe it’s bad form to point out the flaws in someone’s argument in front of others, in a way that could be seen as aggressive or embarrassing for the individual. However, if you pull >20 men into a room to lecture me on, for instance how HPV works, when you are neither a microbiologist or have any experience with viral loading or kill, and think that calling in a further 10 will change the underlying fact that I have just finished writing about it for my thesis, my argument is unlikely to change. All that will happen is that I will cease trying to cover up my level of knowledge in order to play nice and I will quote papers and research at you until you let me leave.
Have you thought about?
One of the other scenarios I’ve found where some interesting male commentary occurs is on some of my blog posts. Now, don’t get me wrong a) most of the commentary I receive on my blogs is super supportive and is what gives me the impetuous to continue to write them and b) I acknowledge that by writing and (over)sharing the way I do I also invite engagement and discussion of the content I put out. Every now and again I get a comment that I don’t approve for public sharing and just leave in the archives as I’m not sure that they are part of the discussion I want to have.
When I posted earlier this year about being overwhelmed and shared some tips that have helped me to get through I received some comments from various male subscribers. These comments were very different from those of my female subscribers, who shared how grateful they were that we were talking about the fact that everyone has days when they struggle and that coping mechanisms are key. These comments all came from a place which I assume was kind and supportive, but ran along the lines of ‘if you feel overwhelmed maybe you should have spent the extra time working and clearing your emails rather than writing this blog’.
On the surface I kind of get it, but also a) it is my right to choose how I spend what free time I manage to have for myself, without commentary from others as long as I’m breaking no laws and hurting no one b) blog writing, for me, has become a method of processing my work load and stress levels and therefore suggesting I abandon it would be removing a key coping strategy I utilise c) the blog post was about sharing experiences and methods to move through feeling over whelmed, not a pity party post about how it sucks, therefore the suggestion that I focus my time on not supporting my community is against the ethos of what this blog is about and frankly kind of sucks and finally d) the assumption that I wouldn’t have considered doing less and not over stretching myself probably doesn’t give me very much credit in terms of self reflection or self awareness. So, I suppose my point is this, sometimes by stating the obvious and your opinion about it, it can come over as pretty patronising, as if it wouldn’t have occured to me and I haven’t done the thinking myself. That said, intent matters, and I don’t believe that these are often meant with any ill intent, so I leave them as unapproved and a source of future consideration and move on.
If you look for it, you will see it
Frankly, some of this is insidious, as I discussed in the intro, I only really started paying attention at the conference because there was such an extreme version of it that it drew my attention and I became deliberately aware of it. Sadly, when I posted about it on twitter the almost universal response was ‘only one’ to my retelling of the male commentator. It’s so universal as a stereotype that we laugh about it, but my thinking is also what can we do to challenge it or support others when we see it.
Summary.
Role incredulity is a form of gender bias where women are mistakenly assumed to be in a support or stereotypically female role — an administrative assistant, nurse, wife, or girlfriend, for instance — rather than a leadership or stereotypically male role, such as CEO, professor, lawyer, doctor, or engineer. While this slight or mistake might seem innocuous, it can have real ramifications for women. Women must expend extra energy and time to assert and prove their role. Their words may lack the credibility and authority inherent in their position. And when women are not seen as a leader, they may be less likely to be hired into male-dominated roles or to be considered for promotions.
While the real issue of role incredulity is systemic, there are steps organizational leaders, workplace allies, and women themselves can take to prevent and correct it., including setting organizational norms, being an ally, owning your mistakes, and, if you’re a woman, proactively identifying your role.
I suspect there are few women amongst us who haven’t been asked to ‘sort the coffee’ despite being one of the most senior people in the room, or who haven’t had their bank card saying Dr handed back to their partner. These are little things, and I for one am completely OK with getting coffee, but not because I’m a woman, but because I think we should all take our turn and hierarchy shouldn’t remove us from that. I find it hard therefore to know when to draw the lines over such things, I’m a team player and want to do my part, but I also don’t want to sustain a stereotype that might negatively impact others. Honestly, even thinking about these things in the moment and having that constant dialogue with yourself can be pretty exhausting when it happens over years or decades.
Do these things actually matter?
Even though I feel that I own my place and have so much more strength than I did when I was younger, these comments, decisions, and moments still take up cognitive space. I may rebound more quickly but I still go through the ‘experience-self recrimination spiral-replay’ cycle in order to process it and decide where fault may lie with me or where the learning is.
“What we found was that women largely had negative outcomes as a result of being mansplained to, whereas it didn’t affect men as much,” said Briggs, whose research was published in the Journal of Business and Psychology. “They tended to register that their competence was being questioned more than men did, and to attribute this to a gender bias – so, maybe this person doesn’t think highly of me or doesn’t like me because of my gender.”
This feeling wasn’t shared by male volunteers who were given a condescending explanation by a woman. “Maybe they perceived it as ‘this person is being rude to me’, but they didn’t perceive it any differently if it came from a man or woman, and they didn’t attribute it to a gender bias,” Briggs said.
It may be therefore that we have to acknowledge the role we play in how we receive the information and the fact that some of the behaviour we experience really does not have any ill intent. However, that also doesn’t mean that those undertaking such behaviours don’t equally have a responsibility to understand how their behaviour impacts others, and in some cases leads to the active detriment of the women who are the recipients. Especially if this behaviour is endemic in institutions/settings or originates from the same individual over protracted periods of time.
So, how do we handle it?
I’ve previously posted about how I learnt to own the place I found myself in with some tips on managing this as individuals. I do think that dealing with direct interactions rather than our own imposter syndrome needs a different set of skills, ones that may indeed help with how we see the world over all. It all starts with being conscious of ourselves in the moment, where do we sit, what do we say when we introduce ourselves, how do we respond in the moment and how do we let our view of ourselves drive these dialogues?
Below are some areas of thinking that have helped me and I hope might also help you in traversing the particular challenge.
Decide which truths to believe
I am often considered over emotional because I wear my heart and values on my sleeve. It’s a running joke within my team that I have absolutely no poker face, and the time to be concerned when in a room with me is when I stop being expressive, as it probably means I have become coldly annoyed.
For a long time, I thought that this was the biggest weakness. I had many a person (male and female) explain to me that I couldn’t be successful as I was and that to proceed I really needed to change and fit the stereotype of what a boss/consultant/professor should be. Well, frankly, screw that. Hiding who we are and pretending to be someone else should not be the only path to success. Being open and honest about my values and who I am is not a weakness. It requires integrity and fairly often bravery to function openly as who you are. We are supposed to be assertive but not too assertive, smart but modest about it, passionate but not emotional. I, for one, don’t want to play that game and, in many ways, just opted out and found ways around it. I strongly believe that we no longer need to play by the rules of those who came before us, let’s set our own rules, let’s choose our own truths and empower the future to be different and better for those who will follow on behind us. Choose your own path and let that be your truth.
Practice makes perfect
Now, I’m not sure I would be comfortable saying any of the below as they are written, I think I would be too scared of coming off as aggressive. For all you women out there who could and own being that assertive, I am not worthy. That said, I have used many of these responses, if not these exact words, in order to manage conversations.
The thing for me is you need to know what language you are comfortable with and practice it before you need it. In the moment I am often surprised and lose my mental footing, therefore if I haven’t practiced how to hold my ground and be assertive I lose it to hesitancy and upset. Practicing enables it to almost be a reflexive approach that you can draw on, so that you don’t have the cognitive additional load of making those nuanced word choices in the moment. So the sentences above may not fit you, but find ones that do and try them on for size well before you need them.
One of the things that also helps me is wearing a different head space when I go into rooms where this is likely to be an issue. ‘Dream’ would never hold up in these spaces, and when I leave them, she often crumbles in the replaying of the moment. Professor Cloutman-Green, however, is much more able to hold her own. It’s almost like my science shield enables me to suffer less from impact in the moment and so allows me to maintain or re-establish myself in that moment much more readily. This is different from not being my authentic self in a space, I am still me, but it gives me the emotional distance to process things later rather than being overwhelmed in the moment.
Self-awareness is key
Ever walk into a room, and there’s a single chair left and you offer it to everyone else who comes in after you? I do this all the time. It’s just polite, right? Absolutely. However, if you are in a room that internalises hierarchy and everyone sitting is a Consultant like you and everyone else standing is more junior, by undertaking this action you are unconsciously giving away your seniority in the room. You are signally you’re difference to your other consultant colleagues. Being aware of your surroundings and what cues you are sending out is important.
Ever sat listening whilst a colleague towered above you? The person who deliberately chooses to lean against your door frame whilst you sit in order to explain X or Y to you. Dominance positioning is a thing, we are primates after all. If we have small and closed body language it says a lot more than our verbal responses in the conversation. Sometimes, when you find yourself in a mansplaining situation the mere act of repositioning yourself can impact the conversation. Stand up, gesticulate using wide body language when speaking. It may be that this merely changes the way you receive the exact same dialogue, but sometimes that is half of the battle. If it also supports you in using some of your practiced dialogue, all the better!
How do we help others?
When sat in the conference room mentioned at the start of this article, I had so much rage at the way these young scientists were being treated. My PhD student who saw and understood my response asked ‘are you going to say something?’. I responded ‘no, these girls are going to handle it’, and they did. They did so perfectly. I think one of my biggest pieces of learning over recent years is not to run in like an amazon warrior to save people, as this can in actual fact be diminishing and takes away their opportunity to act. My response now is to be there as a back up if they signal they need help and to offer support and reinforcement with ‘you were amazing in how you handled that’ afterwards to let them know how successful they were from an independent observer view. By rushing into save we can be as bad as the mansplainer as it indicates we don’t have faith in their ability to handle the moment. That said, if I’d had an official role, such as Chair, I feel it would have been my responsibility to stop the situation from happening in the first place. My take home is this, how you respond has to depend on your role and the situation.
I still love the females from the Obama administration who used their voices to amplify those of other women in the room. Not all actions need to be direct or confrontational, sometimes just being there to repeat the voices of others is enough. I wish that I had been able to breath through my rage and find an amazing follow up question to allow that panel to shine even more in that moment, but I didn’t and that’s my learning. That moment wasn’t about me, it was about them and next time I will have practiced how I can then act to amplify them better in the moment, rather than worry so much about the mansplainer in the room and giving him my energy. Every day I learn a little more.
Right, I’m off to the growlery until I find myself in a better mood. See you on the other side.
I am currently away enduring the heat of Houston, Texas, at the American Society of Microbiology annual conference. Hopefully, I will find lots of lovely inspiration whilst I’m here to share with you all. In the meantime, and whilst jet lag is kicking my ass, the wonderful Dr Claire Walker has swooped in and saved me by writing another awesome guest blog.
Dr Walker is a paid up member of the Dream Team since 2013, token immunologist and occasional defector from the Immunology Mafia. Registered Clinical Scientist in Immunology with a background in genetics (PhD), microbiology and immunology (MSc), biological sciences (mBiolSci), education (PgCert) and indecisiveness (everything else). Now a Senior Lecturer in Immunology at University of Lincoln. She has previously written many great guest blogs for The Girlymicrobiologist, including one on the transition from lab to academia.
So, the other night before a conference @girlymicro and I were sat in a hotel bar, drinking martinis and listening to me bemoan some fairly harsh feedback I recently received anonymously from a student in the form of the oft dreaded ‘Module evaluation feedback form’. The conversation went a little like the Deep Space 9 meme of Julian and Garek that’s doing the rounds – you know the one….
I love the internet. Meme generators entertain me no end.
Back to the story, I was complaining and @girlymicro, quite rightly, reminded me of two important facts. One, all constructive feedback is always useful even if we don’t particularly like hearing it. And two, not everyone is going to love us even if we really, really want them to.
I went to bed reflecting on this conversation and my poor feedback. Constructive critical feedback is a powerful tool for growth, yes it stings a little at the time, but when we take time to reflect can we see why we received it? This particular individual found me to be blunt and rude, and in honesty, in this specific instance I would say they aren’t totally wrong. This year, my decision to support University College Union strike action prevented me from giving the first lecture of my module. I use this lecture not only to introduce myself and describe the content of the module, but to set the expectations for behaviour in my classroom. I’m what has been described by my friends and colleagues as ‘old school’, and this makes me something of a marmite individual for students. I want to provide a safe space for discussions, and I cover a lot of triggering subjects. I have no time for disruptive behaviour that detracts from the groups collective learning experiences, and I have a low threshold for calling students out on this. Am I blunt? Probably. Could it be perceived as rude? Absolutely. Without these early conversations the students this year weren’t aware of my expectations and thus my behaviour had no context. Does this make the feedback fair? Possibly. In my honest opinion when you come to a place of learning you put your phone down and respect the teacher as well as your fellow students, and at University level teaching you shouldn’t need to be reminded of this. However, what I’ve learnt is just how important those conversations are, and I will be having them come hell or high water next year.
Girlymicro’s second point also gave me pause for thought. Not everyone is going to adore me. My teaching style isn’t guaranteed to work for everyone. So after finishing my martinis I returned to my feedback and applied the Pareto Principle. The Pareto principle asserts that 80% of outcomes result from 20% of causes. When I view negative feedback through the lens of the Pareto principle, I see that a significant proportion of this feedback comes from a small percentage of students. And the same is true of the positive feedback. Understanding this principle lets me focus on how I can direct my efforts to addressing their concerns specifically and prioritise improvements across my teaching to make meaningful change. However, it’s also crucial to recognise the silent majority the 80% who are, apparently, content enough not to provide an evaluation of the module. A major overhaul probably isn’t necessary, but there are tweaks to be made to make the content work for everyone.
Finally, I reflect on the words of wisdom from the great Obi Wan Kenobi himself:
“ You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” / “The truth is often what we make of it; you heard what you wanted to hear, believed what you wanted to believe.”
My ‘truth’, my point of view has been that my teaching style is interactive and engaging, and certainly some of my students share this opinion. But this isn’t everyone’s point of view and through receiving feedback I am able to see the opinions of those individuals that differ from my own. I often say that teaching is an iterative process, dependent on a cycle of reflection and growth. I may enjoy a particular style of lecture but if it’s not working for the majority, I have to put it down and build something new. Based on both the negative and positive comments, I have been able to introduce more lab sessions, simulated clinical experiences and data analysis workshops to my modules, and move away from traditional didactic teaching. Yes, it’s more work over the summer but hopefully this will lead to a significant improvement in the learning experience of my students. Who knows? Hopefully that quiet 80% like the changes. Either way I’ll await my next critique and take it from there.
TLDR: You can’t win ‘em all. But you can have a lot of fun with meme generators.
I’m off to ASM in Houston in a few weeks and conference season is well and truly upon is. I’ve been fortunate enough to get asked to speak at a number of events over the years, but I still clearly remember how terrified I was when as a trainee I spoke to my first big room. Last year, I gave my first key note lectures. I’d been asked to do a couple in 2020, and then the pandemic hit, so all of those events were cancelled. I felt as nervous as that trainee again. I prevaricated, I self flagellated and then finally managed to force myself to sit down in front of a blank screen and just get started. If you are in any of those stages, this post is for you, I hope it helps.
No one can tell you the best way – only what is the best way for them
First things first. When as a trainee I was preparing my first talk I got A LOT of advice. My first problem was trying to use all of it, even when it was conflicting. I was advised to rehearse over and over until I had it memorised, I was advised to have a script and notes. I was advised to do none of those things as it would be too staged. So, my first tip is this. Seek advice, gain knowledge from those more experienced, but then use what helps you and discard the rest. Your personal process will be different to everyone else’s, and it’s worth acknowledging this early and accepting that you will find a way that works best for you and refine it with experience.
For instance, I hate rehearsals, and I never have a script. It makes me stressed and forces me to feel like I have to deliver the same way every time. I know my content, I know my story and the audience and I are a team who deliver the final product together. I bounce off them and try to read the room, and fingers crossed, it seems to work OK.
The one time I don’t work this way is for extremely time restricted presentations, such as 5 minute fellowship interviews. For those I practice so much I can recite the words in my sleep. These are different because:
you HAVE to get all your content in, your career kind of depends on it
the time lines are short and hard, they will just cut you off and so you need to know you will finish in the window given
there will be no audience bounce, there will be no reading the room, they are going to remain neutral to what you are presenting, and so focussing on them can make the scenario even more stressful.
What I hope you take away from this is that there are no hard and fast rules, there will always be exceptions, but if you can, do what works for you and don’t try to be anyone else.
Ask for learning objectives and check what other talks/speakers are in your session
There is little worse than sitting, waiting to go on for your talk, and hearing the person before you give the talk that you have basically written to give next. I have learnt the hard way to make an effort to ask what an organiser would like me to cover, and to always check what the agenda is before I turn up for the day to see the lay of the land from other speakers titles. A little repetition is not a bad thing, ground hog day is unlikely to land well. This one is more of an issue for invited speaker sessions, although even if you are presenting novel research data it’s worth seeing who else is in your session, as you may be able to reallocate slide time if the 3 people in front of you are talking about the same virus. They are likely to have covered a lot of the generics and you can then invest time elsewhere.
I don’t always get very far, but these days I also ask for learning objectives when I’m invited to speak – what would you like me to cover? any particular highlights that you are interested in? what is the audience size and mix likely to be? All of these things can dictate not just your content but how you think about delivery, such as how much interaction you can include.
Think about your audience
This one seems like a no brainer, but I often think that it’s forgotten. It is really easy as the person delivering to get caught up with your nerves and write a presentation that you feel comfortable with, without thinking about those that will be listening. Now, I’m not suggesting that you deliberately produce content that makes you uncomfortable, but sometimes it is easy to teach in a way that suits us rather than the learners. It can be really worrying to include interactive content, what if no one responds, but if you are on at the end of the day after 7 hours of didactic teaching, your learners may be ready for something that re-engages them.
The thing that scientists and clinicians also often do when they are nervous is to resort to technicality and jargon. It can act as a shield. If you are presenting to a mixed cohort, of either different levels of knowledge or professional backgrounds, this defence mechanism can end up making your content inaccessible to a number of people within the room. It’s OK to have a couple of slides that stretch people, it’s usually not OK to have a whole talk like that, unless you know your audience really well.
Think about the tone of the presentation
I struggled a lot when I was asked to do the talk below. I struggled thinking that maybe I should turn up as ‘Dr Cloutman-Green’ with formality and pretend gravitas. You would not believe how long I went around in my head about it. I then decided that they had asked me to speak about my blog, and my blog is anything but formal and hierarchical, and so I turned up as me, with all the sarcasm and self mocking that entails. In the setting, at the end of the last day of the conference, when everyone was tired, including a little humour felt like the right way to go.
I would however have made different choices if I was turning up to present my PhD thesis in a viva, or if I was presenting to the board, I would have still been me, but a slightly less overt version. Some settings require a formal tone, some lend themselves to informality and some you can decide the path you wish to walk. The key thing is to make an active decision based on the invite, topic and audience to ensure that you match what your tone is with what you wish to achieve.
Find out if you need to allow room for questions
One of the things that often catches people out at research meetings is there is not always a standard of whether there will be time for questions or not, you can sometimes guess by slot length but not necessarily with any certainty. It is always worth explicitly asking if you need to allow time for questions so you can plan your talk length accordingly. I’ve Chaired conference sessions where this wasn’t handled well and it meant that it was really challenging to keep everyone to time and some speakers had much better opportunities for audience interaction than others. If you aren’t told definitely ask, not least so you can prepare for what your answers might be.
Think about what you want for your slides
This again might be a really obvious one, but if you are teaching on an MSc you are likely to want a lot more information on your slides, as they are likely to be annotated and used for later learning. Your conference talk may be recorded, the slides may get circulated, but the reality is that they are much less likely to be used as a later teaching resource. Therefore you will want to pitch your slide content based on your participants/learners, which is another good reason to find out a bit about them.
It is also worth thinking about how important it is for the people in the room to be able to read and understand what you have included on a slide. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen speakers apologise for tables and overwhelming numbers of charts that are not visible to anyone sitting beyond the front row. Unless it’s high level conceptual stuff there is little point including slides that are not going to be accessible to your audience. It is also worth (and I am not good at this) ensuring that colours and fonts etc do not present unnecessary challenges to engagement.
Plan in your breaks/interactive moments
Even if you are the best speaker in the world, and I am definitely not, there are always slots in any agenda or meeting which will make it more challenging. The post lunch slot, where everyone is digesting and sleepy, and the end of day slot where everyone wants to make sure they catch their trains are just a couple of examples. If you are allocated one of these slots, or are given a 3 hour lesson slot, planning how to keep learners engaged is key. More than 20 minutes staring at your powerpoint is going to be enough for anyone. So can you include things like videos or other types of content to break it up? Can you include live quizzes that embed some of the discussion topics? Can you get people to talk to neighbours or even do some group work? It is sometimes easy to stand up and go through 60 slides, when the experience of everyone in the room might have been better with 6 and a modified activity based approach. Again, it depends on the setting and audience, but if you can be brave and consider stepping beyond the lectern during your session.
Make sure you have backups
No matter how prepared you believe you are for giving a session there are some days when it will not be enough, for this one you need to make sure you are the master of your own destiny. There have been numerous events where I have turned up to speak believing that my slides will be already loaded as I had sent them to the organiser well ahead of time, and had the tech guy look at me in bewilderment as they had nothing. I always carry my talks on a USB stick, having emailed them so I can also get access to an email version in case my USB files is corrupted, and I will have them stored on cloud storage as a back up in case I need to download directly onto a system. The fear of having to just get up and talk without slides haunts me too much to leave anything to chance.
Know how you might wing it if needed
The reason I know very clearly what it feels like to have a slide deck that doesn’t work is because it happened to me at a conference in 2021. I rocked up having sent my slides ahead of time, having been told that the organiser had checked them when they were loaded onto the laptop. I started my talk and then realised that every single slide that had a table or anything other than a textbox was entirely blank. I then proceeded to give my 30 minute with a variety of blank slides. When you’re up there there is nothing that you can do but wing it. I pivoted to a session where instead of trying to focus on my slides I talked about clinical experiences linked to the visible titles. I survived, it was even well reviewed, but I never want to do it again. That said, those 30 seconds staring at the first blank slides and working out what to do taught me a valuable lesson, and now I do my ‘what if’ worst case scenario planning ahead of staring at the audience whilst on my sofa with tea, so that I know what I will do if something goes wrong. I also now try to make sure I personally check my slides prior to any session.
Have a watch or phone that you take up with you
You would be amazed at the number of teaching and conference rooms that don’t have a clock on the wall or visible from the stage. I’ve been caught out by this a few times, and when you full screen your slides you can’t always seen the clock. That means you are subject to the session Chair giving you a 5 minute wrap up when you are only half way through your slides, as time feels different when you’re staring into 1000 faces and hoping not to screw up. I always take my phone (on silent) these days and set a stopwatch so that I can gauge where I am in relation to time without having to rely on someone else. I find the slide rush just waaaaay too stressful otherwise.
Be prepared to handle the question that is a actually a comment
This may be a shock to you, but I’m a woman. This means at any given presentation with questions I have a ~30% chance of a male colleague standing up and giving me the question that isn’t a question, but a comment on how they would have a) done my work better b) point out some key point I have missed c) tell me about their work and their experience. This may not be my most attractive feature but I have made a life choice to shut all of these options down hard. I am open to questions and shared learning, I am not open to someone taking question time from someone else in order to rail road a session into something different. If someone starts with “this isn’t really a question but more of a comment” I will generally reply before they get any further with “that’s really great and I’d love to hear it over coffee but I think we need to address the questions in the room first” and then actively call on someone else. You may wish to have a different technique, you may wish to pivot the comment back into something relevant to your talk so you effectively answer it as if it was the question you wanted to hear. You may have a completely different approach (I’d love to hear them all). If there is plenty of time I also sometimes let it slide, but it is a particular bug bear of mine.
Bring yourself into the room
I’ve touched on this one a little throughout, but I think you will have a much better experience, as will your audience if you can bring yourself into the room. That can be anything from including your favourite colour as part of your slide colour scheme to sharing parts of yourself, in terms of stories or experiences, as part of your session. The more you are prepared to share of yourself, the more your audience will connect with you and the better the chance of your content landing. If you are giving your research presentation, maybe take 10 seconds to share why you chose you that given topic, especially if you have a passion for it – like mine for Klebsiella and Adeno. Don’t be afraid to include humour and light and shade within what you are presenting. Audiences often want to know why they should care about what you are talking to them about, so feel free to convince them, and not just by sharing raw data.
Put your nerves into context
It is almost always nerve racking speaking in front of people, even after you’ve done it for years. One of the things I always say to both myself and my students is “what is the worst that can happen”. I’ve seen some truly terrible talks in my time, but I don’t remember who gave any of them, I remember the topic and why it was bad. Even if I did give a bad session and someone remembered it was me, would they remember in 3 years? If they did, the worst outcome is that they may not invite me back to speak, there will be plenty of other people who will, plenty of people who weren’t in that room that day or who won’t remember. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has bad days at the office. Everyone has sessions that don’t go well or land in the way they hoped. The important thing is to learn from them. Sometimes there isn’t even that, I have given the same activity sessions dozens of times, and every now and again it just won’t work. The participants may be in a bad mood, or there’s tech failure. It happens. Bring your best to every moment and that is all you can do, the rest doesn’t matter, the rest isn’t permanent. So good luck and be bold and I can’t wait to hear you speak!
I remember my first attendance at the CSO Healthcare Science awards incredibly clearly. It was probably around 2015, and I had been nominated for the Rising Star award (I didn’t win, the amazing Lisa Ayres rightfully rocked it). It was my first dinner event, and I didn’t really know anyone. Everyone was in their finest evening wear, they’d all done their make up, they all knew each other. I remember sitting there on my own and feeling how much I just didn’t fit into this world. When the Lead Healthcare Scientist award was given out (we didn’t even have one at that point) I remember the banter on stage about where the winner had brought their dress from. I wouldn’t even know where my dress was from, at best M and S, not something that would be discussion worthy for over 100 people. I was so aware on that night that this was a world where I didn’t fit in, or have the tools to navigate.
Despite being Girlymicro, I’m not actually particularly good at the getting dressed up thing. I’m not one of those girls who has ‘wardrobe choices’ and saints help me if I have to paint my nails. It’s just outside of my wheel house. I’ve also posted before about how bad I am at networking and how I’ve had to develop coping strategies to be able to feel comfortable in rooms at conferences. I have friends and colleagues who are naturally gifted in this regard, but I am not one of them. I am not ashamed of who I am, or where I come from, I’m a proud brummy girl who has worked hard, but that doesn’t change the fact that in 2015 I stared at out at a room full of people from my profession, supposedly from my world, and just felt as other as it was possible to be.
Roll on eight years, and through some twist of fate I don’t think I will ever truly understand, I find myself standing outside of Westminster Abbey, waiting to go in to witness the Coronation of King Charles III. I have gone through a lot of emotions in the journey to this spot, but when standing here I didn’t feel like the girl who didn’t fit in. I arrived through those doors comfortable in my own skin, proud to be representing my profession and not scared to represent all that I am in the process. So how did I get from there to here? How I did I change and grow to feel like I could (most days) own the space I find myself in?
Honour the reason you’re here
The first thing for me was the realisation of how many people, woman in particular, have fought and sacrificed so that I could have the opportunity to even feel like an imposter in a space. I’ve posted about my mum and her journey to support science before, but there are so many woman who have faced so many challenges just so I would have the opportunity, or the door opened. Over time I’ve realised how important it is to seize those opportunities in order to honour those that came before. To move the dialogue on and to ensure that I leave things more open and equal requires me to do my bit, to make my sacrifices for those who will come after, to go through that open door and wedge it open so that others can follow behind and then take even bigger strides than I will. The cost of my feeling uncomfortable and experiencing self doubt is nothing compared to what those who went before experienced. If I think of myself as part of a wider picture, of just another brick on the yellow brick road, then it becomes less about me and more about the journey, and what I do to support others. That doesn’t require me to know anything about hats, false lashes or designers, that only requires me to be passionate about why I’m doing what I am doing. Suddenly everything else feels slightly less intimidating, after all, I know my why.
Be decisive: decide who you want to be in that space
So, you are not like everyone else, congratulations! I think that may just be a very good thing. When you enter a new world, a new network, a new experience, you have an opportunity to be deliberate in deciding who you want to be. You aren’t carrying the baggage of being know as ‘the new girl’ even though you’ve been there 20 years now. You aren’t that girl who spilled adenovirus tissue culture. You are shiny and new. You therefore have the opportunity to tell your tale, to share your why and really focus on the impact you want to have. Most of the time you have been invited into that space, so try to reflect on why that is and what you want to achieve. If, like me, you want to move the dialogue forward than it is OK not to be like the other people in the room, you have probably been invited into that space for just that reason. Don’t lose sight of who you are because of the newness, see it as opportunity to be the essence of what you want to bring into that space. If you can focus on why you have chosen to be there, rather than being overwhelmed by the choices of others, then I find it very grounding. For me, that reason can be anything from, I came to have 1 conversations with X that I couldn’t have other wise, to I came because I want to raise awareness of Y. Sometimes, for me, that can just be me actively introducing myself as a Healthcare Scientist and opening the door for people to ask me what one of those is, so I can discuss how awesome this work force are.
Acknowledge your fears
One of the things that has helped me most is to not just ignore my fears and pretend they don’t exist, but to spend time in reflecting on why they exist and what triggers lead to them overwhelm me. For me, it’s often about letting people down, or standing out in the wrong way – thus diluting my message and meaning I lose my voice. For the Coronation, because I knew not feeling like I was fitting in appearance wise would be a trigger for me and therefore not achieving the representation I wanted to achieve, I took steps before I went. I researched what to wear, I learnt to understand the dress code. This meant on the day I didn’t worry about that part at all, I could just focus on representing IPC and the Healthcare Scientist profession, this isn’t hard, because I have the best job in the world and love my profession. Suddenly I’m freed up to focus on joy and not fear. In 2015, I hadn’t done this work and it’s not something that happened over night. I had to take the time to learn more about me so I could then manage my responses. The work is worth it though. Obviously, this doesn’t always mean you won’t be taken from left field, but most of the time if you’ve put in the work you can free yourself up to be present and enjoy the moment.
Understand that the world is not you centric
The other things is, and I don’t want to ruin anyone’s egos here, you’re just not that important. The BBC did not care what I was wearing at the Coronation, in 2015 I was probably hardly noticed at that event, let alone anyone bothering to think enough about me to judge my outfit or elevator pitch. Frankly, we are mostly just not that important to other people. Therefore a lot of the fears we have about being judged are really not that relevant, we’re just not that seen. Also, even if the worst happens, and you spill that red wine all over the carpet at the House of Commons drinks reception (yep, I did that) the likelihood is that no one will remember. In my case the only person who remembers is Professor Mark Fielder, mostly because I almost spilled it on him too, and we just laugh about it now. I have been to some truly awful conference presentations, but I remember the topics, I don’t remember the speaker. Even if the worst happens, when you get over the mortification, you will be the one that remembers it, it is unlikely that anyone else will. So be braver, the worst is probably not that bad, spend less time worrying over it and embrace the good that could happen instead.
Have the bravery to keep being you
Finally, and this may be because I’m just growing old disreputably, but be brave enough to be you. You find yourself in this moment, and no matter the reason you arrived at it you are the master of your own destiny. Be brave enough to bring all of you into that moment and be who you want to be. It’s not always easy in the moment but I promise you, you will regret the moments when you wuss out and toe the party line or try to be someone else so much more then any moment when you were truly yourself, no matter what the reception. For me, I guess its always about having honesty with myself, and building relationships with others based on the trust that I will be seen. Relationships and moments built without that honest and courageous authenticity will never be really real, you’ll always question them and yourself within them. By being who you are then, good or bad, what you create with others is the truth and has real meaning. I feel it is only by being bravely who we are that we can have the impact that we want for our lives and for changing the world for those who will come after. So lets raise a glass, to being authentically and completely us, and celebrate all that we are, both the good and the work in progress!
Many years ago, before Mr Girlymicro walked me down the aisle, we went on a trip. This was rather a special trip and involved him, mummy Girlymicro and me taking the trans siberian express from Moscow to Beijing. As a way to meet my mother, it could be said to be a rather extreme introduction! At one point, in Ekaterinburg, we had gone shopping and brought a LOT of food to last us the next train leg. It was hot, and to be honest, I wither in anything above 23 degrees. Our collective Russian was pretty poor, and so there was no choice but to walk from the supermarket back to the hotel. It quickly became apparent that we were unprepared for carrying so much stuff in the rather excessive heat. Mr Girlymicro was in charge of directions. Every block he would turn to us and say ‘nearly there, just one more block’. Every time we believed him until after 17 blocks we made it back. Thus, the phrase ‘just one more block’ was born in our household as a way to tackle a challenge that feels truly insurmountable.
The last few weeks have been pretty hard, and this phrase has been used quite a lot. I’ve not been feeling great post COVID, and when I don’t feel great physically, I also struggle mentally. I tend to spiral about interactions and struggle to find the perspective to determine if anything I’ve done is any good. At the same point, I am aware that this is a transient state, and I’m cognisant that I am in it. It’s just, weirdly, sometimes knowing that doesn’t make it feel that much better. The thing is though, life doesn’t stop when you’re not at your best, when you’re not having your best day. Life continues, and sometimes you just have to put on your big girl pants and deliver anyway. Sometimes, the only way is through. So, here are some of my thoughts on just making it through the day when the world gets tough.
Take one step (or block), one action at a time
Sometimes, when I’m finding things very challenging, I have to focus on super short term goals. Sometimes that can be getting through the week, sometimes that can be getting through the day and frankly sometimes that can mean I take the world 10 minutes at a time and focus my world down to a pin point. This may seem a little crazy, but it’s the way I trick my mind and stop being either physically or mentally overwhelmed by the big picture. I may not know how I’m going to survive running a week long course when ill, but I can picture myself surviving the next 10 minutes. All I have to then do is rinse and repeat.
If it’s workload that is overwhelming me, I do the same thing, just with tasks. Instead of focussing on all the things I have to achieve and feeling panicked, I make a commitment to myself that I will complete a single thing. That single thing can then flex depending on my capacity, it could be as simple as making a single call or sending a single email, it could be as complex as reading through a PhD thesis. It’s not the complexity that matters, it’s the commitment to a single act. Doing enough of these then means that without worrying about the whole, I’m still making headway. Now, obviously, in an ideal world you would do this in order of priority, but frankly some days that just doesn’t work for me. Sometimes, I’m just in too deep. Something is better than nothing.
Progress is not always visible, find/make what markers you can
The more senior I become, the less able I seem to be to be able to see progress. So much of what I do now can feel really amorphous. Sometimes, I really miss the days when I would spend a Friday Sanger sequencing, with the radio on. I would start the day with nothing and end it with results that I would phone out to support patient care. The achievements were visible. They felt tangible. The world I live in now is more strategic and tasks run for months, if not years often. It’s harder, therefore, to KNOW you’ve achieved or made a difference. This is the nature of the work, but I’ve learnt that I need some form of progress markers, just to maintain momentum. I therefore try to make sure that I make some milestones, even if the project as a whole doesn’t require them for reporting.
This sounds easier than it is sometimes, and to be honest, I’m still a work in progress on how to do it well. Mostly it’s challenging as this takes time and space to reflect in order to determine what these milestones should be, and this is not something I always grant myself until necessity hits. If you make the time investment in the planning phase it does make it easier in the long term to see the wood for the trees. These milestones may need to be a little inventive as not all long term tasks lend themselves to this process easily. Mine can be anything getting X to produce document Y (or even seeing a draft), to managing to pin A down for a meeting that’s been cancelled for the last 3 years. Whatever it is, it’s about acknowledging that just managing to get that small piece of the puzzle in place is progress.
Acknowledge that you don’t have to spend every day changing the world
I’m super guilty of this one, I have delusions of superhero status, but I am not wonder woman, and neither are you. Some days, everything comes together, and we make massive leaps forward. What we often don’t acknowledge in these moments of great success is the the number of days it took to get us there where it felt like zero progress was occurring. Any big change is not a single moment. It’s many much smaller, less visible moments that suddenly come together in a way that is apparent. In the words of Hamilton, ‘I’m not standing still, I’m lying in wait’. It can be hard to recognise and value those ‘waiting’ moments however.
Not just that, though. We can’t function at 100% all the time, we’ll at least I can’t. If you try, it means that you end up with huge peaks and troughs as you drain your battery. I’m rubbish at doing this in practice, but I acknowledge that what is needed is consistency in order to create impact. Small steps often get you further than single huge leaps. If we set all of our energy on trying to leap tall buildings rather than putting one foot in front of the other, we may actually be making life both harder for ourselves and be less effective. We have to know when to look at the sky and when to look at our feet.
Don’t treat yourself in a way you wouldn’t treat a friend
My inner critic is not kind. Right now, for instance, I’m having a real ‘you don’t really achieve or do anything’ inner dialogue. The thing is, I would never treat someone else the way I treat myself. I would remind someone else of all the progress they’ve made, I would remind them of their benchmarks, I would give them a reality check on their expectations of both themselves and the environment they are in. I would remind them that mistakes and failure are human and, in fact, a crucial part of learning and having a growth mindset. I would do all these things for others, but I struggle to do them for myself. I guess writing this blog is often my way of having kinder conversations with myself.
The way we speak to ourselves matters. Our self-talk, our inner monologue really does impact on how we see the world and how we respond to challenges. I’m trying to be cognisant of this and (between blog writing) actively pep talk myself when trying to manage challenges, or sometimes just get through the day. I’m also super lucky to be able to reach out to Mr Girlymicro for a ‘just one more block’ conversation when I can’t get there myself.
Know who you can show your real face to
Sometimes, as I mentioned above, our inner critic is just too strong, or the external forces are too overwhelming. In this case, you may not be able to get there on your own. You may have to reach out and have that moment of vulnerability with someone else to get through. I love a good sounding board, I think they add so much value, and I’m fortunate to have a number of people who I can show the true unpolished version of myself to who will take the appropriate cues of what I need in the moment. I also have you guys who give your time to read my rambling thought processes and always support my thinking and discussion around it.
Reaching out can be a double-edged sword however, you need to know who you can go through this process with. If you are at point where you are already slightly crushed by your inner dialogue, the last thing you need is someone who will escalate that voice. At the same point, you need to have someone who you trust to call you out if that’s what’s needed. There are times when you just tea and sympathy, there are times when you want coaching, there are times when you want advice, there are times when you need someone to call bullshit on your excuses and push you over the hump you’ve created. You need to know that you are with someone who can pivot to what is actually needed in the conversation, and who knows you well enough to be able to read what you need. Either that or you need to be able to reflect enough and go to the right person for the right things. There’s nothing worse than really needing a sympathetic ear and ending up with a lecture on how to do it better that echoes all the criticism you’ve already been giving yourself. Support is invaluable, but choose your route wisely.
Bribery works, for me anyway
I’ve already talked about breaking the world down into manageable chunks of time, or tasks, in order to be able to move forward by inches if needed. If you are strong of mind and have will power this approach on it’s own may be enough, I however still feel like I have the mind of somewhat upset toddler, and so sometimes will power enough doesn’t cut it for me. Sometimes I need to bribe myself. This shouldn’t work as I know as an adult that I can just decide to get these things anyway, and yet for me it still does. I bribe myself with anything from a biscuit and a cup of tea if I manage the next 1000 words to if I make myself run a half marathon I can buy myself that dress I’ve been lusting after. Sometimes completion of the task in itself is enough reward, especially if getting it off my list leads to a decrease in stress level, but honestly right now I just move from one immovable deadline to the next and something more is needed.
There is also something to be said for celebrating some of the milestones, for celebrating progress rather than waiting for the pay off or success. This means that you are more aware of those milestones happening and value them, instead of using an end point to determine how you feel about a task or yourself. Sometimes you might not succeed at the end goal, but you will have learnt a lot along the way, by celebrating the milestones you can therefore remember progress made rather than focussing on the failure.
Some days, it’s merely the act of showing up that counts
If all of the tips and tricks don’t work, if all the chocolate on the globe still wouldn’t cut it, sometimes you have to remember that you are still showing up. You are still working on being present. You may not make the progress that day you wished to make, that deadline may have flown past with you barely able to engage with it, but there is always tomorrow and the hope that it will be better than today. It may not be the perfection that you wanted, but that doesn’t mean that what you’ve produced doesn’t have value. Finally, and I mean this with every ounce of my being, your value as a human being is not tied to what you produce. You have value irrespective of your successes and failures. You have value in just being you, and there is no deadline on that.
girlymicro 