Pinching Myself Again: Switching out Dr for Professor

February 13, 2023February 13, 2023 girlymicro Academic Life, Microbiology (Research), Research/Academia

While I was away on holiday, I got some pretty amazing news, and now that the contract is in and signed, I finally feel like I can share it. I made Professor! You may think that as I’ve known for a couple of weeks this is coming, this blog post would have already been written, but I didn’t really believe it would come through until I got the official letter so I’m afraid I’m playing catch up.

As you may have picked up, I am still blown away by the fact that this has happened and because I genuinely never thought that someone like me would get here, I thought I would share a little about what it means, why it means so much and how it happened. I do this to inspire others to follow, not to crow, although in the spirit of full disclosure, I am super happy that it’s happened. Also, a warning, I can only talk from my experience, and that is linked to a somewhat unconventional path. Please read the below in that light.

What is an Honorary Professor anyway?

Now, before I go any further, it is an Honorary Professorship as I’m still employed by my Trust rather than UCL, and because of that, it is also not a Chair. It is a title given to someone, who is not employed by a university, but who contributes to the work of that university, in my case via grant funding, paper writing, lecturing and student supervision, but unlike a Chair I am not involved in management. It is also worth noting that, like the academic professional pathway itself, it changes between universities and my only experience is with UCL.

In the UK, this (Honorary Professor) is the highest title to be awarded to individuals whom the university wish to appoint, honor, and to work with. These individuals are not university staff nor employees. An external person is usually recommended by an internal university academic staff, and recommended for approval by the head of department, for which the documents are then forwarded to faculty dean, vice president and president (or deputy vice chancellor) for approval.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorary_title_(academic)

As the title is Honorary, I’m allowed to use the title, but no, I do not get an office, a pay rise, or anything other than a webpage 🙂 My father may have asked me a few times. The success is more about reaching an academic benchmark and achieving recognition for both your work and it’s impact. It also is the final significant step on my journey as a Clinical Academic. I was always told that I should try to ensure that I move up both professional ladders in order to demonstrate success in this area, and so for me, this is as big an achievement as when I became a Consultant in my clinical work.

Why the surprise?

Let me start out by talking about why this felt unattainable and why, therefore, it is such a surprise. I’ve been developing a Clinical Academic career since 2008, so the best part of 15 years. In that time hardly anyone has suggested that making Professor could be something I should aim for. Worse than that, it is in fact an aspiration that I have been told more times than I can count is out of reach for ‘someone like me’. Now, the ‘someone like me’ description changes between the advisors, but a sample have been: you’re a scientist in a medics world, you’re too emotional, you’re too open/honest, you don’t play enough politics, you’re too young, you’re a woman, you will never publish in good enough journals as you work in Infection Prevention and Control.

To put this in context, my medical colleagues automatically make Associate Professor the moment they become consultants, irrespective of their publication or funding track records. They are therefore lined up for the next step and the pathway is fairly established. That said, very few of them go on to take it, partly because that next step is more like climbing a mountain. Put that together with the fact that only 3% of people who graduate with a PhD get to be a professor, and you can see why many people may not decide to pursue it, and why this moment feels momentous to me. Being able to show the world that this is actually what a professor CAN look like is really important to me. To be able to show you can not fit into the stereotype and still get there.

It’s not just about time served

Meeting the criteria to become a professor is not about length of time in post or time served post PhD, there’s quite a lot more to it. You have to be able to demonstrate a diverse portfolio that ticks a number of boxes. One example below is for progression linked to research, but as you can see, you also have to demonstrate not only suitability in the research domain but also in at least 2 other domains.

Progression through the above grades might be expected to be attained by demonstrating an ability to meet:

the threshold research criteria at the next level; and

several of the core and/or specialist research criteria at the next level; and

at least the threshold education criteria or some of the criteria in either of the two other domains (enterprise and external engagement; institutional citizenship) at the next level.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/human-resources/policies/2021/oct/academic-career-framework

Along the way, you will meet a LOT of people who will have an opinion on how you should develop the CV to enable you to eventually apply. One of the things I learnt early was to not listen to those who just said I shouldn’t do try. That’s different from not taking advice. It’s different from heeding the advice of people who say not yet, because there is more to do that will increase your chances of success. These people are often the ones who are wishing you well on the pathway and have some knowledge of the process requirements. The ones who can’t share your vision are the ones to thank for their input and move along. The ones who contribute to your process are incredibly valuable, even if sometimes the truth is hard to hear.

I’m only an Honourary Professor, but even so, I have to meet the same thresholds as my full-time colleagues, as there is only a single standard. As I said above, the Honourary bit really links into your employer rather than the standard you have to attain.

What kind of things do you need to do?

It was International Women and Girls in Science Day this weekend, and I wanted to take a moment therefore to recognise why it can be much for challenging for women and people of colour to attain a Professorship, why it can be difficult for women to find the support they need. I mentioned that some of the stats say that only 3% of PhDs become professors, but the numbers are significantly worse if you are female, and worse still if you are a female person of colour. I’m no expert in this area, but I think it’s worth talking about and raising awareness. There are articles from those better informed than I to talk about it:

Are Female Professors Held To A Different Standard Than Their Male Counterparts?

Ratings-and-bias-against-women-over-time

Talented-women-of-colour-are-blocked-why-are-there-so-few-black-female-professors

Why so Few, Still? Challenges to Attracting, Advancing, and Keeping Women Faculty of Color in Academia

One of the first lessons I learnt was that you are going to struggle to get to the finish line if you try to do it alone. I’ve said it before, and I genuinely believe it, science is a team sport. It will be that team who enables you to demonstrate the breadth, as well as the depth needed. I have a wonderful academic colleague who supported my application, and my research group have always pushed and supported me to aim for the sky. That said, it strikes me that when I say science is a team sport, and that a team is what is required to get you to the finish line, sometimes women are not invited into the same rooms that support others. I’m so aware of the pub nights, meeting clubs, etc, that I’ve been briefly involved in, where names are thrown around prior to meetings, where relationships are built and plans are made. The hours I work generally preclude me from the ‘just popping to the pub’ crowd and the ‘medical discussion groups’ I’ve been to were just too linked into the Old Boys Network tradition for me to feel comfortable. I’m lucky though, at least occasionally I get asked, and therefore I could make an active choice about my path. That isn’t true for everyone. I chose to make my own path, I chose to play with a team that works for me. The word choice is key, and it speaks to my privilege that I get to use it.

The other factor is that women often have ended up being the ones that do the majority of some of the ‘non core’ activities, such as chairing diversity committees or undertaking public engagement. These activities are often things I love and the breadth they provide have always been important to me. The problem is that you have to have enough ‘core’ to secure promotion. You have to be getting grants, publishing papers, and supervising PhD students. Without these, you won’t be able to move forward, no matter how wonderful or talented you are. There are only 2 ways to handle this, keep doing more (and therefore having no time to be ‘in the club’) or be really clear with your boundaries to maintain time for core activities, and this can be easier said than done. To change the stats we have to support each other enough to be able to help with this. Someone’s worth for progression shouldn’t depend on their ability to say no!

It’s a marathon and not a sprint

There are so many boxes to tick and things to be achieved that making Professor is definitely a task of years, on average 15 years post completion of a PhD. I can’t say it enough times, however, that it is not merely about years and time. There are so many things to learn about yourself and your work before it becomes a possibility. What kind of supervisor are you? What is the work that inspires you? Even before you start on the knowledge accumulation.

As I said above, there is also a lot of growing to be done, and I’m nowhere near finished yet. Being able to set boundaries, being able to say no, knowing when to say yes, all of the leadership challenges you can imagine, on top of trying to be creative and deliver new thinking in order to move your research area forward. Just making the networks and finding your collaborators in order to make this happen will take years, and it takes time to build trust and relationships. So buckle in for the ride, and know there is no shortcut for gaining experience.

You will fail and fall many times, but like most challenges in life, it’s about having the passion and persistence to just keep turning up. To turn up after the failures and the difficult conversations. To turn up and take the learning and the growth. To always see the opportunities and develop the knowledge of how to circumvent the barriers. Keeping true to who you are and your values in the face of that failure and the criticism that sometimes comes with it. All of these things, if you don’t let them change you and make you bitter/cynical, will make the successes oh so sweet. Then it’s your job to pay it forward.

Take the time to know you

Like every long-term career journey, becoming a professor requires you to take some time to also know yourself. I’ve said that I got a lot of advice and one of the things I took away from it was that, because it’s a process of years, no 2 people will go about it the same way. From the criteria listed, you can see that you can put a lot of the puzzle pieces together in different ways. Therefore, it’s important to develop in a way that works for you as an individual. What aspects of the role bring you joy? What helps you thrive instead of feeling burnt out? It’s OK to focus on these things and maintain them within your portfolio of practice.

I also think knowing what you are not good or are weak at is also key. None of us are good at everything. None of us enjoy everything. You will have to pick up some core tasks that may not intuitively suit you, but knowing when they are core and when they are not will help you make better judgements. Also, being aware of your weaknesses will enable you to approach those areas more strategically in order to allow you to overcome.

It’s not just what it means to me

I actually don’t have words to express how grateful I am for the responses I’ve had since I shared the news. Part of me always worries about the fact that I might get ‘well why you’, I think it’s the imposter syndrome. Everyone has been so supportive, more than that, a lot of comments have talked about it showing to others that it can be done. This, to me, is SO important. There are so many wonderful Healthcare Scientists out there, so many wonderful Clinical Academics, but so few of them are Professors. It may sound trite, but you can’t be what you can’t see. If you don’t know this is an option, it’s hard to aspire to it as a path. So thank you for your support. Thank you for being my cheer leaders and for sharing what is such a joyful moment for me. In return, I share with you the email my father sent out to my old school teachers and his friends, in order to demonstrate that I know both what this means and how fortunate (or badass) I am. I’m off to break open a bottle of bubbly!

Congratulations to Elaine Cloutman-Green

Thank you to anyone and everyone who has contributed to Elaine’s development by offering advice, education, knowledge, guidance, comfort, discipline!!!!!!!, culture, sophistication!!!!, fellowship and friendship.

Especially her soulmate, mentor and amazing husband Jon.

Plus a small contribution of determination, intelligence, gin!!, character, industry, more gin!!, worldliness, industry, even more gin!!, nouse and a chunk of good, old fashioned, inherited Yorkshire grit from herself.

Who would think that a coalminer and car worker’s grand daughter,
born in Good Hope Hospital of common stock,
Villa Holt End season ticket holding fan,
whose education was via Northfield Manor Junior, Hillcrest and Shenley Court Secondary Schools,
then Liverpool University Biology (BSc 2.1), Physics(MRes) departments, UCL (Msc Queen Mary’s Med Sch) and PhD
Who could forget reading her thesis “The role of the environment in the transmission of Healthcare Associated Infection”?
Fellowship of the Royal Society of Pathologist could achieve such high academic status.

Deputy director of Prevention and Infection Control at Great Ormond Street Hospital,
Pathology consultant
British Empire Medal in the New Year’s Honours List for work on Covid
Freman of the Worshipful Company of Plumbers (I would not let her turn on a tap!!!!)

Now UCL, University College London have for her research work on the prevention of the spread of water bourne diseases and academic teaching programmes about Virology and reducing the spread of disease have in their infinite wisdom have honoured and rewarded her making her:

PROFESSOR ELAINE CLOUTMAN-GREEN

Very well done
Eeh ba gum, sh dun reyt gud tha’ nose!, anno we’er chuffed to bits,
Her sister Claire would have been even prouder of Elaine than her Dad of her success
Dr Alan Green January 2023

All opinions in this blog are my own

The Sound of Deadlines Rushing Past: Surviving in a world where deadlines are constant and there’s never enough time

January 13, 2023 girlymicro Academic Life, General, Leadership

I was fairly unwell before Christmas and was off sick and then struggling for a while. This was particularly traumatic as there were all the inevitable end of year deadlines that just wouldn’t stop coming, and frankly, I was in no position to be able to meet them. The thing is, it is now January, and I didn’t meet those deadlines, many of them I still haven’t delivered on. The other thing to note is that I am both a) still alive, and b) still employed. As someone who has a fairly visceral fear of the deadline, this is pretty shocking to me. So I wanted to kick off the year with what this experience has taught me and what I’m taking from this moving forward. Many of these things the rest of the universe probably already know, but sometimes I take a while to catch up.

Know when a deadline is a deadline and when it is more of a suggestion

The first thing to say is that I have never really taken the time to explore whether the dates or other information given to me are even true deadlines. Give me a date and a time and I will agonise and feel guilt if I fail to deliver. I work on the assumption that if you give me a cut-off then it really is a task that has one. Reflecting on my Christmas experience however, I have learnt there are probably three scenarios where I will be given deadlines:

True deadlines – papers for committee meetings, grant deadlines etc. This is where a number of subsequent actions are riding on yours and if you don’t deliver, the domino effect is both real and important in the wider scheme of things
Gate keeping deadlines – manuscript review deadlines for other authors, 1st draft deadlines for policies, etc. This is where the task needs to happen, and in a timely fashion. The exact date itself, however, is arbitrary and so as long as communication is good and the time period doesn’t substantially extend the process itself is unharmed
Courtesy deadlines – submitting a conference presentation 3 days ahead (normally), arranging planning meetings etc. These often get given dates to ensure that they happen, but in reality as long as they get done before they evolve into a true deadline i.e. before presenting at the conference, then the timescale is actually flexible

It is really important to understand what kind of deadline you’re dealing with, otherwise you will treat everything as a true deadline (exhibit no. 1 = me) and that means you may deliver on a courtesy deadline over a true deadline, with the associated consequences. Without understanding what type of deadline you have you can also not really be truly aware of all of the possible options you can take when you are truly over whelmed and unable to deliver on everything.

Did you know you can just ask for an extension?

I’m just throwing this out there because it’s something I’ve only recently discovered. Did you know you can ask for an extension? This seems like a really bizarre statement I know, but I knew this was a theoretical possibility when a student but I had no idea it translated to real life. I really didn’t. When I talk about understanding what your options might be if you can’t manage all of your deadlines, this is what I’m talking about. I didn’t even know this was an option that I could action.

During the pandemic I was forced to write to people on a number of occasions as I kept getting pulled into various last minute urgent events, and thus had no choice. The first few times I emailed to say I wouldn’t make X deadline but I can get it to you at Y, I came close to panic. Every single time I got an email back saying ‘thanks for letting us know, we’re looking forward to getting it on Y’. Not a single angry response. Not a single ‘we’ll find someone better/more available’. Nope. Every time, a chilled out ‘that’s fine’. Now this is just me being me, but why didn’t I know this? Why didn’t someone tell me years ago? All those nights working till midnight as I promised something that day!

The other thing that my husband has been telling me for years and I didn’t believe. Friday deadlines aren’t real (unless it’s an automatic form that could close or a grant deadline where they really mean it). Again, this is something I just didn’t believe, but I now realise. No one is going to go into their inbox to check at 8am on a Saturday morning. The number of midnight’s when I could have been sat on the sofa doing it on Saturday afternoon instead. Friday deadlines, I now realise, are purely there so the info is in someone’s inbox at 9am on Monday morning. Unless the situation is one of the exceptions, no one is impacted. This has even led to a few occasions recently where, because I’m trying not to work on weekends, I’ve just done something at 8am on Monday morning and sent before 9. Shocker, no one has cared.

Prioritise, and sometimes that includes your wellbeing

The other aspect of this is being aware of when sometimes the deadlines are for other people not for you. Courtesy deadlines are often there to make other peoples lives or processes run more smoothly, and I would always support being a good colleague. That said if meeting a courtesy deadline means that you will incur a substantial personal cost, then this is a time to put your communication skills to the test and think about re-framing the deadline.

Once you know which deadlines are really deadlines and which are deadlines can be negotiated, you are then in a position to be able to prioritise. Now, this isn’t just about juggling all those deadline balls, it’s also about when you have to prioritise yourself. It’s important to take ownership, it’s important to be accountable, but not at the expense of your health and mental well being. This can often be challenging, as working out where we are on the list of prioritise is frequently hard to determine when you are in it. This is why checking in with others, and finding helpful critical friends who can give context and perspective may help. I’m reading this out whilst my husband looks at me and roll his eyes – apparently you must also listen to the advice not just seek it.

Failing to meet deadlines is not the end of the world

I don’t really think of myself as being senior, it’s just not really important to me or part of my identity as long as I have a voice. That means it has only been a recent thing that I’ve reflected on my experience over the years with the mentors, Consultants, professors etc in my life. None of them every managed to turn the things I needed around to any deadline I ever set. I sat there and reminded them, sent diary invites to discuss and frequently in the end wrote things for them or submitted anyway. This wasn’t because they didn’t care, it’s just they had so much on their plate and they couldn’t manage it all. Now I don’t want to be that person but we don’t get everything we want in this life, there are only so many hours in a day. Sometimes, therefore, I feel like I am this girl. Why did I think I was special enough to be able to achieve what all those ahead of me could not. Context is key and denial is not always helpful. I can only aim to do better but beating myself up if I fail is not helpful. As my wise DIPC says to me ‘did anyone die?’ If the answer is no, if what actually happened was I disappointed myself, then I have to have perspective and we have to be kinder to ourselves.

There were a few times over the past three years when I had to unexpectedly put my work laptop and phone in a cupboard and step away completely to deal with other life stuff. I missed deadlines, I missed emails, but nothing that I missed still haunts me. Things just didn’t get done. People weren’t angry, people were super understanding, and my teams were wonderful and helped so much. The world continued to turn. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget, as humans are so ego centric, that the world does not stop if we are not in it, the void gets filled. I failed, I survived and so will you.

Tips that I’ve learnt to manage a world filled with deadline pot holes

Share the load – be clear that you will need email or calendar reminders – if it is important others will help you get there
Aim for clear communication to support prioritisation – if they only email you about it once it probably isn’t that key. Be clear about the fact that you will need prompts or chasers
Clear diary time and include it as a specific hold to do the task, rather than just having it on a to do list
Ask about deadlines up front before you take on something and be prepared to negotiate your involvement. Do you still want to be involved? Can you meet their deadlines? Can you adjust their deadlines so they work for you too?
Know when deadlines are part of your agenda or part of someone else’s

All opinions in this blog are my own

Guest Blog by Jade Lambert: Choosing your next steps as a Healthcare Scientist – Why an integrated biology masters may be the right choice

November 11, 2022October 29, 2022 girlymicro Academic Life, Education, Guest blog, Healthcare Science

Blog Post Introduction from Dr Claire Walker

Whilst @Girlymicro is taking a well-earned break buying all her Christmas presents in New York, I’ve been loaned this wonderful platform to discuss all sorts of important matters in science and education.

Recently I’ve been speaking a lot with students of all levels about different opportunities they have in the University environment. Things have changed a lot since my day, it’s not just a BSc then a PhD if you like research. There are so many exciting pathways for students in biological and biomedical sciences to follow, but it can become a bit of a quagmire trying to work out exactly which path you might want to take. I often start the conversation with students describing my own experiences at university and how I came to be in my current role, but increasingly I feel that they are now out of date and just aren’t relevant in the modern system.

It can feel overwhelming when you look at the decisions you have to make when starting university – do you take an iBMS accredited course, should you do a placement in industry or the NHS or maybe a year abroad, how about a Masters by Research degree, and what the heck is an MBio? Where are the best resources and who should you ask? Dusty old lecturers like myself will be able to tell you about the content of the courses, and all about our love of research. But we aren’t going to be able to tell you what doing a placement feels like, if it’s worth spending the money on an MRes or how to choose the right undergraduate course for you. To that end, I have asked some of my most engaging and eloquent students who are completing all sorts of different degree pathways to give us all some insight into what we can gain from the university experience in 2022 rather than, let’s be kind and say, my experiences which were more than a little while ago. And with that I’m going to hand over to reins to their expert hands.

My life as an MBio student by Jade Lambert

Since I was a child, I have always obsessed with medical programmes such as 24 hours in A&E. I found the investigative work that goes into diagnosing a patient so cool. When the programmes got a bit gory, like all these programmes tend to do, I would be fixed to the TV, fascinated by the doctor’s knowledge to save their patients. Despite growing up as quite shy person, I’ve always had a passion to helping people and making the world a better place.

I’ve always been interested in doing a science degree, the problem was picking what science degree, I wanted to do them all. At around the age of 16 I was set on doing a degree in biochemistry, until I discovered my dislike for chemistry. So, it was back to the drawing board, until I discovered biomedical science. It was like something in finally me clicked, a degree which brought my love for medicine and hands on laboratory experience all together. Then I was onto my next problem, choosing a university. This problem was a lot easier to solve, as there are only certain universities in the UK which provide an IBMS accredited course. To later register as a biomedical scientist, an accredited biomedical science degree is needed.

I landed myself applying for an integrated masters (MBio) in biomedical science at the University of Lincoln. The course is quite unique in the way that it is a 4-year undergraduate course, but the final year is a masters, MBio ‘research’ year. Explaining to people that I’m doing a masters, which isn’t a masters, but kind of is a masters has been entertaining. I am currently at the start of my MBio final year, and so far, I’ve really being enjoying it. The past 3 years of the course have been heavily focussed on learning the ins and outs of biomedical science, which gives you the knowledge to complete research in later years. As this year consists solely of research skills and my project, I have felt much more scientific freedom to read around the subject, instead of focussing on multiple modules at a time.

The originally end goal of my degree was to become a biomedical scientist for the NHS, so I was not going to do the MBio, and instead take a placement year out. However, after starting my degree I discovered my love for research, so doing the MBio year was a must for me. The MBio to me seems to be the perfect steppingstone degree to developing a researcher. My third-year project involved doing a study which the answer was already known. However, for my MBio project all the research is novel, giving a real insight to the world of research.

My new end goal of my degree is to become a Clinical Acientist in embryology, through the Science Training Programme. The possibility of doing a PhD as a clinical scientist also really excites me. This degree has not expanded my knowledge of biomedical science but has helped me find an area I really find interesting. I would really recommend the MBio to anyone wanting a career in the life sciences, it has not only advanced my knowledge in the subject but developed me into a scientist.

All opinions on the blog are my own

Clarity is Key: The role of learning agreements in supporting learner success

September 28, 2022September 28, 2022 girlymicro Academic Life, Education, Healthcare Science, Microbiology (Clinical), Microbiology (Research), Research/Academia

It’s that time of year again and many of us will be taking on new trainees, getting to know new students or supervising new PhDs. I thought it was time therefore to share something that I’ve found increasingly useful and have now set out to cover in initial meetings with learners, and that is the development of learning agreements.

What is a learning agreement and why is taking this time worth while? Surely everyone knows what they’ve signed up for when they take a training place? The truth of the matter is that students often know the logistics of what they’ve signed up for, but any learning placement is a whole lot more than just the nuts of bolts of the curriculum. There’s a lot of expectation setting/management required for one thing. We’ll cover what learning agreements look like in a bit, but in short they are agreements based on conversations between the learner and their supervisor where they actively set out the expectations and boundaries of their relationship.

At STP/HSST and PhD level it can be the learners first experience of formal education routes within a professional setting. As supervisors we often expect learners to be able to undertake independent study at this point, identifying their own learning objectives and being responsible for any escalations. If this is the students first experience however, they may believe it will follow the pattern of the prior learning they have experienced, which may have placed a lot more focus on structure and consistency.

What is a learning agreement?

In light of these complexities what is a learning agreement and how can it help? Well they take quite a few different forms depending on what it is that you want them to fulfil. In short they are a working (and therefore dynamic) agreement between you as the supervisor/education officer and your new student/trainee. I tend to refer to them as learning agreements rather than contracts as the term contract to me implies penalties and learning contracts are what I escalate to if challenges occur during the time someone is with me.

They can include all kinds of things:

What topics are in or out of the learning objectives
How deadlines will be set and a broad plan of work
Expectation setting around students identifying additional learning objectives
Ideas for how the learner will benchmark their progress and/or learning
How the educator will assess progress/learning

Although the above is often the framework the most valuable parts of a learning agreement for me are less structural. It is my time to ask:

What kind of learner are you?
What kind of support do you prefer (close vs supportive supervision)
What are your main objectives that may or may not be topic based?
What are you hoping this will lead to?
How do you prefer to communicate, face to face, email etc?
Why this course? Why this training? What attracted you? In order to understand their drivers

Making the implicit explicit

In general I think most of us are good about talking about the nuts and bolts of what a course/placement entails. We are good at giving the ‘this is the bathroom’ tour and ‘this is where your desk is’ plus ‘our supervisor meetings are on Tuesday’ type of information. What I have discovered over the last few years however, is that imparting curriculum or logistic based information just isn’t enough to support a good supervisor-learner relationship, where both get what they want out of it.

I think as supervisors we have quite a lot of expectations that we don’t necessarily voice, after all for many of us this is something we do a lot of. It can therefore be easy to make assumptions about the level of awareness of these expectations from someone coming into that supervisor-learner relationship with us. The thing is, you may have been doing this a loooooong time, but your learner almost definitely hasn’t. They won’t have that implicit and often organisational linked cultural knowledge that you have been embedded in for so long. Worse than that even, they are likely to have a whole lot of different assumptions based on their last educational experience that they are bringing with them. Unless we all work therefore to make things that we implicitly understand explicit, you won’t know where those differences in practices and expectations lie. It is when this happens that problems often occur that could easily have been addressed early on, but have significant impacts on learner experience and supervisor stress levels.

Supports orientation to a new field/culture

As I’ve said a few times culture matters, as culture and cultural norms are intrinsically linked with the expectations we all have. Having these conversations is about more than expectation management however. Learners are coming into an environment that may be pretty alien to them. This can make students feel like they are floundering, right from the start, meaning that they don’t feel like they fit. A small percentage of students are likely to walk away because of this, not really understanding the cause. This is often combined and amplified by the fact that they may have moved or lost their support networks in the transition.

Talking about your role (and similar roles) with learners helps, not only to build your relationship and set expectations, but also to support them in making the transition into being a scientist in practice, not just in name. It took me years to feel like a scientist, to feel comfortable calling myself that, to feel like I belonged. Having conversations where students understand what it takes to succeed as a scientist, not just in a placement, can be invaluable to learners re-establishing support networks. Also, supporting learners to find other trainee groups, to join twitter, or of timings for lunch clubs, can help them settle into their new role and their future profession.

Setting matters

Having these conversations can feel uncomfortable and challenging, mostly because of the fear of the unknown. They may also take time we may not have. All of these are reasons to make sure they are done correctly and given the time required. If you are nervous having them with your learner then imagine how nervous they may be to have them with you. You are asking for a lot of honesty and self reflection from someone who doesn’t know you well, in a relationship where trust may not yet have been built. Furthermore, you are asking for all of this in a relationship where you probably have all the power and where your learner is likely to be highly keen to please, rather than representing their true self..

So how do we hold these conversations and support them getting the best outcomes? I think there a couple of things we can be mindful of. The first is not dropping them on the learner. If we want the conversation to deliver we both need to do the work. I need to be honest with myself about time and also what kind of supervisor I am. The student needs to be given the questions or a framework beforehand and supported to have time to reflect on themselves to be able to answer the questions asked. They may need to be encouraged to speak to friends or family to support them in this reflection if they’ve never done it before. They can then start the process of reflection by thinking in the presence of people they trust, if needed.

Think about where you physically want to have the conversation. I tend to take learners out, to a none Trust space where we can have tea and cake (or other suitable consumables). I’ve written before about the power of tea. The main reason that I do this is that it means we are no ones turf, we are in a neutral space, and the provision of food further helps to reduce/remove hierarchy. When thinking about where however, you need to consider privacy. Your learner may need to share things that are private or important to them, and so considering the type of location is also important.

The other important thing about getting the conversation right is setting the conversational scene before you start the conversation itself. You need to be clear about the objectives that you want to achieve, why they are helpful to both parties and set some ground rules. It’s key to say that honesty is the most important part of this process. It’s OK to have styles that don’t match, by knowing this early you can sign post and find additional support to ensure that the learning process itself still works.

What happens when the expectations don’t match

Hopefully by going through the process of creating a learning agreement you will avoid any significant bumps along the way later on. The process needs to be done thoroughly though, so you don’t just hear what you’d like to hear. As stated above it’s ok to have areas of difference, it’s what you can flex in response to that information and how you respond that matters.

For example, I am never going to be a good micro manager, I have neither the time or personal inclination to work this way. I have fallen foul of not having had the learning agreement conversation and subsequently had learners who felt they were inadequately supported. If I find out that I have a learner who feels they need close support I need to therefore make some pragmatic choices. Is it they will need close guidance for the transition period? If so I can likely change my style for a period of a couple of months in order to support that orientation to a new location. Is it that this is their learning style long term? In this case I need to think about pairing them up or seeking support from a colleague who is better able to provide that close support during the periods in between our catch up sessions.

I have also struggled previously with learners who have not met the outputs that I had expected. This may be more of an issue with PhD students, but to be honest if I’m not clear about publication expectations how will they know? Therefore if it becomes apparent that the timeline expectations don’t match it is worth considering drawing up a broad, high level, delivery plan so you are both working towards the same mental models

Finally, it may be that learners make it clear that they have pastoral care expectations that you may or may not be able to support. Prior to going into these sessions it is important to be aware of the different additional support services that learners have available to them. Whether they need them or not in the moment it is crucial that you sign post to these, especially if you are not the kind of supervisor who will take on this kind of support role. Additionally, there are likely to be plenty of networks that offer peer support that you can sign post learners to. There will always be things that they want to talk about that they won’t want to talk to you about. Let’s be honest, no matter how well you get on there will be times they need to moan about you as a minimum. Being open about this being OK and linking them into peer groups can be incredibly valuable

No matter what you hear in this space it’s important to be open and judgement free, in order to support honest sharing. If you hear something you don’t agree with it’s important to take a beat and try to understand the drivers of that view point. By being open to opinion and challenge now you are investing in success later on. I don’t know about anyone else but I studied in a different time, my undergraduate degree finished 20 years ago. My expectations of learners and learner experience therefore is, to be frank, well old. I’ve also worked in one place for 18 years. It is naïve therefore to believe my experience and expectations are going to perfectly match the learners who are coming through now.

There is a big difference between being someone’s educational supervisor and someone’s manager. In some cases we are both, but we need to understand that they are different roles with different requirements on both sides, and be aware of what hat we are wearing when. Techniques such as learning agreements can help make sure that we do the ‘education’ part better by having the kinds of conversations you would not have with someone you just had a managerial relationship with. It encourages self reflection, expectation management and consensus forming. All of which are skills that we should be modelling for those learners we are supporting. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know. So let’s start this new academic year by having conversations better and talking about how we can all be the best we can be.

All opinions on this blog are my own

Surviving Your Viva: My top 10 tips for oral exams

September 16, 2022September 16, 2022 girlymicro Academic Life, Education, Research/Academia

I’ve sat my fair share of viva voce exams in my time and I must admit I’ve always been pretty intimidated by them, that said they’ve never been as bad as I feared when I finally got in the room. They’ve been on my mind this week as one of my PhD students is due to have her viva on Friday and so I thought I would write down my top tips in order to bring your best self to the process. This post focusses a lot on PhD viva’s but I think a lot of the principles can be extrapolated to other types of oral exams.

1 – Do your prep

Some people think that the viva process is about what happens in the room. Although you have to ‘bring it’ during the discussion your life can be made much much easier by doing a good job in the prep phase.

If you are having a viva for a PhD this goes all the way back to researching the administrative side of the process and being actively involved in examiner selection. In an ideal world your supervisor would sit with you, talk you through the stages and actively involve you in the discussions, we both know however that the world isn’t always that ideal and you may have to be prepared to do this leg work for yourself.

There are some benefits to owning this phase of the work. For my PhD there was a communication breakdown towards the end and my supervisor wanted me to delay submitting for another year and therefore refused to sign the submission paperwork. I knew that I needed to submit on my current time scale as I wanted to sit FRCPath in my NIHR funded time. I also knew because I’d spent time researching the administrative side of things that I wasn’t required to have sign off, that part just meant that UCL weren’t responsible for any failures. So I submitted anyway and passed. I also researched, found and submitted my examiner paperwork and choices.

The downside to selecting your own examiners without supervisor support is that you run the risk of only selecting based on academic publications or area of interest. I was fortunate as I personally knew plenty of people in the field of IPC and so could select with greater context. If you only select on the basis of publications you can end up with an unbalanced panel or one that doesn’t support you to have a discussion that really represents you or your work to the best of your ability. So if you are in a position where you need to lead on this make sure you also find out what kind of examiner they are, and whether there are any political conflicts of interest before making a final decision.

2 – Have a practice

Whatever your situation it is always worth having a practice viva, preferably with people that scare you just a little. Ask that amazing post doc who has always been a little intimidating or the person that always asks good but challenging questions at lab meetings. You don’t want to destroy your shaky confidence at this point but if set yourself a challenge you will amazed at how much easier it is when you are in the room for the real thing.

One of my other PhD students had their upgrade recently and his other supervisor and I ran a mock. Now I apparently can get a little intense when I’m asking questions about science and very rarely I’ve been called ‘the destroyer’ when it comes to challenging the science presented by reps if I’ve found it to be misleading. It was therefore reported back that if you can survive a mock with me the actual event will be a walk in the park. I don’t know if that’s true, but what I do know is that if you have a relationship with your supervisor that permits this kind of mock session, your supervisor will know the strengths and weaknesses of your project intimately. They will therefore be able to ask ALL the questions that you hope your real examiners will skip over or not pick up on. The purpose of us asking these questions is not to discredit what you’ve worked so hard on, all work has weaknesses, it’s to help you develop a strategy to answer those questions.

These sessions can also be useful to prep the paperwork you’re taking into the viva with you. I had my thesis labelled up with colour coded tabs and had post it notes within it to remind me of key points in case I got flustered (Bayesian modelling haunts me to this day). A practice viva will help you work out whether what you have done works and if you need to change anything before the real thing.

3 – Know your examiners

I’ve already talked a little bit about researching examiners before you select them, but in the run up to the big event there are last minute things that are worth doing. Firstly, check any of their publications that have come out since you submitted your thesis. I had these printed out and annotated to take into my viva so I had prepared for discussion based on their latest work. Second, when your doing your thesis notes think about highlighting your examiners papers that you have referenced and be very aware of how they have linked into your narrative. They will also have published papers adjacent to your work which you may not have referenced, be aware of these and where the conversation topics may therefore drift to in order to help you be prepared.

Third, and this is a bit more work but worth doing if you have time, check out who they referenced. We all have go to references and authors, your examiners are no different. By looking at the reference lists in their papers you can see who their go to authors are and you can see where your over laps are. Also, be prepared for questions if you haven’t cited the same papers. Finally, check the latest publications within the big name journals within your field. Examiners may occasionally ask questions about the latest big work in your field, even if it’s not directly related to your work, to see how well read you are and if you have a wider interest. This isn’t a pass or fail question, but your PhD project may be different to where you end up as a post doc and it helps to gauge how you might make the transition to working in academia more generally.

3 – Think how you want to present yourself

This may seem like a given but it’s really useful to think about how you want to be perceived in the room. How much this matters, in part, is dependent upon some of the research you’ve done. There are some examiners who would immediately think less of you if you turn up in the room and aren’t suited and booted. The main thing In terms of clothing and outfit is that it’s important to be comfortable, whatever route you choose to go down. You may be sitting in that outfit for 6 hours and so you don’t want to have to constantly be adjusting necklines or moving waist bands that are cutting into you. You need to be in the moment and so choose an outfit that helps that by making you feel comfortable in your own skin, preferably professional enough that you don’t risk upsetting anyone. You may find wearing a T-shirt under that top that sums up who you are is helpful or having a mascot in your pocket that you can slip a hand into a pocket and grip if it gets stressful is useful. I genuinely don’t believe there are any hard and fast rules here other than to plan it before hand and make sure you give your an outfit a dress rehearsal to make sure it empowers rather than distracts you.

To be honest appearance isn’t something that is important to me when I examine, being present and polite in the room is waaaaaay more important to me. I find body language is really key in this kind of face to face assessment. You really need to be aware of what your body language is saying. No matter how you feel it’s going it’s important to stay open, smiling and responsive in terms of your body language. If you have a ‘resting bitch face’ it’s worth being aware of it as you don’t want to come over as angry or defensive when you are dealing with the questions. Mostly because you won’t get your point across anywhere near as clearly as it will be distracting for the examiners.

4 – Answer the question they ask not the one you’d prefer

This one is true whether it’s an oral exam or written paper, answer the question you are asked not the one you wish they’d asked. Now as part of your viva prep you will probably learn to answer some of the difficult ones like a politician, where you acknowledge the questions and then deflect to a strength when following up. This is different to just not answering the question. I’m so guilty of this one. I tend to be holding a conversation in my head at the same time as being in the room and so I will proceed to the next question in the conversation I’ve planned rather than listen to nuance of the one I’m actually being asked. I have to really force myself to be calm and really listen to the question. I always make sure I have water or something I can drink in the room and try to force myself to take a sip before I answer a question when I’m feeling stressed or nervous in order to stop me jumping in and make me focus on the question. Hearing the question can be especially tricky in a PhD viva when the questions may be long and multi-component. I took in a pad so that I could write down sections from multi-component questions (just words as prompts) so that I could try to ensure that I was answering everything that was asked of me.

Remember that in a PhD viva you are also able to take the lead in some of the discussion, this is your chance to really talk about your work after all, but it’s important that you bear in mind the point you are trying to make rather than meandering or going down rabbit holes. If you go off topic too much it can give your examiner doubts about your ability to prioritise key points, which can indicate a lack of thorough understanding.

5 – Don’t try to blag it

If you don’t know the answer please just say so, it’s OK. There is nothing worse than having someone try to pretend they know the answer or watching them actively make things up in a viva. Science is about the unknown and there will be numerous points in your working life where you don’t know the answer. If you try to blag it can indicate that you might not acknowledge key failings or points in your work/field you don’t know/understand, not just in your viva but in your practice. This can be a really big red flag and will mean your examiners push harder and dig more to uncover what other weaknesses may be present. It is perfectly fine to acknowledge that you are having a blank and would prefer to come back to a question later, or say that is not something you actually have a concrete answer for but you would consider X, Y, Z in finding an answer. Practice responding to questions you don’t have the answer to, it will stand you in good stead for conference questions and all kinds of other situations in the future.

6 – Give credit where its due

A lot of PhDs and other pieces of work contain sections where you supported rather than led. You may have had some statistics, bioinformatics, or sampling support. I’ve had a couple of (non examination) situations recently where instead of acknowledging this individuals have obfuscated the support they had. If this happens in an exam situation then it’s really concerning, if it comes out in an exam situation and has not been acknowledged in the thesis this is also really not good. It is OK to have work that has been co-created or even led by others, as long as this is well acknowledge and there is enough in your thesis that is unique or led by you. Again, hiding these other contributions makes your examiners question the level of your contribution and they will get the spades out to start digging. Science and medicine is a team sport, don’t be afraid to acknowledge that. Being able to work with others is a strength and not a weakness.

7 – Be prepared to talk about your why

Although PhD viva exams can feel like they are all about the data that’s not actually true. They are also about you as a person, not just the science. It is important therefore to be prepared to answer questions to help the examiners get to know more about you. What was it that made you want to do a PhD? What were your skills and interests when you started? What were your learning outcomes that you were aiming to complete by the time you finished?

A PhD is effectively an apprenticeship in research with the aim that you will become an independent researcher at the end. All that is about more than just data collection. What skills and techniques do you feel like you’ve picked up along the way? What other transferable skills have you learnt? Have you mentored masters students? Presented at conferences? Written papers? Have you undertaken any science communication or public engagement – what have you learnt? Which courses have you undertaken as part of your PhD? What networks have you become part of? What collaborations have you formed? Thinking and preparing to answer questions like this will give your examiners a much greater idea of where you came from and help to bench mark how far you’ve come.

8 – Prepare to talk about the future

The other thing that you should be prepared to talk about (after where you’ve come from) is where you are going to. A common question is ‘if money or resources were no object how would you change the work you have done so far and how would you plan the next steps for your project?’

You will have had plenty of time to reflect on the weaknesses of your work, this is the moment where you get to talk about how you would address those weaknesses by discussing what the next steps for your work could be. Practice both a realistic ‘I would put in a grant to X funding body to continue Y aspect of my work because….’ answer as well as a super ambitious version for if someone took away all of the resource limitations placed upon you.

You should also be prepared to talk about your plans for the future. Are you going to stay in academia? Are you interested in transferring to industry? Would you like to become a clinical academic? This a great way to help examiners understand why you may have made some of the choices of direction you’ve made linked to project, for instance taking a more clinical bent. It is also a good way to have a conversation that may help your thinking about where you want to be in 5 years and if you’re lucky gain advice from some very experienced people on next steps.

9 – Know we’re rooting for you

A lot of people go into the examination room thinking that it will be adversarial setting, the opposite should be true, we are rooting for you. Our job is to support you through the process to get the most out of both you and your work. Everyone understands that you will be nervous, everyone in that room has sat on the other side of the table, has sat in your shoes, they know therefore both how it feels and what it means.

Don’t be afraid to talk about challenges your have faced, in fact you will often be asked to talk about the biggest challenges within your project. It is important to think about what you want to discuss in response to this question: what was the challenge? how did you respond to it? what was the learning you took from it, both about yourself and the work? These questions are important for the examiner not just to understand what your progress to viva has involved but also how you think and respond. This is a great opportunity to talk about things that matter to you and to help the examiners get to know who you are as a scientist. By doing the work to prepare you are doing all you can to help your examiners achieve this. Stay open, stay engaged and stay hopeful.

10 – Keep calm and carry on

Finally, this is a big one. No matter what happens in that room know that it is rarely the end. For good or bad almost everyone comes out of that room with further work, with something more to do. That is very much part of the learning. A lot of people who haven’t done a PhD think that the viva is the end of the process, the big hooray, but I must admit it didn’t feel real to me until I stood at a graduation ceremony in my robes knowing it was truly done.

Whatever happens you will work out of that room with a whole bunch of concrete information that will allow you to put a bow on what will already be (probably) one of the best pieces of writing you will ever do. You will also have learnt more than you could dream in the process of prepping for the viva and during the event itself. You will come out of it as a stronger, better person who will have learnt so much about yourself and what you can really achieve when you put your mind to it.

So as much as any oral exam is terrifying, know that you will actually benefit so much from the process. It’s one of the few moments in your life where people will be forced to listen to you talk about a topic you will know more about than just about anyone in the world. Enjoy the captive audience and if you can try to be in the moment and make the most of the experience.

All opinions on this blog are my own

More Than the Sum of Our Grades: Why academic success only tells part of the story

September 2, 2022September 2, 2022 girlymicro Academic Life, Education, General, Healthcare Science

I thought I should start with an apology, this one is all about me. There is a point to it but you may have to get through a chunk of stuff about me first. If you don’t fancy that there are links to some of my other posts at the bottom that you may fancy more.

Everyone tells you that academic qualifications aren’t everything and they really are not, depending on the path you want to take. In many ways the more qualifications I have the more I question their validity, but I get to do that now from a position of privilege where I no longer really have any skin in that particular game. That said A-level and GCSE results have come out in recent weeks and it got me remembering the day I received mine, more than that it made me think about every time I stood there waiting for a sheet of paper to be put up on a wall or to open an envelope (yes I am that old 😉).

If you look at my CV now you’d see a pretty good list of academic achievements but there are things that you don’t see. Past a certain point no one lists their GCSE or A-level grades. You also don’t see the fact that I have never been the smartest person in the room, I’ve never been the top. The reason you don’t see it is because none of that actually matters, it’s about the body of work rather than a single point in time. When you get those results however no one tells you that or even if they did you probably wouldn’t believe them. Those results are your whole future, they feel like your whole world. I wanted to just write something to put out there that shows that no matter what you received it doesn’t have to define either who you are or your future, it’s just one step on the way.

GCSE horror show

Frankly my GCSE years were a bit of a horror show. Not because I didn’t want to study or engage but health wise it was basically a disaster. I caught glandular fever (Epstein Barr virus) and ended up with such bad swollen lymph glands under my arms I couldn’t lower them for days at a time and turned yellow due to the hepatitis. On top of this I slept 23 hours a day and it just didn’t get better. I ended up with post viral fatigue and for my 5th year at school managed an hour a day, on a good day. I was withdrawn from all but the basics (maths, english and double science) and told I should plan for failure.

I sat no mocks and frankly had no idea what day it was let alone feeling on top of anything. School became a terrifying place where I could see everyone else moving on rather than a place where I fit in, as I had loved to study. I never really had a lot of school friends but all but one basically forgot I existed (cheers to Heather who always stood by my side). I missed all the big occasions, no last day of school with signatures for me, no last school disco. I was just left behind and I really started to believe the tale that I was being told that my aspirations were over.

Things got worse when I sat the exams. I managed a weekend of revision pre the written papers, although it really blew me out. I did that awful thing of not really reading the instructions as I was so nervous. My english literature exam was up first and instead of answering 2 of 5 essays, I answered them all. I couldn’t understand why I was furiously writing whilst everyone else looked so calm or had finished with loads of time. It just fed into my panic. With 5 minutes to go I finally finished and went back to the start to see the words 2/5 glaring at me from the front page. I felt like I’d screwed it on day 1.

Come results day I just didn’t even want to go. I was so convinced of my failure and that I had sealed my fate. I had no plans for next steps, I had no college or A-level plans. I picked up my envelope and I suspect other people’s tears were for very different reasons. My 2 A’s (english lit and language) BB (duel science) and C in maths were so far from what I had hoped for at the start but were so unexpected on the day. Everyone stood around me with 11 and 12 passes but my 5 meant that I was still in the running. I still had a chance. I went back home and went to bed for a week, there was no energy for celebrations and dreamt of what next.

A-level winging it

As I said I’d made no plans for A-levels as no one thought they were an option. My mum (who is loyal, devoted, loving and probably a genius) swung into action in a way that I will be forever grateful for and don’t deserve. She got me a last minute place organised to do A-levels at the secondary school less than 5 minutes from my home. My original school were so focused on grades and success that it wasn’t even discussed as an option. So 3 weeks later I’m due to start at mixed sixth form, having only studied in a single sex environment since 11, with no one I knew, having never even visited the school. Nervous was not the word. The school knew about my health issues and to be honest the word university was not being mentioned. So that I could manage health wise I started A-level biology, which happened in normal school hours, and A-level drama that had some evening classes so I could rest during the day. That was it. 2 A-levels. Only 1 of which was considered serious. I set to it.

In what will become a theme for my life I felt so far behind. For my GCSE exams I studied the minimum possible to be able to pass for a weekend, that did not enable me to keep up with my peers during A-level biology classes. I was the idiot who knew nothing, understood nothing. If I had had friends I probably would have understood earlier that most of my class mates felt the same way but I didn’t, the switch from GCSEs to A-levels is hard but I thought it was just me.

Drama on the otherhand was a revelation. For someone who was struggling to find a refreshed version of her identity and new place in the world as the plan she’d had was falling by the wayside, drama was my safe space. You could choose to be loud or quiet. You could often choose to watch or engage. I was in a place where my choices were given life. Not just that but I didn’t feel behind, the texts were new to everyone, it was a very different space. I still didn’t fit, on the first day they thought I was their teacher not a student, but being able to academically engage in a place I didn’t feel like a failure was something that gave me hope, it kept me going. It’s partly why I’m still so passionate about the use of STEAM now. When I had no other way of being me it helped me find myself.

By the end of my 1st year of A-levels I was beginning to feel a bit more like me, a bit more able to think about the future. I still wasn’t physically right but my mind was a bit more back on track and I wanted to be able to plan again. I knew that if I wanted to even apply for uni that I would need 3 A-levels plus general studies and I only had 2. Let’s put to one side that I had no idea what I would apply to study I just knew that 3 A-levels was the first step. As I’ve said the school where I was doing my A-levels did evening classes that were open to everyone. I can’t even remember how it happened but I found an amazing psychology teacher who I spent some time talking to and who said she would help me. We came up with a plan. There was no way I could cover 2 years of psychology in 1 but I didn’t need to. The course was split into core and optional modules. If I took some of the evening classes and some of the day classes across years I could still cover all the core components. I then just had to cover 1 optional and make sure that I knew it super well as I’d have no essay options – I’d have to be able to answer the one that came up. I also registered on general studies knowing I would just have to turn up to the exam and hope as I wouldn’t be able to physically manage any more classes.

I also knew that despite ‘the plan’ I wasn’t going to be well enough to manage full time uni the next year and so I would give it everything I had and then defer my place for a year.

I basically spent that year working and sleeping. I didn’t have much left in the tank for anything else, but I had a plan. I also had an amazing cheer leader in my mum who repeatedly let me know that her love was unconditional and that she had my back, but I could also stop at any point if I wanted to. The choice was my mine. That word choice is so important when you feel like your options are taken from you. I chose to go for it. At the end of that year I got my envelop. The uni’s I’d applied to required ABB or 3 BBB with the A or B in biology. I got 2 As a B and a C. The C was in biology. The A’s were in psychology and drama. I didn’t get in. I can sit here and say that the fact that I managed to get passing grades was amazing, that to come from nothing to a C in biology was such an achievement, but none of that is true. I felt crushed. I felt that the people who told me I couldn’t make it were right and what was I thinking. Then someone stuck me a room and handed me a phone and told me to call clearing. I had no idea what clearing was or what I even want to study, but somehow an hour later I’m going to a city I’ve never even visited (Liverpool) to study a course (general science) which I didn’t even know anything about – apart from the fact that it would enable me to choose my science speciality later on which at that moment felt sooooooooo important.

Everyone moved past me once again as I deferred for a year and focussed on getting well. I also took a part time job, not only to help me earn some money for uni (we weren’t rich and I’d need it) but also so I could see how I managed to see if I was OK to go.

University catch up

I turned up for my first week at uni and if A-levels had been a shock they were nothing on this. EVERYONE and I mean EVERYONE seemed to be more prepared, understood more and frankly knew more than I did. I had been so relieved to just arrive I hadn’t planned for what would happen next. As it turned out 3 main things occurred:

One – I learnt the importance of finding my tribe
Two – I learnt to hide my fear and insecurities
Three – I found ways around things so that I could hide my knowledge gaps

Now, some of these I’ve written about separately on this blog, like finding your tribe, and as a life lesson it has stood me in so much good. I found a small group of people who I could learn with, who didn’t make me feel foolish and behind, even if I didn’t ever really share with them how I felt. One person in particular, Diane, became my study buddy and we would have late night chinese, work out pass margin requirements and all in all keep each other going. She was a bridesmaid at my wedding and I was maid of honour at hers, if it wasn’t for Diane I wouldn’t have made it through. She’s northern, straight forward and stopped me listening to the voices of doubt and fear that troubled me in the middle of the night.

As for the other two things I learnt they have their pros and cons. I’ve reached a point in my life now where I’m pretty open about my fears and insecurities, I write this blog after all. The thing is fear festers because we don’t talk about it and one of my motivations in writing this blog is so that others don’t feel alone in their self doubt and their challenges. I can do that now though as someone who has worked through a lot of them and who has (thankfully) gotten to a place in her life where I’m less bothered by what people think of me than I am in trying to help others find their way. That certainly wasn’t the case when I was a 19 year old who was still struggling to feel like she belonged. This is an after uni story, but I still remember my first week as a trainee Clinical Scientist and having people stare at me as I tried to pipette into an agarose gel, and having people comment on whether I was back pipetting and how interesting my style was. I had no style. No one had ever taught me how to pipette, I had never run a molecular test, I was a Zoologist who ended up in microbiology after all. I therefore had to learn, especially in the competitive environment I was in at uni, where the bottom 50% got booted every year, and as a trainee to cover and not let my lack of skills be seen for fear of what that might mean for me.

I spent my entire time at uni volunteering to do the drawing or take other roles because no one had ever shown me how to focus a microscope and I was terrified that I would be found out. This haunted me enough that when I sat FRCPath I actually had close friends run trials for me on different types because even the memory of it gives me panic attacks to this day. No one ever showed me how to do dissection and so again for my first 2 years at uni I covered and did the best I could. It was assumed that everyone had gone to schools that had access to equipment, that had run these types of classes and then to add onto to that my lack of experience due to illness, it all just meant I felt at sea. In my third year I faced an eight hour dissection exam and I knew it was going to be a disaster. After three years of uni though I had finally found a lecturer I trusted and a couple of friends who I felt would stand by me, and so we approached as a collective and asked to be allowed to have specimens and practice on weekends. Me and my dogfish George got an A in that exam and I cried in a way that is only rivalled by passing FRCPath. It took me three years to have enough trust in other people and myself to ask for help, not because I was afraid to do the work, but because I was afraid of what it would mean if they rejected my request.

So what does all of this mean and why have I written it. Firstly, I’ve written it because I want anyone out there to know that if things didn’t go well for you there are still pathways ahead. We may not take the most straight forward path but we end up in similar places and sometimes the learning that will give us will be invaluable for the rest of our lives.

Secondly, I want those of us who are now acting as educators, leaders and supervisors to bear in mind that not everyone is joining you at the same point. There will be smart people out there who are turning up at day one who will not necessarily have had access to the resources or opportunities you think they have. Making assumptions that everyone is started from the same place sometimes puts people back even further. This is especially pertinent as we have trainees about to start with us. Taking the time to have a non judgement based conversation about prior experience can make all the difference to those who feel lost in our world where we take so much for granted.

Believe it or not there are so many things I’ve learnt about myself that I see the way I got here as a strength and not a weakness. I’ve never been the one at the head of the class, and the route that I’ve taken, although circuitous, now pays real dividends as I understand so much more than if I’d taken the direct route. It’s also taught me valuable lessons about myself, what I value and what I can achieve if I can get over my fears of how people see me. I’m used to hearing no, I’m used to hearing that’s not how it’s done and that it won’t work for someone like me. All of those things felt horrible but now I’m so thankful. Those no’s have taught me to be strong and to break down barriers. Those no’s have in the end enabled me to truly be the person I wanted to become.

Finally, and I can’t say this enough, find the person who sees your value even when you can’t. Find the people like my mum, my husband, like Heather and Diane. Find them and even when you haven’t got the strength to articulate what you are truly afraid of they will still be the people who stand by your side and guide you. Find your tribe and you will never truly be alone again.

All opinions on this blog are my own

Keeping Up With the Joneses: The dangers of benchmarking success against social media

August 15, 2022August 15, 2022 girlymicro Academic Life, General, Healthcare Science

I posted last week about some of the reasons that I think social media can be powerful and positive. This week though I want to talk a little bit about the other side of the coin, the fact that social media can end up being a source of enormous pressure to the detriment of both our wellbeing and our career choices.

I’m a great advocate of the use of social media as scientists, I’ve even given the odd talk about it. That doesn’t make me naïve to its risks. We tend to talk about platforms as if they are formed of a cohesive community with the same rules of etiquette and values, but they aren’t. The reasons that people use social media are as variable as the number of people who have accounts. Therefore if you fall into the assumption that the posts you are reading are made using the same motivations and ethics as yours, you can end up in a position where posts and responses to them can cause upset, self recrimination or harm. So what review and thought processes do I try to undertake when I post and engage with posts by others, either emotionally or by responding?

Am I comparing like with like?

I’ve had conversations with a couple of my PhD students over the last month or so about the dangers of benchmarking against people who you don’t really know. You don’t know what their project is, you don’t know what their education and learning objectives are in comparison to yours, you don’t even know if their description of where they are at reflects the reality of what is being shared.

Even for me I can sometimes see posts on social media and when I’m having a bad day can fall into a spiral of asking myself ‘am I good enough?’ ‘do I work hard enough?” ‘do I know enough?’ ‘am I successful enough?’. The thing is that, especially on social media, posts are a projection of self but an edited one. The same thing happens when you have PhD get togethers down the pub but the reach is different and you have at least a better chance to evaluate what’s being said.

It’s easy to fall into comparison but you have to know what your comparing against. For PhDs and training programmes especially, you’ll have your own mile stones and training goals that will be personalised to you and your learning needs. It is folly therefore to compare yourself against someone else as their goals will be different. Discussing shared barriers and approaches can be helpful however but the race to compete about papers, data and presentations rarely is.

Are they only sharing the good stuff?

I personally am really wary of accounts that only share their successes. I know I go on about this a lot, but the most learning often occurs in the failures and if you’re not prepared to share the learning I’m less willing to engage with the success. Nothing is brilliant all the time, no job, no project, and so if an account only shares the hype I am less likely to use it as a benchmark. I’m also less likely to share it with the community, as I worry about the impact that amplifying those voices might have.

In a similar vein, accounts which are not about conversations and supporting the community appeal to me less. If you have an account that is only there to disseminate your success, your papers etc and you don’t also work to amplify others I am less willing to engage. To me, social media is about the opportunity to converse with a diverse group of people. Some accounts are the equivalent of standing on top of a hill with a megaphone and so I take that ethos into account when reading their posts.

Harder, faster, stronger

I see a lot of posts these days talking about how many extra hours someone works, about how many work hats they wear etc. There’s a strong push for this on some academic accounts where people make comments that if you aren’t prepared to work every weekend you can’t be an academic. I also see it more and more coming from some Healthcare Scientists and I’m not sure it’s a healthy trend. There are always times when we have to go the extra mile but wearing it as a badge of honour concerns me. I’m also aware that some of this doesn’t actually reflect the reality, it’s almost like it is what is now expected.

I’m sure that I am guilty of this one, but I hope that most people read my ‘I’m working this weekend’ as ‘my god I’m working again this weekend’. If not you have my apologies. Step up when you have to but also find the strength to have boundaries as it will make you better at all you do.

One last thing on this while I have my rant on. Discussing the ability to do long hours is a privilege, there are many people for whom is this not possible. Parents and carers are excluded from progression if this is what is required. I work hard but I physically suffer badly for it. I don’t want to have my face and hands swell for the rest of my career. I want 8 hours sleep and weekends off if its not an emergency. My mind may be willing but my body is most definitely not. So lets not imply that the only way to be successful is to get 4 hours of sleep a night and to become the job, we all owe ourselves and our families more than that. Rant over!

Whose is the driving seat?

I’m thinking I’m not alone in this one. There are times when I read something and it will send me into a proper shame spiral. Sometimes it’s something as simple as seeing a micro question and not getting the answer right, sometimes it’s seeing an opportunity that I feel like I should engage with and don’t have the energy to and sometimes quite frankly it’s seeing things like a meeting day on my specialist subject that I didn’t know about and makes me question my knowledge/impact. The thing is very few of these reactions are real. They are driven by my anxiety and 9/10 time I will have read exactly the same tweet and not raised an eyebrow. So if it’s about me and not about them what do I do?

Well to be honest I turn off Twitter, step away and have a cup of tea and check my thinking. What is it that has triggered me? Why has it led to that response? In short I make sure that I get back in the driving seat rather than being a passenger to my responses. It’s like those emails you get that you know you shouldn’t respond to right away – I always do and I always regret it, I have impulse control issues. At least on twitter if I step away immediately and don’t engage then I can do the self reflection to try to ensure I’m the best version of myself when I do. We’re all human, we all have moments of jealousy or self doubt, it’s how we respond to those moments that define us. This may be especially true on social media where your responses are out there for the world to see.

Is it helpful? Is it kind?

I definitely share my successes and challenges via both this blog and across social media. My aim in doing so is not to dwell in either but in the hope that sharing will help others, in seeing the opportunities available to them or on feeling less alone. I do have a constant conversation with myself about whether the level at which I share content from myself and other is correct. I know I’m never going to please everyone but I try to at least be honest with myself about my intent when sharing. I saw the tweet below a few weeks ago and it really enforced for me the need to continue with this evaluation. It can never be a response of ‘well I managed it so why haven’t you’. So much of social media strips away nuance and 280 characters will never tell the full story, and so we need to be clever about telling as much of the truth as we can. When people respond in a way that signals that we haven’t managed this it’s important to bear in mind not just what we believe we put out there but also what the reader received when they saw it. I’ve often found the 2 are not the same as they will be looking at it through a different lens to us. Sometimes just acknowledging this is what is needed to make the other person feel heard. I think this is worth remembering as both the maker and receiver of content.

Is seeing believing?

I am super guilty of this one. I’m nothing particularly special and so I fall into the trap of believing that because I did it anyone can do it. I think in terms of intellectual ability this is true as I’m no smarter than anyone else, but I also have a super supportive husband, no kids and research funding. Those things open doors and enable me to have the time to focus on things I want to achieve, whilst feeling supported to do so. This is not the case for everyone and so everyone’s scenario is different.

When you look every year on the day that FRCPath results come out, you see way more people posting that they have passed than those who post they have failed. People hardly ever post to say they failed their PhD viva’s or have come out with an MRes instead. It is worth therefore being wary of using the evidence before your eyes in terms of evaluating how many people actually succeed. I think when I took FRCPath the pass rate was about 40% and for my NIHR Fellowships it has been even less some years, not the 80 – 90% you’d extrapolate from what you see. Making career choices on the basis of this is pretty dangerous. It sounds easy therefore to say you should meet up and speak to people to understand what the reality is. That is sometimes easier than it sounds, not everyone will know someone who has been interviewed for an NIHR Fellowship for instance. We don’t want to limit ourselves and others by saying if you don’t have the connections you can’t strive for the opportunity. What we do need to do is make it easier to see the reality of those options and also make ourselves available for the conversation about what it felt like to attempt it. If we are going to celebrate our successes publicly we should also try to be generous with our time in order to make the same opportunities more widely accessible, with all the context specific information that entails.

You don’t have to take on board all that you hear

That said we’re scientists and healthcare professionals and should be able to look at information available and critically evaluate it. It is easy to get bogged down and not to be able to see the woods for the trees, you’ll get offered so many different opinions and perspectives that it can sometimes be hard to work out whose voice to listen to. Not all of those voices should however have equal value, some you will know more context specific information about than others. When I’m in doubt, when I start to spiral, or when people are critical I tell myself the advice below and then re-evaluate what I’m hearing in light of my relationship and the content of the advice received.

Finally, the other things are more about my own expectation setting. I try to remember why I set up my twitter account and what I was trying to achieve with it. My account is mainly professional, although I also like to share who I am a person, as I think that’s important. It is not my personal account which I maintain on Facebook for checking in on my family and use an occasional safe space to vent. If my Facebook friends have science questions I direct them to Dr Cloutman-Green on twitter because I like to have a safe space elsewhere where I’m not Dr or being reviewed or critiqued. I go back to this when I struggle with dealing with managing my posts or feeling low. I remember the lens through which I am supposed to be viewing the information. I also know that when I’m tired and in a place where my inner critic is running wild, that it is not the time to engage and to take a break, get some sleep and come back when I feel more like myself.

Social media, like most things in life, can be a double edged sword. It has the power to connect and inspire, it also has the potential to isolate and feed our inner demons. Like any adventure it’s therefore worth being prepared and ensuring that you know why you set out and what you want to get out of it. In times of stress know when to walk away and at the end of the day, know that you have friends who can act as a more rounded sounding board if they are not limited to 280 characters, they may even have gin.

All opinions on this blog are my own

Keeping Up with the Kardashians: Your K score and the uneasy relationship between science and science communication

August 12, 2022August 12, 2022 girlymicro Academic Life, Healthcare Science, Microbiology (Clinical), Microbiology (Research), Research/Academia, Science Communication

I’ve talked previously about benchmarking and the pros and cons of trying to work out if you are doing OK by comparing yourself to others. As scientists we have a tendancy to look for evidence, in the form of numbers, to enable us to do this. In terms of research measures the main ones that I have heard of being used are the h-index (Hirsch index) and the i10-index. These numbers are not just used by us as individuals as marker of impact and progress but they are also used by promotion panels at universities and by external reviews as a marker of quality/excellence. The question is are they measuring the right things? More recently I heard of something completely new (to me), the K-index (Kardashian index) and finding out what it was about kind of blew my mind.

What are these measures?

The h-index is supposed to measure both productivity and impact. It’s calculated by using the number of papers published by an individual that have a minimum number of citations, for instance if you have a h-index score of 4 you have 4 papers that have at least 4 citations. You may have published 20 papers but they only count once they have reached the minimum citation score. The i10-index by comparison is the number of papers with a minimum of 10 citations, and so is a similar but simplified version.

As of August 2021 my scores for these benchmarks (as taken from Google Scholar) are:

I had on the other hand had never heard of the K score or Kardashian index until recently. The K-index is a measure of someone’s scientific productivity in relation to their social media score. It is determined by dividing the number of social media followers someone has on Twitter by the number of citations they have in peer reviewed publications. In my case (as of the 10th August) that would be 4939/703 = K-index of 7.03.

What’s in a number?

But what do any of these numbers actually mean. For the h-index a score of 20 for a scientist of 20 years experience is supposed to mean they are successful, 40 is outstanding and 60 is exceptional. Obviously these vary between disciplines, but as I haven’t reached my 20 years yet I’m OK with my 16. For the i10-index, only really used by Google Scholar, for a similar level of experience an i10-index of 25 is considered to be pretty good. Again, this varies between disciplines. It is also likely to differ between settings, as a Clinical Academic I am unlikely to achieve the same metrics as one of my academic colleagues, as I also hold a clinical role.

“I propose that all scientists calculate their own K-index on an annual basis and include it in their Twitter profile. Not only does this help others decide how much weight they should give to someone’s 140 character wisdom, it can also be an incentive – if your K-index gets above 5, then it’s time to get off Twitter and write those papers”
Hall, N (July 30, 2014). “The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists” (PDF). Genome Biology. 15 (7): 424.

What is it that my K-index means then? Well my K-index is above 5 and therefore apparently means I may have a higher following than my scientific research credentials indicate I deserve. If I had a low K-index (i.e. 1 or 2) it would suggest that perhaps my science was being undervalued. This was actually seen for a quite a few female scientists in this rather tongue in cheek study.

Just call me Khloe

So I am a Kardashian, it’s official! Now if I could also be given their pay packet and I also wouldn’t mind someone who would follow me around doing my hair and nails – although that might be a little weird on ward round.

In all seriousness there have been a number of things that struck me about this as a concept.

The idea that scientists only attract followers in order to share their own science, rather than to share and discuss science or to raise awareness of the profession
That all of these measures try to claim they measure impact but all they do is measure the equivalent of ‘shares’ by scientists to scientists and I would suggest that that isn’t actually a measure of impact – just a measure of how well you are surviving at publish or perish
The lack of perceived benefit from science communication undertaken by scientists in comparison to the requirement to produce new publications. This has been seen in a bias against women in the promotions process as they are usually disproportionately involved in activities such as outreach, which are not perceived to have equivalent value. Only ‘hard’ science counts

What does the existence of this metric tell us (even jokingly) about the relationship between science and science communication?

I am aware that the author of this paper said in 2022 that it was satire and a dig at the use of a metric indicators, but I think it goes deeper than that and sheds light on a much larger set of issues and attitudes.

I have been told my people that I both respect and who are very senior that I should do ‘less of my nonsense and focus on both my science and clinical skills’. The nonsense they were referring to is my education and outreach work, work like the Nosocomial Project. The impact of this work in terms of recruiting future scientists, about the democratisation of science, and impacts on decision making, definitely aren’t captured by the number of citations I have on Google Scholar.

I think these metrics also fail to capture things like translation into clinical practice, inclusion in guidance and use by groups who may not be publishing papers, and therefore are not citing your work, but have applied it to their setting. That is the reason that I publish, to support change, not to chase a h-index, and so these metrics represent only a very traditional view of academic impact.

As for the K-index, as far as I’m concerned my research is funded by the public, the results therefore are owned by that same public and there is an onus on me to share with then what their funding has paid for, discuss with them whether they actually feel it brings benefit and where it can be improved for those with lived experience. I think the time of academics living in an Ivory Tower and only communicating with each other should be over. Yes we need to talk to each other, collaborate and inspire each other, but that shouldn’t be as far as the conversation goes.

There is obviously a difference between being a science communicator and a scientist who communicates science. The JD’s and the skill sets are over lapping but different. That doesn’t mean that scientists shouldn’t be out there talking about science with the wider public. I feel very strongly that sites like twitter shouldn’t be a single sided conversation. I’m not just going to talk about my science, I want to discuss and amplify content produced by others. I want to have, sometimes challenging, discussions in order to show that science isn’t about absolutes.

Communication on social media is about so much more than the sharing of data. It is a way to develop networks, show support and amplify, as well as to communicate information that is real time and may not have gone through the academic peer review process, such as guidelines or funding calls. So maybe instead of putting scientists with a high K-index and low other scores into academic purgatory we should look at developing a different way to evaluate the modern version of what it is to be a scientist. A score that could capture all of the invaluable work a lot of academics do to ensure that there is a workforce of the future and to support scientific literacy and co-production beyond the Ivory Towers in which we live.

Anyway, apparently I’m off to the paper mines to prove my academic worth. I intend to continue to smuggle out tweets whilst the WiFi permits however, because as much as its lovely to talk to scientists and people like me, science is more valuable when it is truly shared and available to everyone.

All opinions on this blog are my own

The Second Year Slump: understanding the ups and downs of doing a PhD

July 4, 2022July 4, 2022 girlymicro Academic Life, Microbiology (Research), Research/Academia

I loved my PhD, it was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever had the privilege of doing in my career. It was also the start of my physical decline, the point at which I developed alopecia and started to have auto immune attacks. It was (next to FRCPath) the psychologically most challenging thing I’ve ever done. I don’t regret it for one second, but there are aspects of what it is like to do a PhD that I think I would have been better prepared for if someone had talked to me about them before I started. Now I supervise PhD students myself and I try to have some of the conversations with them that I wish that someone had had with me.

Completing any PhD is a roller coaster and crossing the finish line is a huge mile stone. There is a lot of road from the start to completion however. So today I wanted to talk about one topic in particular that if I had known about when I started would have meant, when it happened to me, I didn’t feel so alone, out if my depth and like a failure compared to my peers. I’m talking about the second year slump.

Now this post is going to focus on PhDs but a lot of the thinking about why this is challenging and hard can be applied to any form of long term project that is high stakes and mostly undertaken in isolation. There are probably points we can all take away for different aspects of our working lives

So what is the second year slump?

The second year slump is the time during the middle of your PhD when you feel like you’ve lost your way. It’s the time where most students have a massive crisis of confidence both linked to their own skills and whether they can ever complete, but also linked to the project itself and whether it will have value. It is a pretty dark and lonely time where everything feels really hard and very isolating.

A question of timing?

Why does it happen when it happens? The second year is that point in a project when you have been doing it for long enough to understand the scale of the project and are so firmly embedded in it that you see both all of the challenges and all of the faults. You are also still quite far away from seeing the finish line or having outputs that make you feel you are really achieving.

Now obviously the second year slump doesn’t always occur in the second year, when it happens depends somewhat on the time scale of your PhD, it may be later if you’re working part time. The thing is it has happened to every PhD student I’ve spoken to at some point and certainly to every PhD student I’ve ever supervised.

One of the difficult things about entering the middle stage of your PhD is that you are getting to the point where you will be actively comparing yourself against others. Am I doing OK? Am I working hard enough? Am I productive enough? The problem is that every single project is different, your learning needs as a student will also be different as everyone starts in a different place. Therefore comparing how you are doing against others is often a fools errand. To compound this you are often benchmarking against peers that are either super enthusiastic as they have just started, or against other peers who are getting outputs (papers/posters) and meeting their success criteria because they are further down the line. Very rarely do you have someone in exactly the same boat to truly compare against, and yet we are rarely told to not compare against others.

The road ahead is all starting to become very real

The other thing about the middle of any long term project is that you are too far away from the end to truly be able to conceptualise what that looks like, and far enough from the beginning that the true challenges of the task are becoming very real. Rather than being filled with lots of enthusiasm and just an idea that it is going to be challenging, you know know quite how challenging the path ahead will be.

At this stage it can often feel like no progress is being made. The increments are so small that you can’t fully judge the distance you have travelled and you are so fully focussed on what is in front of you that you forget quite how far you’ve come. One of the tricks that I’ve been thinking of doing with my new starters is to get them to write notes to themselves for 6, 12 and 18 months as with a reminder of where they are and what they hope to have achieved by that point. I hope that by doing this it will give them something concrete to reflect back on to truly understand their level of progress. Pairing students during the second year slump with new starters can also actually help at this point. As well as developing them as educators it can also stand to show them how much knowledge they have acquired since they were the new starter themselves.

‘Oh, everyone wants to know about me’

It is a truth universally acknowledge that you should never ask a PhD student how it is going. The main issue with this is, if you are anything like I was at this point, I had very little life outside of work and my PhD so I just didn’t have a lot of small talk that wasn’t about my project. The problem is (and I acknowledge the irony here) everyone has an opinion or some advice. People who haven’t done a PhD have nothing to really compare it against in terms of giving you the support you need. We also all know of those other PhD students who use discussion as a way of making themselves feel better by talking about how great they are doing, whereas in truth we know that they were actually doing no better than anyone else. This is often compounded by your supervisor who will have a 1001 different priorities and will be trying to strike a balance between pushing enough and (if you are lucky) caring enough about your health and wellbeing to not push too much.

During the second year slump it can be tricky to find anything positive to say. You can’t babble on about everyone you’ve just met or how great it is to start, you often have nothing concrete that people will understand (like papers and posters) to share, and in all honesty this phase of an experimental PhD is often just filled with a lot of failure which can be difficult to discuss for fear of judgement. These things can all make just simply answering the question ‘how is the PhD going?’ challenging.

Stepping into your future

Finally, and I know it doesn’t feel like it, this is the point at which you really are developing and learning most. You’re at the point where you are starting to take risks and explore what it’s like to do novel work, you are truly beginning to work as a scientist and that can be scary and require adjustment.

At the start of your PhD you will mostly be doing the ‘safe’ work. Learning techniques and building on work done by others, but not initially taking those next big leaps of thought that are required for you to develop your own work. During your second year you are usually going to be making your own intellectual leaps and so the consequence of that is that there is a lot of failure and trouble shooting as you try and work things out. As you really grow into undertaking work as an independent researcher, you make that shift into following up on your own thoughts and really take responsibility for planning your work. That responsibility and the fact that your success is intrinsically linked to how well you develop into this new role can be truly terrifying, but it’s rarely articulated. Most people think the adjustment happens in the first year, but in my experience it is definitely during the second year when this shift starts to occur.

So if you are feeling low and lonely in the middle of any project, know that it is not you, it’s probably a function of the type of work you are doing. Remember that this is hard and that’s OK as you are truly beginning to reach your potential and anything worth doing is not easy, so be kind to yourself. If you are a supervisor or other form of mentor, talk about this with your students that are coming on board, think of ways to make it easier. Last of all and for the love of all you hold dear, don’t as a second year PhD student if they’ve started on their thesis yet, unless you’re prepared to give them a LOT of tea, cake and sympathy.

All opinions on this blog are my own

Celebrating National Pathology Week: What is a clinical academic?

June 22, 2022June 22, 2022 girlymicro Academic Life, Healthcare Science, Microbiology (Clinical), Microbiology (Research), Research/Academia

We are working through an exciting time within NHS careers, especially as Healthcare Scientists. Training pathways are becoming more formalised and alongside this diversity of opportunities are increasing, allowing Healthcare Scientists to have not only more options for their individual careers but also to increase the impact of this workforce across areas including academia, education, leadership, as well as clinical specialisms. Following on from this weeks Guest Blog by Dr Claire Walker discussing the transition from lab to lectern and life working as a Healthcare Scientist within the academic setting I thought I would write something on what it is like to be a Clinical Academic (CA), working with a foot in both camps.

So what is a clinical academic? I suspect that all of you who read this blog regularly will be able to picture my face when I googled and the top entry is the one below from the NHS Healthcare Careers webpage:

what is a clinical academic? – healthcare careers search response

I believe it’s pretty self evident that I am not a medical doctor and that although this description may once have been true it is far from telling the full story.

So what is a Clinical Academic?

Being a CA is not in fact based on profession, or even % time splits. It’s based on the role that is occupied. One of the big distinguishing features is that a CA holds roles both within a University and within a Healthcare organisation, usually one honorary position and another substantive. Throughout the lifetime of a CA career the substantive post may switch between being within healthcare or a University, its the maintenance of both that is probably the most CA universal theme.

The amount of lecturing vs research varies by individual. Most of the CAs I work with tend to be highly engaged with research, especially if they are mainly based in healthcare, as this provides them with funding to buy out their time. In roles where clinics are routine however this provides a buy out route in the other direction. Despite being more research than teaching focussed I still teach on a number of master and undergraduate courses, as well as speaking at conferences etc.

Some typical academic tasks include:

Grant applications
Publication writing
Public engagement
Research supervision
Data collection (in whatever field that might be)
Teaching
Peer review (grants, papers etc)
Conference presentations
Other writing: book chapters etc
Guidance and strategic inputting

What are the routes into clinical academia?

On the Healthcare Scientist career chart below there is a box for CA pathways, but to me it still feels a bit ‘to be developed’. This isn’t unique to Healthcare Science but provides particular issues for my colleagues in specialist laboratories, especially within the UKHSA as they don’t have such a clear progression route laid out for them. It currently doesn’t really capture the whole situation as many of us in the Consultant Clinical Scientist box will also hold CA responsibilities and so the pathways aren’t as split as they appear.

There are a variety of roles into CA careers, both formal and informal. There is a fairly specific skill set you need to develop:

PhD (usually a research PhD rather than a tought/professional doctorate)
Some form of teaching qualification (as determined by your university). Not required for existing post but usually required for new
Funding track record – as you need to demonstrate to your employer you can assure an income stream
Publication track record – needed both for funding and dissemination
These days an interest in public engagement/involvement doesn’t hurt

The most established formal route into a CA career is via the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) and the Integrated Clinical Academic (ICA) programme.

This is a programme that provides skill development and funding support all the way through from taster sessions to funding support for you to run your own research group. I wrote an article about this route in 2016 for the ACB and not much has changed in terms of the benefits.

The NIHR schemes are great, they match your current salary and give both great training and consumables support. This does mean these schemes are highly competitive (20 – 40% success rate, depending on level) however these days you need a level of research track record (publications and funding) to even enter at Doctoral level – demonstrating a pre-existing commitment to a CA career.

What about the informal routes? As I said the skill sets required are pretty standard and so can be developed piecemeal rather than through a structured programme. It is possible to get funding to do both a PhD and a teaching qualification by going through other routes (I have a post linked to PhD funding coming). The other components, funding and publishing, you will get by applying for funding for the qualification based aspects and during your PhD, it just may take longer. That said the NIHR route is time consuming and far from guaranteed, so both routes require you to know why you want to become a CA and an understanding of the fact that getting there is not a 9 – 5 commitment.

Why do Clinical Academic careers matter?

So having said that it can be a challenging route to go down why should you put in the effort?

There are numerous reasons why CAs are essential in healthcare. Let’s start with individual patient benefits. Research, especially translational research, is key to providing the best possible patient care. If we want to provide cutting edge care then we need to be engaged in the research that is developing that care – from clinical trials to diagnostic development. Getting results that diagnose patients faster has great individual benefits for patients, as they get on the right treatment more rapidly. Being engaged with clinical trials means that patients may be offered treatment or management that would just not be open to them otherwise.

On a Trust scale research enables funding to support infrastructure or translation of new diagnostics/services that might just not be possible with normal budget constraints. I was recently the co-applicant on a grant which brought in over £500,000.00 of infrastructure funding, for both staff and equipment. This means that the initial financial burden of translating over something new is not placed on the NHS and the data to then support business cases for introduction can be collected with minimal financial impact. On a national scale this kind of funding also supports multi site projects which would be difficult to manage in any other way in order to support large scale changes within the healthcare system, meaning that the potential impact can be huge and provide wide scale change.

There are also so many benefits for you as an individual. My career and life changed the day I got my NIHR Doctoral Fellowship. It opened both my eyes and doors to paths that I could never have imagined. I wouldn’t be a Lead Healthcare Scientist now if it wasn’t for the NIHR. I’m not sure I would be a Consultant. I have travelled the world, given lectures to thousands of people, developed future CAs and been able to develop as a scientist and a leader thanks to the funding that was provided. Along the way I hope that I’ve also made a difference for patients both through being involved in national guidance and local change.

What does a day in the life of a clinical academic look like?

As with so many aspects of Healthcare Science no two CAs seems to be the same. The National School of Healthcare Science have a number of different profiles on their webpage which describe some of the different options.

For me my weeks are really varied, obviously for the last 2 years my clinical work has been a priority and so the academic side of my role has been less prominent. I’ve already talked about teaching but for instance this is what I will be doing this month:

Organising a specialist conference on Environmental Infection Prevention and Control
Reviewing papers for numerous journals
Reviewing a grant
Reviewing abstract submissions for a conference
Meeting with my PhD students
Editing a paper for submission
Meeting to review SOPs for a country wide clinical trial
Meeting to review data for an ongoing COVID-19 study
Meeting with the molecular team to talk about how we move our Gram negative typing forward
Carrying out an MSc viva
Attending 2 exam boards as an external examiner

As my clinical work is currently still pretty hard core a lot of this I’ll pick up for the moment in my own time. Also, none of it takes me as long as when I first started out and so it looks more overwhelming than it actually is – I hope you can see the variety however.

There is no getting around the fact that being a CA is not a 9 – 5 post however, managing grant and other deadlines on top of clinical work often requires some significant juggling skills, and in my case a very supportive husband. It’s not something I would advise that people strive for if they don’t love research, if they don’t have so many ideas that they just need to do something with them, it is not a tick box career. You also have to grow to be comfortable with failure, only ~20% of grants are successful, paper reviewer comments can be harsh and your confidence will take repeated knocks. Every time this happens though I get better at what I do, I find the learning and try to make sure I do it better next time #lifeislearning.

Despite it’s challenges being a CA brings me untold joy, it provides me with an outlet for creative thought and means that even though I spend most of my days in an office not a lab, I still feel like a scientist. I get to collaborate with the most amazing people who are at the forefront of their fields to make improvements for patients that would either not be possible or would take years any other way. For me it’s been something that has more than repaid my investment in time, energy and creativity. It’s taken me to places I would never have imagined, introduced me to people that my life is better for having met and provided me with experiences that I didn’t think would ever happen to someone as normal as me. So if you love learning new things, making life better for patients and are happy to spend your weekends in front of a laptop then a Clinical Academic career may be the career for you!

All opinions on this blog are my own

Guest Blog Dr Claire Walker: The Clinical Academic Path – From the Lab to the Lectern

June 20, 2022June 16, 2022 girlymicro Academic Life, Guest blog, Healthcare Science

To help us celebrate National Pathology Week the ever inspiring Dr Claire Walker has written a blog post to follow on from the talk she gave at HCSEd22 (videos to follow on YouTube). Healthcare Scientists work across the NHS and increasingly within academia, and so it’s important that we acknowledge the wide variety of roles that are open to us.

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.

The Clinical Academic Path – From the Lab to the Lectern

What can we learn from clinical academic scientists during a conference about co-production? Turns out, given a platform to shout loudly enough, rather a lot.

Minding the Gap

What steps did I take to move from the clinical laboratory to an academic position? Well, I did what any clinical scientist worth their salt who’s been through the transition from CPA to UKAS would do, I performed a gap analysis. Yes, I really am that person. I looked at job adverts for senior clinical scientists and senior lecturers looking for key similarities and points of difference. To my delight I found that we had far more in common than that which divides us. Yes, there are a few key extras like the commitment to completing a teaching qualification and learning exciting new quality systems but where better to learn a new skill than a university filled with professional educators? The similarities in the roles didn’t genuinely surprise me but it did confirm what I had hoped to be true. If we are to educate and, hopefully, inspire the next generation of healthcare scientist then universities are looking to recruit leaders who’ve been there, done that, and lived to tell the tale.

Clinical Academic Purgatory

In a recent lecture on roles in the NHS, a student asked me where I currently sit. I pointed to the training pathway for healthcare scientists at point 4 – the Clinical Academic Career. ‘Ah I see’ they replied, “you’re in Clinical Academic Purgatory whilst you have your kids, you’ll go back to your real job eventually”. Well that stung a bit! But it’s a valid point, I think that the move to a teaching role in a university is often seen as a bit of a soft option. Nicer hours that running your own lab with a better work life balance, just don’t mention the marking! It’s not completely wrong either, the chance to spend my evenings and weekends with my partner and children even when drowning in marking is a huge perk.

However, I view this move as more that a pause on my way to a consultant gig. I think that this collaboration offers us an incredibly important opportunity, the chance to share our stories. When I reflect on my many years in both universities and hospitals, the moments I remember are not learning the details of the complement cascade or T cell receptor VDJ recombination (though of course both are very useful) but the stories told by my mentors, colleagues and leaders that made me want to become the scientist I am today. To my mind, we have a responsibility to those who are following on from us. Through collaboration with our academic institutions, we can help perform this essential service to our profession.

As a clinical scientist turned lecturer, I’ve spent a good deal of my career bouncing between the laboratory and the lectern but I have often found that never the twain shall meet. I think it’s time we change that.

TLDR: What do we want? Co-Production! When do we want it? At the start of the next academic year. It is nearly summer after all.

All opinions on this blog are my own

Wearing My Quitter Badge With Pride: Why FOMO can damage your health

May 23, 2022May 23, 2022 girlymicro Academic Life, General, Healthcare Science, Microbiology (Clinical)

I have written lots of posts on this blog about being brave and saying yes to opportunities. For once I’m going to write about something that for me requires even more courage, and that is saying no. It’s not that I don’t stand by those previous posts, saying yes is incredibly important. The thing is we all need to know why we are saying yes (or no) and to make sure that we are choosing our responses for the right reasons. Neither response should be driven by fear. There are times that for our own health and wellbeing we need to know when to choose our responses in a way that isn’t about career progression or opportunities, and we need to acknowledge that that saying no is also OK.

I’m a FOMO (fear of missing out) addict. I always want to be engaged, I want to both support and be seen to do so. I’ve worked so hard to get into the room that I live in some level of fear about not being in it. I worry that if I leave the room I fought to get in, not only will I be forgotten, but I will be barred from re-entry.

Over the last year a number of things have happened which have forced me to put this fear into context. FOMO is a fear of missing out on the possible, but by not being present for my life I’ve been missing out on the reality of my life that is happening every day. Recent events have prompted me to send emails resigning from a couple of things. I thought it would feel awful (it might still at some point in the future) but it didn’t, it felt great. Not because I am not heart broken to step away from those roles but because of the removal of the weight of those responsibilities that I had not realised I was carrying with me.

I feel like not only am I happy that I took the plunge but in fact I want to Marie Kondo my diary i.e. look at each item/commitment and say ‘does this bring me joy?’. If the answer is no then I need to follow up with asking myself honestly ‘why am I doing it?’. Obviously there are many things in our day to day working lives that just need to happen, but I think you would also be amazed at how many of those things that we feel obligated to do are actually just a routine or something that we are doing because we tell ourselves we should. It is these things we need to interrogate ourselves over and ask what it is that they are giving us: joy, experience, contacts? Are they still giving those things to us or are we attached to the memory/habit. Are we just scared to face up to what it would mean to move on?

Reasons to regularly review

What this current experience has shown me is that I don’t review my working life. The last couple of weeks have taught me that I should. I’ve spent some time thinking about it and the thought that has struck me (and you probably all knew this already – I’m often behind) is that you have to let go of the things that no longer serve you to make room for things that will let you continue to grow. I’ve not been letting go of things. Partly because I’ve finally reached the goal I was desperate to achieve in my working life and to be frank I’m so happy about that I’m still scared someone will take it away from me. I’m so used to having to tick so many boxes, often driven by the check list of others, that I’ve stopped reflecting on what was on the list for me.

If you, like me, have fallen into the habit of just taking on more, of just carrying on without reviewing your why, this is my plea for you to take a moment to see whether this is something you need to change. We should take a moment to put a review date in our diaries – I’m aiming for once every 6 months – to go through my lists of committees and responsibilities to see whether they are still a good fit for me and for those I’m working with. After all, it’s not just about my needs but also about making sure that I still offer what was required.

Carve out time to maximise impact

For me its not just a review of task, it’s also a review of mindset that is required. It’s very easy to become a human ‘doing’ and not a human ‘being’. Due to the pandemic I feel I’ve got into the habit of being in responsive mode. Constantly responding to changing information, changing guidance and the hundreds of daily emails. Don’t get me wrong, this is where I think many of us needed to be for the last couple of years, but we need to break ourselves of this habit. It’s nigh on impossible to be strategic in responsive mode. It is also not good for our own well being – at least it’s not for mine. I know get stressed and twitchy if I don’t access emails on the weekend. I worry about being judged for not immediately responding to every demand. The problem is that after the last 2 years I am broken and I can’t maintain it. Not just that but whilst I’ve been taking the time to reflect I’m pretty sure that it’s not where I do my best work. Responsive mode is fine when in crisis. Crisis is time consuming however and leads to focus on specific issues. To work on how to improve services and identify where we can do better requires us to take the time to step back, calmly reflect and then make plans. Switching from responsive to strategic mode is therefore important not just for me as an individual but is also key to doing a better job for patients.

Interrogate your reasons for saying yes

Not only am I a FOMO addict but I’m also a people pleaser. I feel the need to get feedback from others in order to feel like I succeed (I have another post coming on this). This can be an effective driver but when it takes over it can become a really destructive trait. You do not need to say yes to everything in order to ‘show up’. You don’t need to work 12 hour days ever day in order to be successful, in order to be enough. In fact by working those hours and becoming so focussed on the minutiae you may actually be performing less well than if you did your 9 – 5 and had adequate time off to reflect and recuperate.

These are my reasons for over committing but your may be very different. All of the different drivers we have are both good and bad, it all depends on how they are balanced. In times of stress it can become difficult to find that balance – and we have all been mighty stressed over the last 2 years. Now is a good time to look at ourselves and our decisions to make deliberate and mindful choices moving forward. Our judgement of worth needs to be internal not external if we’re to get out of this loop.

Know your worth

Self worth is a tricky thing. As I said above I’m a people pleaser, my self worth is often therefore derived from pleasing others. It is also linked to success, and like many in my field I define that success linked to outputs – presentations, guidelines, grant funding, papers published. Like many others I have lived, breathed, and focussed on pandemic management for the last 2 years. Therefore my sense of self has become distorted and my self worth has become even more focussed on work.

The thing is there is way more to me than my job. I have passions and interests both linked to work (like writing and The Nosocomial Project) and with my family. It is my family that have paid the price for the shift in how I behave and determine my value, and it is my family that now need to be my focus in order re-establish the balance I need to move forward. As teams, as managers and supervisors we need to support each other in shifting mindsets post this unusual period, and remind them that it’s OK to leave on time, to have weekends and eat lunch. It is OK to be the fullest version of yourself.

Give yourself permission to say no

So moving forward I am going to give myself permission to not just review options and step away from projects, but also to say no to new ones. If I lose traction, if I lose opportunities because I say no on occasion and if I’m not ‘always on’ then that is a price that I have determined I’m willing to pay. Those people who know me and have supported me will not disappear overnight just because I take more time to focus my energies on being the best person I can be.

Opening doors for others

I’m also not going to feel guilty about stepping back. This feeling of guilt has been difficult to manage but it’s not well founded. By stepping back from positions I’ve done for a while I’m opening up progression windows for others to make connections and gain experience in exactly the same that I did. By learning to say ‘no but have you thought about’ I am making opportunities for others and hopefully lifting others up by putting their names forward. Realising this has been crucial to me not feeling guilty about saying no. My saying no means that others can say yes and that is nothing to feel guilty about.

Situations change and the thing that was right for you 2 years ago may not be right thing for you now and that’s ok. Fear and guilt shouldn’t prevent us from letting go of things in order to grow and learn. So as much as I’m an advocate of yes I am also learning to become more comfortable with no. Find your joy, say yes to putting yourself first and know that by doing so you will become even better tomorrow than you are today!

All opinions on this blog are my own

Conference Season Is Upon Us: Top tips for anyone who struggles with networking

May 2, 2022May 4, 2022 girlymicro Academic Life, Education, Healthcare Science, Microbiology (Clinical), Microbiology (Research), Research/Academia

Firstly apologies, this post was supposed to go up before ECCMID as I was hoping it would help others attending. Work was just too full on and I didn’t have the headspace to get it written. As there are still a lot of events yet to come I’m hoping it will still prove useful however.

We all know how very important networking is, especially at conferences. So much of a career that makes a difference in science is based on who you know and who you collaborate with. The problem is making those connections and getting to know people, especially in the early part of your career, often requires taking the plunge and being the one to open a conversion with someone you’ve never met.

I have an amazing friend called Diane who is a wonder to behold in these setting. She happily goes up to talk to people who she’s never met and just starts talking to them with great enthusiasm. Shes fearless and draws the best out of those she engages with. If you are a Diane you probably need read no further. For me however, there is little worse than that moment when you enter a room at a meeting/event, get your cup of tea and survey the 100s of people before you. In this moment you know that really now is the time, you HAVE to find someone to talk to. How do you choose who? What on earth do you say that means you don’t come across as an idiot? The very thought of it gives me palpitations. So here are some things I’ve learnt that take some of the stress out of networking at conferences.

Find an in

There are some moments and set ups at conferences when it is easier to start a conversation than others. There is always the chance that the person next to you in an interesting session will strike up a conversation to help them process what they’ve heard but in general they will be doing the same as you, ducking into and out of sessions that trigger their fancy, meaning they will be you focused on what comes next not starting a chat.

I find however there are two key moments when people are available for the cold start up conversation.

The first is at food breaks/receptions. During these moments there will be people who are there solo and also looking to develop their networks. I find the best thing to do in these situations is to get there early. There are always a limited number of tables where people can put down drinks, if you can find one and hold a place then people will effectively come to you. If this fails and there are no tables, just being close to the source of the refreshments often does the same job. Food and drink are great removers of hierarchy and being somewhere visible means that those in a similar position to you will be able to see you and hopefully will head your way. Worst case you make some small talk to the group that comes to your table and you can politely extricate yourself if it all feels too weird by saying you’re popping to get another drink.

The other place where people will be desperate to speak to you is during poster sessions. So many people will be waiting at their posters for an hour in the desperate hope that someone will come and show an interest. This is often a great time to make connections/exchange contact details (see NB below) If you scope out the listing you will know you are speaking to people who are interested in the same kind of work as you. This can shortcut some of the small talk you might otherwise need to make. It also enables you to know whether you are making a connection with a peer or whether you are connecting with a potential mentor/future employer.

The other thing to think about prior to these conversations is what you can offer, what is your unique selling point?

Knowledge (technique, setting or organism)
Access (organism, patients, research equipment)
Support (mentorship, peer-peer)
Collaboration (shared goals, shared research, shared implementation)

NB one of my biggest tips for all of these situations is to make sure you have some business cards printed – even if you print them yourself – this means that you can have something easy to hand out or pin to posters if you want authors to get in touch

Find your tribe

Anyone who reads this blog regularly will know that I’m a bit of a twitterholic (@girlymicro if we haven’t met). One of the many reasons that I’ve stuck with twitter since I initially signed up is that it has transformed my networking experiences. Twitter has offered me a way to circumvent the cold start up conversation by allowing me to find my tribe.

These days every conference/meeting has a hashtag. By following this hashtag you can find people who are interested in the same things as you, people who are in the same sessions or who even have shared connections. In many ways its an improved version of doing the poster walk. Not only does this give you a conversational in but also by tweeting yourself linked to the thread before you ever meet in person it allows you to have a low stakes initial introduction.

One of the things I also love about twitter is it enables me to find and arrange to meet up with people who I primarily know online in order to strengthen my networks by getting to know each other better. It also gives me the chance to arrange collaboration events, like podcast recordings, when we just happen to be in the same place for a limited time. Both of these can obviously be done by email but can be much easier to arrange when at an event when you suddenly have half an hour free. Especially at big conferences you could wander the halls for 4 days and not meet anyone you know, this way you can make the most of every second.

Take a study buddy

I absorb my learning best when I have someone to talk through my thoughts with. I have a couple of trusted study buddies that I will by preference attend events with. These guys help me get the most out of any event by:

Encouraging me to be braver – ask those questions I might talk myself out of, talk to that person that I should really try to connect with
Providing me with a sounding board for ideas when I’m in the moment
Enabling us to divide and conquer – there are often multiple sessions I want to be in at the same time, this way we can split up and meet at whichever session is actually proving most appropriate
Knowing me well enough to give me space when I need down time to re-energise
Crucially for me they are also there so I can feel safe from a health perspective if I have issues. They’ve helped me manage severe reactions, broken limbs etc and I trust them to get me where I need to be and give healthcare workers the right info if I need care

Mel and Lena have been my colleagues for years and they can not only get me out of a shame spiral if I do something stupid but also, by having them available to have conversations all together with new collaborators, we can make much more rapid progress on projects from the very start.

One of the other great things about going with a great study buddy is that you can also achieve other goals whilst at the conference. You can start to get papers drafted, do that research return or catch up about PhD students. If you do have supervision responsibilities whilst you’re away, as you have trainees with you, you can also share the load in terms of ensuring you have downtime. A lot of my most creative breakthroughs have happened with these guys whilst we’ve been away, surrounded both by new science and the time to reflect on how we could encorporate new thinking into our work.

Do some pre-work

I can get really insecure when going to high stakes meetings, like some of the ones I’ve been to at the House of Commons. I never really feel like I fit in and I have been known to hide in the bathrooms there until 5 minutes prior to an event start so I don’t have to face the ‘meet a stranger’ chit chat. In recent years I’ve learnt the value of doing some pre-work ahead of these meetings. This has taken different forms:

Reaching out on social media to see if any of my connections are attending
Approaching a professional body, especially if I’m on their guestlist, to find out who else they are sending so I can pre-arrange meeting at the session
Researching the event to look at speakers and attendance list (if available) so I can pre plan who I might want to speak to and what I could start a conversation with

In these events part of the value is in expanding your network and so really thinking about why you are going and what you hope to achieve is really worth it. Then you can match your elevator pitch (who you are, what you do and what you can offer) to your goals to help you achieve them.

Become the person others come to speak to

One of the things that has become lovely in recent years is that I’ve realised if you are presenting/organising/chairing people come to speak to you. This removes a whole lot of the stress of networking. As I mentioned above, people will often come to you even when you are presenting posters. Its always worth submitting work therefore to events you are attending, not only to get feedback on get science, but also to support you in developing your networks.

Even if you are not in a position to submit work then you should think about offering to support the organisation of events. Meetings are frequently looking for individuals who are happy to support the event organisation, both ahead of time and to do things like man the desks during the event itself. This will mean that you get to know other people who are supporting event delivery with you and give you an opportunity to network with delegates and speakers in a supported way. These connections can be transformative in terms of giving you further opportunities down the line.

Know your self and your limits

Most people assume I’m an extrovert when they meet me and I definitely have a lot of those traits. The things is, I can only manage networking for a fixed period of time. I’m good for a couple of meetings but then I need to retreat back into my bathroom office and answer some emails, otherwise I just feel progressively drained. The older I get the more I need my own space. This is usually fine but presents a real problem at places like conferences where I may need to be in full on extrovert mode for 16 hours a day. I find it exhausting.

One of the things that I’ve discovered about networking is that I therefore have to schedule it in a way that works for me. I can’t agree to go to lots of dinners on top of full day events, either from a health or a social resource point of view. I therefore pick the moments that work best for me and don’t over commit. This does mean I sometimes worry about missing out and not making the most of every opportunity but it also means that I put myself and my wellbeing first. It means that I don’t leave a conference unable to engage with work when I get back as I’ve already used up all my resources. Therefore my top piece of advice is to understand that networking is key but find a way to do it that works for you. Pick your key moments and do them well, rather than trying to be all things to all people.

All opinions on this blog are my own

How Do We Stop, When the Person We Are Competing Against is Ourselves?

March 6, 2022March 6, 2022 girlymicro Academic Life, General, Healthcare Science

I’ve talked a lot previously about the fact that we should only really compete with ourselves. We are all different as are our lives and therefore it makes sense that all of our success criteria will be different too. It’s too tempting to bench mark against others and find yourself wanting. This can be a great driver but it is also something that I for one find difficult some days as I don’t know if it can be turned on and off.

Three years ago today I ended up in a cast from shoulder to wrist. I fell out of a lift at work and protected my work laptop and phone and failed somewhat to protect myself. I’d never broken anything before and so was convinced I’d just sprained something (despite not being able to straighten my arm). I therefore took ibuprofen and paracetamol, went to three more meetings and told everyone I’d be back on Monday – this was a Friday morning. On Saturday morning I was forced to admit that maybe there was something wrong and finally went to A & E (after checking my emails). There I was told I broken my elbow and that I’d have a fracture clinic appointment in the week. I shrugged and said well it’s only and elbow and so worked from home as that didn’t mean I couldn’t type……..right. I finally turned up at fracture clinic and I had broken not only my elbow but also my wrist and then put a full arm cast on me and signed me off sick for 6 weeks. I’d never had a sick note before, I hyperventilated in the appointment and burst into tears saying that they couldn’t do it. They pointed out they could, insisted I took codeine for the pain and put me in the hands of my friend to take me home. What’s my point? My point is that that I don’t know when to stop. I was told by multiple people I should have gone to A & E on the day. I was told by many more to go home and not go to meetings? My husband was adamant that I was in pain and shouldn’t work prior to the fracture clinic as I had a broken arm. I made my wrist much worse and heal out of alignment because I typed on it for almost a week because I couldn’t stop.

So how do we stop when the person who is driving us to continue is ourselves?

I posted last week about the fact that I am often not that well, in fact today I am writing this post in bed as I just feel pretty rough. I’m used to needing to push through because if I didn’t I wouldn’t ever achieve anything very much. What’s probably worse is that I think I’m a fundamentally lazy person. Honestly if I could I would lie on a chaise longue in a library all day reading books and drinking tea. As I’m painfully aware of this aspect of my personality I do try (although my hubby may point out not always successfully) to counter it by being pro-active about doing things. The combination of these two mean that I don’t often know when it’s OK to take my foot off the gas and rest and when I need to knuckle down and push on.

There are times when this is useful

There are times when not knowing when to stop is actually useful. Pre-pandemic I used to run, badly. I’m not good at it, I’m not fast. What I am is stubborn. I continue to put one foot in front of the other no matter what. I’ve finished marathons and half marathons with blood up to calves and enormous holes in my feet but I get into a zone where I just put one foot in front of the other and the pain doesn’t matter so much.

When it comes to working in healthcare I find the same thing happens mentally as well as physically, you just keep going. No matter what the warning signs in terms of burn out of physical health, you keep going because that’s what we do. My auto immune condition entered a whole new phase when I was doing my PhD and I’d just finished a half marathon (whilst in my 3rd year of PhD) when my husband noticed I’d lost a patch of my hair. None of it stopped me. I still submitted my PhD a year early so I could do FRCPath and complete my consultant training.

I succeeded because I just pushed on, because of the habit of putting one foot in front of another. At the time finishing was everything, now I wonder if there were more sensible ways and if I should have listened to those around me, but I was on mile 9 (which I hate) and I just wanted to get the equivalent of mile 13.

Medicine and healthcare are hard places to break the habit

I work in an amazing organisation, filled with the most amazing people. They are all also super smart and world leading experts. I’ve worked there for almost 18 years, I trained there, I’ve grown into an adult there. Being surrounded by people that smart, that successful becomes an embedded driver in itself. You want to succeed for yourself but you also want to succeed for them. As someone who thrives on doing things differently I wanted to follow my own path, break glass ceilings and set the way. To do that however you have to succeed, you have to tick the boxes that people think you can’t tick and so you have to find the drive to continue even when it feels impossible.

As a Healthcare Scientist there is track that needs completing in order to reach the consultant end point I was determined to achieve, for me it was supposed to look something like this:

Masters (years 1 – 3)
State registration (year 4)
Membership of the Royal College of Pathologists (year 4)
PhD (years 5 – 10)
Fellowship of the Royal College of Pathologists (year 11)

Even though I’ve talked about not benchmarking against others the need to complete these goals become embedded in your psyche. You become very focussed on the track that you are on, in the same way that I run, you get into the zone and take one step at a time. Sometimes however when you are in that zone it’s hard to hear the voices that say you could do it differently, that you could take a break between stages, that you could take that afternoon off to refresh. In my case it was hard because I was on fixed term contracts for the first 13 years of my career, until after I had my PhD and FRCPath. There was therefore a ticking clock in my brain that if I didn’t demonstrate enough commitment, get enough done, that I would lose my job and a career I loved. Not only was I competing against myself but I was competing against time.

So how do we stop?

All of this drive has definitely had its benefits, as I said there are times when this self-competition is really helpful. I would not have managed to get a consultant post or tick all the boxes that needed ticking without it. The issue is that how do you stop when it is no longer useful or even harmful?

I’m still working on this one but here are some things that I’ve found useful. The first one being is to listen to the balancing voices. There’s a lot of good in social media but it’s sometimes easy to only hear the things that re-enforce the fact that we should be working harder and doing more. There are other voices out there however that should make you stop and think about whether you can stop and take a break or just do it in a different way altogether, try and pay as much attention to these as the ones that drive you to keep doing what you’re doing.

Think more about who you are listening to when getting face to face advice. The day I broke my arm at least 3 people told me to go to A and E. I knew something wasn’t right but I listened to others that re-enforced my inner voice to keep going. It was my friends and family who were the ones that said to stop, the ones who prioritise me over Dr Cloutman-Green. Do yourself a favour and listen to these people more. Their priority is you, not the roster, not the deadlines and not the work. Amplify their voices in your mind rather than listening to others.

Finally I’m trying to become my own critical friend. If I was giving advice to someone on the situation I find myself in, would I tell them to push on or would I tell them to stop and rest so they can come back stronger? This is definitely a skill and I am definitely at amateur level right now, but I am working on giving myself permission, permission to leave on time, permission to eat lunch and permission to do things I enjoy that have nothing to do with work. I know some of you out there are so much better than I am at this, and as I said, I am a work in progress. I’m trying to remember therefore to enjoy the learning and the journey. Life after all is just a ride.

All opinions on this blog are my own

Celebrating International Day of Women and Girls in Science Day: A view from the Girly Side

February 11, 2022February 11, 2022 girlymicro Academic Life, General, Microbiology (Clinical), Research/Academia, Science Communication

This topic means a lot to me. It wasn’t by accident that when, in 2012, I chose my twitter handle: I chose Girlymicro/Girlymicrobiologist. It has felt to me, since I started as a working scientist in 2004, that it was considered unprofessional to bring my whole self to work: to like pink and purple, to bake, to talk about science fiction and gaming. It was the start of the journey that I am still on, to show that we are better scientists when we bring our whole selves to work. Anything that acts as a barrier to that not only harms us as individuals, but also harms what we can achieve as a collective.

The Road Is Long
With Many a Winding Turn
That Leads Us to Who Knows Where…

You may not know this, but I started out as a zoologist. I adored it, I loved it, but there were no jobs in it. My undergraduate dissertation was on the ‘Demographics of Witchcraft Accusations from 1625 to 1715’. You may think that has nothing to do with what I do now but you’d be wrong. Studying human and animal behaviour helps me all the time in understanding some of the group decision-making that occurs in healthcare. The hours of my life spent learning how to undertake statistical modelling was not wasted. What I didn’t study a lot of was microbiology: I did a single module of microbiology during my whole degree.

I then went on to study not microbiology but the physics of biological interactions at surfaces as an MRes. This was where I learnt some microbiology and developed a love of applied science. When I started as a trainee Clinical Scientist, I had so much less experience of microbiology than any of the other more traditional trainees. I once asked why they hired me and the wonderful Dr Margaret Sillis, who acted as my mentor, responded ‘We can teach you microbiology, it’s much harder to teach you how to think’. I still think about that and the transferable skills I picked up by studying other disciplines still come in use all the time.

This trend of not following the standard path has continued. It’s why I ended up in Infection Prevention and Control rather than microbiology. Although the traditional paths are in some ways easier, as you will be able to walk the path that others have walked before you, don’t be afraid to wander the path untrodden if you think that it will be a more satisfying journey for you as an individual. You will learn so much along the way and open up new roads for others to follow.

Making the Invisible Visible

During the last 10 years, one of the things I’ve consciously decided to do is to be visible. In 2015 I was asked if I would be filmed for a project that the Royal Society of Biology were organising called ‘Biology: Changing the World’. For some years I had been told, by my lovely (male) boss, that I shouldn’t do media and shouldn’t be seen as ‘courting attention’ as it a) detracted from the work, and b) people were looking to make a story out of you. Don’t get me wrong, there is some truth to this. It also results in a fair amount of negative feedback, often from female colleagues, about grandstanding and attention seeking. You know what it also does, however: it hopefully means that when a girl in 20 years time is asked the question I’m asked in this video about what female scientist inspired her, there is a chance she will have a name. Not that I think I’m going to be that person. I’m not going to win a Noble Prize or have a Wkipedia page. I do, even today, remember very clearly the male science undergraduate who came and spoke to my primary school class about his job, I can be THAT girl. The one that someone meets up close and personal and shows that normal everyday women can work in science. That the door is open to them. I can shine a light and make the career path visible to those who might follow. So, next time you are invited to do that piece of outreach, that radio interview, that blog and your mind questions your worth, ask: if not me, then who? I promise you that the next person will not be more qualified than you, more worthy than you, more appropriate than you. So please say yes.

The Importance of Valuing Difference

The above point brings me onto something a bit trickier. I’ve been fortunate enough to win a number of awards for myself and with my wonderful team and partners for undertaking STEM engagement. Doing this work requires energy and time, both of which are frequently given on weekends and evenings. Or, in the case of today’s blog, annual leave. I feel a moral obligation to do this work as well as it being an important part of maintaining my registration to practice. The interesting thing is that it is frequently not viewed this way in either my clinical or academic environments. It is not seen as ‘work’ and I have on more than one occasion been told that if I was serious about my career progression I needed to ‘do less of that nonsense’. Sadly this isn’t a unique situation for me, but is something that many women in science face, especially in academia. In these areas women spend a greater proportion of their time undertaking public engagement and utilising ‘soft skills’, which are not valued when it comes to promotion panels.

Over time I believe I have started to change perspectives, but it takes even more work and investment in time. I’ve taken on additional positions, such as Joint Trust Lead Healthcare Scientist. This position has enabled me to speak to senior leaders about the benefits of the work in order to raise awareness and to capture impact. By actively working with wonderful colleagues on projects nominated for awards, such as the Advancing Healthcare Award for Reach Out for Healthcare Science, with Dr Philippa May, and with Nicola Baldwin for the Antibiotic Guardian Awards and CSO Awards for Nosocomial, I have started to make inroads into changing the conversation. Awards aren’t everything, but they do support you in re-positioning what you are doing in a way that fits into the ‘traditional way’ success is captured.

Whilst I’m on this particular topic, I would also like to make one of the points I often respond with when talking to colleagues who aren’t so engaged in public engagement and outreach. The days of healthcare workers being considered to be ‘the authority’ are quite rightly coming to an end. Those of us working in healthcare need to be engaging and working collaboratively with patients and the public to co-create what the future of healthcare might be and should look like. We can’t begin this work until we get out there and start having conversations. Rather than being ‘nonsense’, this work is key to future of the NHS and, especially, Healthcare Science.

“Amplification” is Where It’s At

During the Obama administration, despite it’s progressive nature, women found it hard to get their voices heard.

We’ve all been there. The meetings in which you make a comment or a response and you’re ignored, only for a man in the room to repeat the comment and have everyone react as if it is the first time they’ve heard it. As women in science, we are often the only women in the room and so making ourselves heard can be difficult.

The women in the Obama administration came up with an “amplification” strategy, where women in meetings repeated each other’s ideas as well as deliberately crediting the women who came up with them.

I work with some amazing women in Healthcare Science (Jane Freeman, Anna Barnes, Ruth Thomsen, Kerrie Davies and so many more) who do an excellent job of this amplification. I’d like to think that we all have a definite and deliberate attitude of amplifying each others voices and not falling into the trap (that happens way too often) of competing with each other. Be deliberate when you are in spaces with other women who may not be heard, actively listen and repeat. Focus on those moments that could make a difference and ensure that everyone in the room is heard. It requires active effort, but it definitely changes the course of conversations.

So how our male colleagues can help? This is definitely one of those areas. There are often not the women in the room to do this and so having allies who are happy to support in the same way is a definite help.

Change the View for One That is More Pleasing

One day the super-inspirational Dr Lena Ciric and I sat down over a cup of coffee and engaged in one of our regular consolation sessions. This was because, yet again, I had written a grant that had been successfully funded but it didn’t have my name on it. It had the name of one of my male professors. Lena had experienced similar things over the years and also the reviewers’ response of ‘not enough experience’ as a result of grant after grant that didn’t credit us. This cup of coffee was different: it was during this session we decided that, if we couldn’t change the playing field, we could change the view.

What do I mean by this? Academically, we were applying for funding within the clinical microbiology environment. A landscape that was already filled with vastly experienced and (mostly) older male medics. We were not going to succeed in breaking through the glass ceiling by applying within this space. Life lesson: we needed to find another space. So we very deliberately looked across the different funders to see where there was a landscape that wasn’t crowded with people like us and where we could constructively add something. We found it. We ended up putting in our first million pound grant to the EPSRC, an engineering research council who were looking to fund healthcare research and were not getting applications from researchers with enough clinical experience. We got the grant first time! Now we had a million pound grant AND we had the track record that means we can not only continue to apply in the new landscape but that also enables us to apply in the old arena.

Sometimes, if you continue to bang your fist against a closed door all you will get is a bloody fist. In these circumstances you need to take a step back and review whether there is another way to get to where you want to be. If there is, do it, you may not only succeed in your original goal but learn some other valuable skills along the way.

Finally, I wanted to finish with the above image of Shonda Rhimes. I am as guilty as the next person of talking about how lucky and fortunate I am, and it is true. That said, own your success: you’ve earned it, you’ve put in the hours, you’ve sacrificed, you’ve made it happen whilst balancing families, health issues and all kinds of other demands.

Be the badass I know you are!

All views in this blog are my own

Celebrating International Day of Women and Girls in Science Day: A view from the Girly Side

February 11, 2022February 11, 2022 girlymicro Academic Life, General, Microbiology (Clinical), Research/Academia, Science Communication

I’ve been asked to write a number of blog posts this year for International Day of Women and Girls in Science. I wanted to write an extra one that wasn’t so much a career guidance document, but more to celebrate some of the great approaches I have seen as a woman working in science. This post is based around some of the points that came out of a twitter conversation last week.

The Road Is Long
With Many a Winding Turn
That Leads Us to Who Knows Where…