Having now been lecturing for a few years, I’ve had the opportunity and time to think about what kind of lecturer I want to be. I wrote this down a while ago but decided to share it now – because thinking about and sharing best practice makes us all better teachers, and because ECRs just starting to think about teaching might find it useful.
There is often a lot of doom and gloom in Academia. People discuss the workload, the work-life balance, and the difficulty in taking maternity leave or having a family. For example, this recent piece in The Guardian highlights one professor’s less-than-positive experience of having children as an academic. The Times Higher Ed writes about the leaky pipeline, often attributed to the difficulty in balancing motherhood and an academic career.
However, I believe that, while there are often difficulties, I think there are also reasons to be positive in Academia. In my opinion, in terms of family life, Academia is no worse than, and in many places better than, most other professional careers. There are advantages and disadvantages in an academic career when it comes to family life, but in many ways they are similar to the challenges faced by many professional women across a spectrum of careers. Many of these are societal, rather than academic, issues. I would hate a young, promising academic to be put off just because they only perceive the negative aspects. Continue reading
Last autumn, I had two great pieces of news. The first was that I had been awarded a small grant to conduct three weeks’ fieldwork in Chile. The second was that I was pregnant.
I was obviously immediately interested in other people’s stories about fieldwork while pregnant. I could find only a few blogs about it on the internet, so I thought I would write about my own experiences of fieldwork while pregnant.
I’m delighted to have been awarded a £3000 Software Sustainability Fellowship by the Software Sustainability Institute. This promises to be a great collaboration and I’m excited to be working with the SSI to promote sustainable software practices.
I plan to use the Fellowship funds to host a Software Carpentry Workshop at RHUL, and to attend a conference where I’ll promote sustainable software practices, including promoting open code.
For more information, please see the Fellowship Programme over at the SSI. You can read the profiles of the current and former Fellows here.
A position on a funded PhD studentship in the environmental sciences (including Geography and Geology) has never been easy, but in these days of funding cuts and university and RCUK (Research Council UK) reorganisations, it’s ever more difficult to get PhD funding. It’s competetive and every studentship may have hundreds of applicants. Here’s a guide on how to maximise your chances.
The following advice is most applicable to early career researchers wishing to pursue a PhD in Physical Geography or Geology, but hopefully some of it at least is more widely relevant! Continue reading
This week, it’s five years since I had my viva. Rather like finishing my PhD originally, I feel like I’ll celebrate this anniversary several times (five years since submission, since viva, since corrections accepted, since graduation, etc.). I guess this means that I’m no longer an early career researcher, and I’m supposed to know what I’m doing. I feel that this is as good a time as any to reflect on the past five years and my career progression; where I am, and where I want to be. This article contains thoughts on some of the strategies that worked for me – and that I’ll be employing over the next few years as I move on to the next stage in my career. Continue reading
It is a good idea, at the close of one year, to review the past 12 months and to reflect on accomplishments, skills developed and lessons learned. Inspired by similar posts by Jon Tennant and Martin Eve, I thought that I would also write a summary of my activities and achievements in 2013, just for my own benefit. Hopefully others will follow suit and we can all congratulate each other! Continue reading
In an era when PhD students are rising in number and the amount of highly qualified early career scientists is huge, competition for post-docs are intense. These fixed-term research positions, which can be thought of as apprenticeships, are essential for scientists wishing to move to permanent positions in research leading universities. Lectureships at good universities seem to require at least 5 years of post-doc experience, at least 10 first-author publications in strong journals, a significant amount of grant income, and ideally a prestigious independent research fellowship. Continue reading
At some point in the journey to the PhD, it is time to stop experimentation, stop data collection, stop fieldwork, and consider how to convert this huge pile of data into a PhD. It’s not easy. No one said it would be easy. But it is achievable. Here are some coping strategies that I used when I was writing up – and still use today – that might be useful to anyone contemplating a large writing project, be that undergraduate or masters’ dissertation or a PhD. Continue reading
People often ask me how I find the time to update and maintain this website. The truth is, I make time for outreach in a number of ways. Continue reading