SOMETIMES time goes by slowly and unremarkably, then suddenly picks up and gives you immense fulfilment in the blink of an eye. In the last two weeks I've had both such experiences: a week in which my only highlight was the realisation that there is a part of my work building in which I have never set foot (and oh the possibilities that might be contained therein!), followed by a week in which every day produced a story to tell. After a period of hard slog on assignments, leading to a dearth of stories and posts, forgive me for the forthcoming explosion of anecdotes, thoughts and nonsense that is about to follow. We begin with day one.
Monday and Tuesday last week saw this year's Biosciences Graduate Research School Symposium, an opportunity for researchers within the school to showcase one another's work. All final year students present a short talk, and all second year PhD students (or doctoral researchers as we are supposed to refer to ourselves) produce and present a poster of their achievements to date. As a second year student, I, too, had to produce a poster, and the colleague with whom I have shared much over the past year and who has taught me most of what I know gave a talk. The deadline to produce the poster snuck up on me somewhat, so it became a hurried affair with rewrites up to and including the day of submission, but I felt like I had done a reasonable job. The purpose of the symposium is to gain experience at presenting your work in an academic setting, especially for those who do not get the chance to attend conferences, but we wanted to use my poster for an additional purpose: to attract the opinions and advice of fellow Biosciences members to garner ideas and future directions for my project. This would be not only useful but essential, as my project has in the last few weeks drawn up a decisive and frustrating blank in one of the directions I had wanted to take it. We don't know what I'm doing wrong.
Poster designed and printed, it was time for the symposium.
I really enjoyed it. It is great to see what is going on around you in the department, to find out what familiar faces work on and who might be important to get advice from. Science in practice is rather mundane, the repetition of seemingly futile actions such as pipetting and mixing of unremarkable substances, but when presented with the big picture of what those actions aim to achieve the building (and subject) comes alive; science in concept is exciting, important and, pointedly, of enormous and wondrous scope. I learnt, for example, that the people I see every day pipetting or counting cells or playing with pages of numbers are in fact trying to understand muscular dystrophy, cognition, how orangutans walk or how the body prevents damage to its own DNA, trying to understand the most microscopic molecular changes during cellular processes or how we can be more responsible producers of food and stewards of our environments. These are my colleague's obsessions and focuses and yet, to look at them or speak to them normally, you would not have the slightest clue.
A day and a half of talks and networking preceded the poster session, during which I stood for an hour and a half and talked non-stop at reassuringly interested people. My project is all about solving a puzzle and I believe I portrayed it as a sufficiently intriguing one, with lots of questions fired at me (but, sadly, not so many ideas at the same time). After collecting my printed poster I had to stop myself scrutinising it, as each time I did so I spotted more and more errors. There were formatting issues where objects had moved between me finalising the file and it being printed, colours had changed without warning and text had gone missing, probably because of all the last minute changes. I forgot to delete a bracket too. These mistakes niggled away at me and I did my best to ignore them, attempting to draw attention away from them as people browsed.
The posters and talks were assessed for a competition. Though I did not win (I blame the errant parenthesis) I was happy with the attention I had received. My colleague did win: the best talk of day two, no less. Our lab was very happy.
This year's symposium was a first in many ways - first time I was presenting, first time that it was organised exclusively by doctoral researchers and the first time we had a guest speaker. This was billed as essential attendance, but the subject of the talk was kept quiet, perhaps even from the organisers. So, with a room packed with PhD students and unsuspecting academic staff, our visitor from London revealed his first slide: How to Succeed in Academia. I couldn't help but feel things were about to go horribly wrong.
In some ways it was a helpful talk. There was little in it that I didn't already know, but it was a useful reminder of what focus you should apply and what experience you ought to obtain. Furthermore, the speaker had a positive attitude towards uses of academic training outside of pure academia, such as in publishing, communication and journalism, and political careers. Plenty of academics frown upon this, labelling such people as 'failed scientists', but this is not so. Many careers and disciplines would benefit from the application of scientific thinking or simply basic scientific knowledge. With so much resting on scientific advance, it is crucial that politicians and lay public understand it, use it and implement it correctly. Currently, few MPs have scientific training (if any). The speaker gave the example of the USA, the most educated society in the world, in which a worrying proportion do not believe in global warming. It's not that the evidence isn't available, it's that people with the expertise to decipher it are not pursuing careers to communicate it. This leads to mistrust or confusion, understandably scuppering progress. The divide is, if anything, growing.
A separate good point made was with regard to the application of research, namely the inevitable: 'but WHY are you studying this, how on Earth will this benefit mankind?' It's an easy question to ask and often a difficult one to answer in such a way that will satisfy the inquirer. Not everybody believes in the importance of Blue Sky thinking. There are two kinds of people, he explained: those who ask how something works, because they want to unravel the inner workings of life itself, and those who use the information obtained by the former to identify suitable targets for medicine or technology. The human application comes second once the specifics are known. Both types of scientist are needed.
Despite these points, his talk was not well received. Two key issues arose. First, the speaker made it very clear that life in academia is tough and unrewarding, not going so far as to say it is not worth it, but with sufficient gusto that only the most committed would remain convinced. Second, the speech was given to a room half-filled with established, successful academics, listening to a man telling them how they ought to have done it. They were not impressed.
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