Reflective

About the process of doing a PhD and perhaps being an early-career researcher.

02
Feb
2018

Viva!!!

Yesterday was my viva, or thesis defence for those used to that terminology. For those not familiar, in the UK system this means an oral exam of unknown length, in private, with the candidate and two examiners – one from my university, one from elsewhere. It’s nerve-wracking in the lead-up, and one hears plenty of horror stories as well as the (far more common) good tales.

Mine was fine 🙂 I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed it, as some people describe, but it went for three and a bit hours with only a few difficult moments. My examiners were rigorous yet kind, in that when they identified areas of theory that I was clearly a little hazy about they noted that and backed off, rather than continuing to push. They asked for reasonable changes, which will improve the thesis, and one can’t really ask for better than that!

Cartoon of a spider in a viva, using many arms to write in different places and respod to multiple questions at the same time. Caption: "having extra arms helps in a viva, but not as much as an extra brain would".

Comic by errantscience.com, licensed CC-BY-NC.

So the upshot is that I’ve passed, subject to corrections. This is a huge milestone, in that – so long as I do the corrections to the examiner’s satisfaction – I will be awarded the degree. It’s certainly the end of a lot of tension; an evening of relief.

Yet, in some ways it doesn’t feel climatic, and when people ask “how did it go?” it’s a little hard to answer – because the vast majority of candidates who get to this stage pass with corrections (their supervisors would advise them against submitting the thesis if they wouldn’t), and it was very likely that I would as well, and I did! There’s no real surprise, or even a lot of uncertainty, involved – the real question was how significant the corrections would be (mine are not trivial, but are managable). So I’m certainly relieved, and relaxed, compared to this time yesterday, but at the same time it doesn’t feel like I’ve finished, because I haven’t. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that I’ve passed a gate and moved on to the next stage, and there’s still work to be done (and bureaucratic hoops to jump through) before I can be finished and move on.

Posted by simon in Reflective
14
Jan
2018

Thoughts on publishing in The Conversation

Last week, as regular readers will know, I had a piece published in The Conversation. Hopefully it will help communicate some of my work to a wider, non-specialist audience, but the process was also interesting.

It’s the first time in many years – since returning to university for my masters – that I’ve tried to write something journalistic. I used to do such articles long ago for the trade press in my old industry, but I never felt very good at it; the writing seemed stilted to me. I wondered whether having trained myself in academic writing would make this more difficult – but to my surprise, the opposite was true.

Small child in a hoodie shouting.

Communication? (Photo: Flickr user mindaugasdanys, licensed CC-BY-2.0)

I did have to consciously avoid some of the usual turns of phrase from journal articles, and try to write more as people speak, but it was much smoother than past experience. I attribute this to three things: part of it is simply that I’ve had more writing experience now. Part will be because this was shorter, so I was concentrating on optimising rather than writing lots. The biggest part was probably the input of the editor.

Unlike the trade magazines that I’ve written for before, which simply use your text verbatim, The Conversation (hereafter TC) assigns a professional editor to each article, as a newspaper might do. However, wheras for a newspaper you’d submit your copy and then be at the editor’s mercy, for TC it’s a two-way process where the researcher gets final approval of everything, including pictures and the headline. We did go back and forth a couple of times where the editor made things a bit too hyperbolic, claiming things that weren’t supported by the study – but she was willing to roll them back when I explained, and she did wonders for improving the readability of the article for the public. It’s a good way of working.

TC provides analytics, and I spent some of last week glued to that page. So far, three days after it appeared, it’s had 1450 readers. This is gratifying, and vastly surpasses both the audience that anything of mine has had before, and the audience that the vast majority of journal articles ever get. For a while I had a response of “eek. So many people. What if it’s controversial, or wrong?”, and I had to remind myself that I do have confidence in my results, and so does a peer reviewer or two.

On Twitter I was gratified to see it retweeted by such accounts as @NERCscience and @BGSScotland, in addition to my own institution. Most of those reads were in the first two days, while it was at the top of the feeds and making its way around social media, and it’s leveled off now; it probably won’t ever get many more. 28% of readers were in the US, which surprised me, 26% in the UK, which didn’t, and 31% in Other, which I wish was broken down more. I hope that a lot of that is Japan, since the article is about the energy situation there.

A dog staring intently at a laptop screen

Readers. (Photo:
Jean Beaufort. Public domain (CC0))

TC also provides analytics that compare your reader numbers to articles published by others from your own institution, and I found myself feeling surprisingly competitive as I watched mine climb from the bottom to… well, quite near the bottom still. The high-flyers there are timely articles that tie in with a news story, or social science based ones that resonate with the zeitgeist and get picked up and republished by The Guardian. That’s fair enough. But having more readers than the articles by two of my former bosses is strangely gratifying!

This wasn’t a major time investment. It probably took two hours to write – which would be less with practice – and maybe an hour after that for editing and correspondence. When considered in the context of the number of hours that go into performing research and getting it into journals, it’s nothing – and it’s a nothing that brings the research to more than a thousand eyes. Good experience, would do again 🙂

Posted by simon in Publications, Reflective
02
Nov
2017

Discovering my own over-planning

There’s something that I’ve noticed over the course of my PhD studentship: I plan too much.

In my previous, commercial, career, this had worked well for me. When I was feeling bright and creative I would organise all the tasks that I needed to do, and make sure the prerequisites were in place, and then whenever the time was available – regardless of my state of mind – I could sit down and do the work. In the words of an old manager, “You like to line your tasks up, and then knock them down”.

A row of yellow plastic ducks, where the second one is wearing a stormtrooper helmet from Star Wars

Ducks in a row: less useful if ducks hold surprises. Photo: Flickr user jdhancock, licensed CC-BY 2.0.

That worked well then, because a large part of the work was technical rather than creative; I had to do things right, with good attention to detail, but once the overall concept was established the execution did not require me to be at my best. Perhaps surprisingly, I’ve had some success in doing academic writing the same way – I produce very detailed outlines, sometimes down to individual paragraph level, which is quite a fast process when I’m at my peak, and then find that I can write from them even when having an “off day”.

But that doesn’t work for research itself because, by definition, with research you don’t know what you will find, and hence you can’t always plan beyond the first set of results. In some recent work I planned out all the tests I’d like to do and the plots that I’d produce from that data… and my supervisor wisely said “see what the first set of data is like first”. That’s a pattern that I’ve repeated a few times in the last few years; I’ve planned far too far ahead, and then some unexpected results have made me throw that planning away.

Lining tasks up to knock them down is a useful technique, at least for me, but it isn’t useful for everything, and I need to develop some more diverse approaches.

Posted by simon in Reflective
17
Oct
2017

News! Thesis! Job!

Hello world. I have two bits of news.

A stack of paper, about 2cm high

And that’s double-sided!

The first one is that a couple of weeks ago I sent a complete draft of my thesis to my supervisors. This isn’t the end of anything as there’s still plenty of work to do, both before and after they get back to me, before it’s ready to be submitted for examination; but it’s a milestone. I’d never printed the whole thing in one go before, and I was surprised by its bulk…

The second piece of news is that I have a new job! I’ve been lucky enough to win a NERC “innovation placement”, which will allow me to spend a year working with the Oceanography team at Marine Scotland Science. From next month I’ll be doing the same type of modelling that I’ve done for most of the last four years, but instead of using it for energy I’ll be working on applications in aquaculture.

This doesn’t mean that I’m leaving energy behind, at least for now – apart from anything else, if time permits there’s at least one more energy-related paper waiting to be written. But it will be valuable for me to diversify my skills and experience in a different area for a year.

Posted by simon in Professional updates, Reflective
17
Sep
2017

Thesis deadline approaching.

I’m in the final few weeks of writing up my thesis, with my (self-imposed, but then agreed with supervisors) deadline for a complete first draft coming at the end of the month. It’s surprisingly stressful.

It shouldn’t be. Yes, the deadline is soon, but the amount I have left to do is entirely manageable. Yes, it’s longer than anything that I’ve written before, but the chapters are reasonably self-contained, and any given chapter is shorter than plenty of documents that I’ve written in the past. Additionally, most of those chapters are based on papers* that have been through peer review, so I know that they (probably) can’t be awful.

So given all that, why does the thought of “finishing a thesis” have so much weight around it? I think part of it is that, however unlikely, it’s a potential single point of failure which could render the last 4-5 years of work, arguably, wasted. I think another significant part of it is that finishing a thesis is expected to be heavy and stressful, and one internalises that over the years. When everybody who has done one is sympathising with you and saying “you can do it”, you start to agree that it’s hard.

Anyway. Having procrastinated a bit by writing this… Onwards!

 

* Papers that I wrote, just in case anybody is getting funny ideas 😉

Posted by simon in Reflective