Lessons for the academy from non-academic research: on management

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alternative academic careers, grad students, management

I’ve never technically worked for a university. Two postdocs in government research centres, a stint at an NGO, and now at a museum mean the structures, pressures, and opportunities I’ve had in my professional research career of the last decade have been different to those of my academic (university-based) colleagues. It’s a useful comparison because, at least research-wise, we share many of the same goals. And whereas my friends at universities have teaching & admin, I have curation & admin (or more often, admin and more admin).

One area where I think universities can take a lesson from non-academic research environments is in management. As a rule, researchers make terrible managers, and managers make terrible researchers (exceptions do apply, of course), but when I compare the management I do/receive with that of academic colleagues, it strikes me as an easy win for universities.

By management, I mean the formal reporting, oversight, and support system in place for workers. This includes graduate students. Everything from taking leave to annual reviews and career progression to setting work plans and hiring in academia (as I’ve experienced it) could take something from outside and be improved.

 

Recruitment

Here, I’m mainly talking about graduate student recruitment. Often, it’s up to just the supervisor to deal with recruitment, resulting in a veritable mishmash of processes. Of course, the university will have a formal application/admissions procedure, but the steps before there (or in some cases where students are allocated after admission) is a bit of a mess. A few things to think about:

• are adverts written in a way that minimizes gender bias?
• what essential (required) and desirable (optional) criteria are there for the role? Are these assessed by the application, CV, or interview?
• who else is short-listing applicants for an interview?
• who else is sitting on the interview panel?
• what set questions are being asked of every candidate?
• how are criteria being scored & evaluated?

Daily management

Academics are used to a pretty loose reign and that flexibility is one of the incentives. The same goes for grad school. But there should be expectations of a standard set number of hours worked per week on an agreed schedule (allowing flexibility where possible) that takes into account other university-related tasks, such as courses, TAing, and professional development. I often say that students/staff I manage should work 36-40 hours/week, but I don’t have strong feelings on when those hours occur. Equally, there’s an expectation that once that agreed schedule is in place, deviations should be agreed or at least communicated (e.g., days working from home).

The same applies to annual leave. Staff and students do (should!) get a certain number of days off as annual leave, which should be taken with the approval of the manager. My take has always been that it’s up to each individual to manage their own time, and I will approve leave so long as there is leave remaining. But the key thing is that everyone knows how much annual leave there is, and when it’s occurring (which is particularly important when folks work remotely, and it’s not possible to easily tell on a given day whether they were working or on leave).

Annual reviews & work plans

One of the biggest differences I’ve noticed is in how annual work plans are set, agreed, and evaluated. At the museum, I spent about 2-3 hours with each person I manage setting out their plan for the coming year (they put the first draft together themselves). We then go over it, look at how realistic is, what resources they might need, balance it with other commitments, and then monitor it about half-way through the year. At the RSPB, we allocated defined percentages of time for specific projects; we don’t do that at the museum in part because we had more externally-funded work at RSPB, and at the museum many projects run together and separating time isn’t terribly efficient or useful. The key, though, is that both the staff member and manager agree on the plan, and when progress isn’t being made, it’s reevaluated and actions put in place to allow the person to succeed.

At the end of the year, we again sit down and look over the work plan, see where the successes and challenges were, and use that to inform our plan for the year ahead. This can be easier for permanent staff, where HR structures are in place to support them, and their managers, when goals aren’t met. For short-term/contract staff and graduate students, this is harder because the length of the period of employment is set by external funding.

And the same principles apply when doing one’s OWN review/work plan. Many academics are left to their own devices, except for a short chat with a head of department once a year. A friend of mine at a university has less than half an hour a year with their nominal boss. This is woefully inadequate and results in a plethora of requests for activities throughout the year, often at short notice. Granted, it’s also trickier in universities where one can be beholden to several functional managers — one person assigns teaching roles, another has more interest in the research & admin side, and they don’t always (ever?) talk to each other when setting annual workloads.

 

Now, I’m not advocating for micromanagement (which seldom works, and takes a LOT of time), but I think the pendulum needs to swing back somewhat in university environments. Structures to support managers, both in their own work and in managing the work of others, just aren’t there and this causes a great deal of frustration, anger, and chaos. The flexibility, freedom, and independence is why many pursue careers in academia, but in many places (certainly not all, but most that I’ve encountered/heard of) there needs to be better and appropriate support.

Few in research get any training in effective management; heck, I’ve picked it up along the way. But a combination of being sensible, compassionate, and understanding combined with structures to support both my staff and I have resulted in, I like to think, most successes, and dealt with any bumps along the road in an appropriate way. There’s always room for improvement in any organization, granted, but I’ve found it to be one of the areas where academia lags behind non-academic science institutions significantly (for a variety of reasons).

A new adventure

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alternative academic careers, jobs, natural history

When I first visited the American Museum of Natural History during my PhD, I was amazed at many things. The room of extinct specimens, the diversity of species represented, the wide array of collections (skins, skeletons, eggs, nests, fluid-preserved, mounts), and the fact that friendly curators basically let me loose in the rooms and I could explore. All for free. It was transformative.

Years later as a postdoc, I visited yet more large museums (the Royal Ontario Museum and Canadian Museum of Nature, to be precise), and found the same thing. And at smaller collections, too, like the New Brunswick Museum, or The Rooms Provincial Museum of Newfoundland and Labrador.

And then four years ago I found an excuse to visit THE Natural History Museum when I moved to the UK. The veritable Mecca of ornithological natural history and museum research. I managed to visit, for research or to drop off specimens collected from my various field travels, a couple of times a year.

Now, I’ll be visiting almost daily.

I’m absolutely thrilled to let you all know that I’ve been appointed the Senior Curator in Charge of the Bird Group at The Natural History Museum, starting this autumn.

I’ve spent nearly four years at the RSPB, and in that time have learned a great deal, done some interesting work, and visited some fascinating places. But the opportunity to work at the NHM in this role was simply too good to pass up. I’ll continue to not be an academic.

The NHM houses 750,000 skins covering 95% of extant bird species, >200,000 egg sets, 17,000 fluid-preserved specimens, 16,000 skeletons, 6000 mounts, and 4000 nests. It also has one of the most extensive (and historically valuable) ornithological libraries in the world, and hosts >1000 visitor-days a year. And like my experiences in New York, Toronto, Gatineau, Saint John, and St. John’s, it has a dedicated team of five fantastic curators who have made my previous visits there welcoming, productive, and exciting.

The bird collection is based at Tring, in Hertfordshire, on an estate donated by Lionel Walter, 2nd Baron Rothschild, in the 1930s, which is where I’ll be based, but with regular time spent at the NHM’s larger site at South Kensington in central London, which is where all the fantastic analytical equipment, and other taxonomic groups are based.

My role is a mix of curation and research, and will no doubt feature #OtherPeoplesData, and the challenges of museum documentation as well as my own collections-based and field research. I’ll also be promoting the use of the ornithological collections by other researchers at the museum and from outside, too.

So now begins the transition, the frantic packing as we relocate, and the impending excitement of the next adventure.

Who are scientists?

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academia, alternative academic careers, NGO, scientist

One of the blog posts that caught my eye after I got back from Tristan was this entry by The EEB & Flow, wherein they take (much deserved) shots at “creation scientists”, in particular their attempt to define a scientist in a way that excluded people pushing a pro-creationism agenda under the guise of science.  In their table entitled “How to know if you are doing science”, they list four criteria by which scientists should be defined:

1. Publishing peer-reviewed papers
2. Being asked to review papers
3. Securing research funding
4. Training students

It is with this list that I take umbrage, and with which I disagree.  This is not “how to know if you are doing science”, but “how to know if you are an academic scientist” which, let’s be honest, is only a subsection of scientific endeavour, and a relatively recent one at that.  It’s also one to which an increasing number of researchers don’t aspire.

 

The terms “academic”, “scientist”, and “researcher” are often thrown about as though they are equivalent, when in fact they are like матрёшка, the nesting Russian dolls. Pardon my pedantry, but I think it’s important to know that these differ, and how.

Most broadly, a researcher is engaged in a line of inquiry. This includes biographers, art historians, sociologists, linguists, economists, and many, many more.  A subset within this group are the academics, which are researchers employed by the academy (usually a university, college, or other school).  Scientists are those,  within and outside the academy, who are researchers in a scientific field (however one chooses to define the scope of those fields; a post for another day).  Though the differences may appear subtle, I assure you they are not without meaning or importance. To suggest otherwise demeans all of us engaged in the pursuit of knowledge.

I work for an environmental NGO. I am a researcher. I am a scientist. I am not an academic.

Taking the list of four supposed requirements to be graced with the moniker of “scientist”, I find fault with each of them.  First, that a scientist must publish, and be asked to review peer-reviewed papers.  For better or worse, this is the mechanism by which we, as a scientific community, have largely chosen to assess merit and progress.  Again, whether this broken system is the best/most appropriate/only way to do so is a topic for another day.  But it excludes the foot-soldiers on the ground doing a lot of the actual work – technicians and research assistants.  “But!” I hear some cry, “They are simply following the instructions of a scientist!” Well done on demoting these people to the role of mindless automatons. Suggesting that they have no independent thought, no ability to find solutions to problems, or to pose unique and important questions is disingenuous, and placing them in a supposedly lower class of “technician” or “field assistant” absent of the word scientist reinforces the strongly hierarchical norms of our profession.  These people are scientists.

We now come to research funding, that fabled mystical land. As above, technicians and field assistants (who, you’ll recall, are also scientists) aren’t expected to secure research funding.  Similarly, some scientists in “industry” (oh, what a wonderfully nebulous term!), in government, and at NGOs are expected to deliver the organization’s scientific program using internal funding.  This is not to say that scientists in these organizations do not, cannot, and should not pursue external funding, but that it’s not necessarily a requirement of their jobs.  But “securing research funding” is sufficiently vague and broad to include meeting with one’s boss to pitch a project, and having it approved, though the typical expectation is that “secure research funding” means a competitive, often external, process.

Lastly, we come to the supposed criterion with which I disagree the most – scientists must train students. Hello there, small-world view! Training students is not a part of my job (though it’s not prohibited, either). The same can be said of scientists in industry and in government. The question of whether there are “too many” PhDs (or other graduate students) has been asked frequently (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here are just a few examples), and there are no signs that it will slow down.  Even though we, as a community, have been shouting from the rooftops that the days of PhD to postdoc to tenure-track position are largely over, that progression is still the dominant narrative to which graduate students subscribe.  “But!”, some cry, “The universities need to provide/are providing them with the skills necessary to succeed outside academia!”.  When immersed in a research lab “doing academia” for 4+ years, a few hour-long workshops to present alternative careers isn’t going to make a difference. Now, I know that some PIs work at the interface between academia and government/industry/NGOs, and that their students might have a slightly different experience, but they are probably in the minority.  Because “number of students/graduated students” is another criterion against which “success” is measured, they are continually recruited, emerge in their late 20s or early 30s with burdensome debt, having worked for poor salaries (and living with the consequences thereof), and face an abysmal job market. The point of this digression is that recruiting and supervising students isn’t required of, or necessarily good for, science.

 

Taken together, these four points, while perhaps important for academics are not necessarily the same for scientists, or indeed researchers.  The conflation of these three labels is found frequently in media stories, blog posts, and other discussions, particularly those directed at academics. So please remember that I am a scientist, there are other scientists outside the ivory tower, and we’re not necessarily the same.

Post-postdoc?

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alternative academic careers, hiring, jobs, postdoc

Wow.

My recent missive on the dismal prospects of early-career researchers has, evidently, struck a nerve.  Since I posted it on Thursday, over 550 people have read it, it’s been tweeted and retweeted, and a couple of folks contacted me by e-mail.  This is by far the largest response to any post I’ve had, and the message is clear: I’m not alone.

But after the weekend, one thing has become abundantly apparent: there are some alternatives out there that, for whatever reason, aren’t really discussed in the hallowed halls of the academy.

I spent just over 10 years as a student in university between undergrad and two graduate degrees, and with one exception in a fourth-year course on field ecology, the options generally presented were a) med school / dentistry school / other professional health-related program, and b) grad school leading to a career as an academic.  I don’t necessarily blame my professors – after all, it worked for them.  But following the glut of hiring in the mid 1990s, things have slowed down, NSERC’s postgraduate and postdoctoral wages have declines in real terms, and retiring ecology professors aren’t being replaced (or are being replaced by other subfields, like anything-omics).

Now, I haven’t given up totally on landing an academic job, and I’ll continue to apply for them during the next 18 months (which is the extent of my current foreseeable funding).  But there are some other options that I’m going to start paying attention to a little more:

 

Consulting

During my undergrad (and parts of grad school), consulting was derided as selling out to “the man” and something you did only as a stop-gap measure until a “real” job came up.  As Jeremy from Dynamic Ecology pointed out in his comment, this isn’t the case.  Private landowners, NGOs, and increasingly, government agencies and departments, all want their own evidence to counter assessments provided by resource extraction companies.

 

Entrepreneurship

Jennifer over at From PhD to Life wrote a post (startlingly close to when I wrote mine!) about what she, as a humanities PhD, actually wanted to do: run her own business.  Freelancing is tough work, and has little job security, plus all the added stresses of being self-employed, but it can be highly rewarding.

 

Start to build a community

Postdocs are an odd bunch.  We’re not quite staff, but certainly not students.  Our tenures are often short (usually a couple of years), and there are few “Postdoc Associations” (though see CAPS-ACSP if you’re a postdoc in Canada) that keep us in touch.  Ethan Perlstein wrote earlier this year about “Postdocalypse Now”: the shell shock of realising that a tenure-track job might not actually work out.  I find myself in the same boat.  At the end of his piece, he writes:

So what’s next? As the shell shock begins to wear off and more and more thwarted post­docs emerge from their bunkers, I hope we can take com­fort and inspi­ra­tion from each other by shar­ing our jour­neys. Younger trainees can ben­e­fit from our peer-to-peer men­tor­ship. And prac­ti­cally speak­ing, we can start to mobi­lize and brainstorm new ways to do the sci­ence we love out­side of tra­di­tional aca­d­e­mic (or even industry) settings.

So, consider this, and my other post, a small contribution to the codex of the post-postdoc world.