October 2014 – The Bristol Doctoral College Blog

Postgraduate research: student-employee limbo

Posted on 29 October 2014 by Doctoral College

Sarah Jose is third-year postgraduate researcher in plant science. Her research focuses on how plants limit water loss by producing a waterproof coating and pores that can close to prevent water from leaving the leaf. She spends a lot of time looking down the microscope at nail varnish impressions of leaves!

It’s the start of a new academic year. Watching the new batch of postgraduate students settle into PhD life has got me thinking about my own arrival two years ago.

It’s very strange to go from being taught everything as an undergraduate student to being a PhD candidate who has to teach themselves about their project. It was a little overwhelming at first, but with the help of my supervisor and lab mates I quickly learned the skills that would be vital over the coming years, from laboratory techniques to the best ways to organise your data.

It’s exciting being at the helm of research, exploring something that no one has ever done before. You start to feel like a real scientist, and you’re treated like one by academics and students alike. You start talking to people about your ideas and planning your first publication…

But then the niggling voice in the back of your head points out that you’re not a real academic. The ID card hanging from that official-looking University of Bristol lanyard still says “STUDENT”.

Who am I?

Doing a PhD is like living in a student-employee limbo. Life as an undergraduate is very guided and enclosed, although it might not feel like it at the time. You go to lectures and practical lab classes, you have exams, and then you finish. Postgraduate research is far less structured; you are the driving force behind your project, so it takes a certain type of control freak / self-motivated person to get anything done.

I’ve had access to loads of great training and resources as a student at the University (and of course there are the added benefits of student discounts and council tax exemption). At the same time, I am lucky enough to be paid a living allowance stipend, which instils a sort of employee mentality. I always work in the office instead of at home, which has enabled me a deeper integration within my department because you get to know the people you work with.

As a postgrad you and your peers have a lot more experience than you had as an undergraduate, where every lab technique was new. As a third year, I’m pretty confident with the methods I use, but speaking to post-docs makes me realise that they have a far wider range of experience and skills than I do! Building up this knowledge takes time and it’s usually not something you’d sit down and study, but rather you’d ask someone to show you how.

A research apprentice

I tend to see myself as an apprentice researcher. Doing a PhD is all about acquiring the skills you will need later and learning the academic ropes. You do have annual assessments and hopefully you get a degree at the end of it, but you’re the one in control.

My advice to our new starters? Make the most of your status. Take advantage of the constant barrage of opportunities to learn new skills as a student, but use your professionalism to show that you are a researcher in your own right. Attend conferences, talk to other people, and don’t be put off by their titles. You’re not an undergrad anymore; you’re a researcher.

Dumb and Dumber

Posted on 22 October 2014 by Doctoral College

Madeline Burke is a third-year postgraduate researcher in the department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. Madeline did her undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering before switching disciplines when she started a PhD with the Bristol Centre for Functional Nanomaterials (BCFN). She is currently building a 3D bio-printer that can create human tissue by printing stem cells. Madeline’s research is interdisciplinary, using concepts from chemistry, cell biology and engineering, to design matrices for stem cells that not only support the cells, but cause them to grow into desired tissue such as cartilage. Most of her time is spent in the lab, designing new experiments and building her 3D printer.

One of the hardest things I’m finding about my PhD is the constant feeling of stupidity overwhelming me at every turn. All the way through school and my undergraduate degree there was a huge importance placed on getting things right; getting the right answer to a question, understanding theory, reciting facts. The set of skills you worked so hard to acquire during school and your undergrad are almost entirely useless when doing a research degree, when something isn’t working you can’t just look the answer up in a text book.

This hit me the hardest recently when I asked the longest-serving postdoc in my group, who to me is the fountain of all knowledge, to help me with a problem I was having. Her answer, that she didn’t know how to solve the problem, astounded me. I asked around the group, no one knew the answer. If this group of highly intelligent people, who had worked in this field for many more years than I had, didn’t know the answer what hope did I have at succeeding? I went home feeling really dejected – why was I putting myself through this when someone who was far more experienced than me didn’t have the answer to one of my smaller research problems. Then I realised, that is the point of a research degree. No one knows the answer, it’s uncharted territory. I am working on a completely new research problem; it’s up to me to find the answer to my own question.

It took me a while, but after I accepted that no one knew the answer it suddenly became a whole lot easier. A couple of days of wading through papers and trying different things yielded a promising result and I realised that I’m not stupid, but that feeling stupid had helped to motivate me to find the answer. Stupidity and ignorance are feelings that most of us will feel throughout our PhDs. Initially I thought this was a bad thing – who wants to feel dumb all the time? But is feeling stupid really a bad thing? Maybe it’s the reason we strive harder to reach the next goal. The person that sums this up the best is Martin A. Schwartz who in 2008 wrote an essay in the Journal of Cell Science about “The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research”.

In his closing paragraph he reasons the importance of being productively stupid;

“Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.”

I’m very lucky, having completed an undergraduate degree in engineering I have been schooled in creativity, problem solving and iterative understanding. Engineering takes known and clearly understood facts and applies them to a problem to solve it; this is essentially what we are doing in a scientific research degree. Taking the knowledge we know and using it to explore the unknown research problem. The feelings of stupidity I experienced in my engineering degree – not knowing if the filter I built using denim instead of expensive filter paper would work – I still feel today. In this case my ignorance worked, I discovered a much cheaper filter material, and my design worked. But more often than not the experiments you design don’t work, and the feeling of ignorance and stupidity persists. But hard as it is, I am trying to embrace that feeling. I don’t know the answers to all my questions, and maybe never will, but I’m definitely going try and find out.

New tools from summer school

Posted on 15 October 2014 by Doctoral College

Nick Jones is a second-year postgraduate researcher in the School of Mathematics. His research is rooted in physics and the problem of understanding how a large number of interacting particles behave. Particularly interesting is the case where the emerging cooperative behaviour of the whole system is very different to that of the smaller pieces that make it up.

Having just returned to my desk after a summer of attending conferences and workshops I thought I’d say something about the merits of travelling – a common feature of ‘a year in the life of a PhD’. First, though, I should explain some context about my research – I am studying a physical phenomenon called the fractional quantum Hall effect. The Hall effect, discovered in 1879, is the bunching up of electrons on one side of a current-carrying wire once you place that wire in a magnetic field. You could think of the wire as a horizontal pipe containing fast flowing water which carries bubbles of air and, while there would bubbles all through the pipe, you might expect more towards the top as they drift upwards (of course the real motion of bubbles can get very complicated, but it’s a picture to have in mind). You can explain the Hall effect using the theory of electromagnetism from the 19th century, and characterise the bunching in terms of the conductance. The conductance can be measured in an experiment and is seen to go down as you increase the applied field.

In the 1980s Klaus von Klitzing looked at what happens when you cool a particular ‘wire’ (something called a MOSFET) down to very low temperatures and place this in a very strong magnetic field. These extreme conditions bring the quantum mechanics (the counterintuitive microscopic theory) of the electrons to the forefront and remarkably he saw that the conductance no longer moves up and down continuously with the field, rather it gets stuck on special values – integers. You can explain these special integer values using the quantum mechanics of electrons that we assume to not interact with each other except for the famous rule that any two electrons can’t be in the same state. The pattern the electrons make is very rigid and doesn’t change at all if you prod it a little bit (with the only tool available to you – the magnet). At some point though, as you change how strong the magnet is, the integer jumps up or down. The behaviour in these jumps is even more interesting and is called the fractional quantum Hall effect – this is because you see some further special values inside the jump where the conductance is some fraction (the easiest one to see is 1/3).

There’s still lots of research going into how to describe the system at these fractional conductances but one point that is particularly important to me is that very nice mathematical objects represent the states of the electrons – functions of complex numbers (these are numbers where you are able to take the square root of negative numbers). Another beautiful object appears if the electrons aren’t completely free to move (they’re bound somewhat to atoms) – the Hofstadter butterfly.

The Hofstadter butterfly shows you which energies the electrons are allowed to have as you change the strength of the magnetic field. We’re trying to see how these two sides of the same physical system fit together in terms of some ideas from another mathematical community – the probability theorists. They work on randomness in all its manifestations but in particular have looked at these complex functions on lattices – exactly the setting where the Hofstadter butterfly appears.

To see how these pieces fit together, I need to understand the two sides, and also the potential glue. In August I was lucky to get the chance to participate in a month-long school on topological condensed matter physics – a booming area of research which grew out of work on the quantum Hall effect, and in which a central theoretical concept is the Berry phase (discovered in Bristol!). The school brought together experimentalists and theorists from all over the world, just outside the alpine village of les Houches. The participants all lived together, went to lectures together and in between ate cheese on hikes together. This kind of proximity meant we had plenty of opportunities to talk to each other and I now have a much better understanding of the physics I’m studying. The conference closed with an excellent talk by von Klitzing on the history of the quantum Hall effect and some of the more recent work he has done – a nice way to finish discussions on the field that had since exploded.

Up next was probability, and luckily the probability group at Bristol were hosting a week long workshop as soon as I got back. The topic was using probability to get results about quantum systems – exactly what I’m thinking about. This was followed by another workshop in Oxford on recent work in the field and lots of inspiring ideas. I met another student there who had been at les Houches and had explained a lot about Hofstadter’s butterfly to me. He told me that he was trying to compare some electron states he had found to a mathematical object called a Jack polynomial. He couldn’t generate these things on his computer and so it was taking a long time, but I realised that Bristol had a resident expert on Jack polynomials and sure enough she knew a computer program that could do what he needed. Lucky coincidences like this made me appreciate even more the importance of travelling. Now I’m back where I started in July, with the same problem to do, but a few more tools to tackle it and am looking forward to this term.

The last year…and out of the other side

Posted on 8 October 2014 by Doctoral College

Richard Budd was awarded his PhD in September 2014, having successfully defended his thesis a few weeks beforehand. Based in the Graduate School of Education, he conducted a comparative case study of how German and English undergraduates understood and negotiated their respective higher education contexts. This required implementing a qualitative research design, conducting in-depth interviews with students at universities in each country.

The last year of my doctorate presented challenges far beyond the intellectual. I started a part-time research assistant role a few months after my three-year scholarship ended, and this was then supplemented by an inter-university project coordination role a month later. Having the thesis, working full time, and having a young family, meant that I was working overtime for what seemed like an eternity. The workload was hellish, but I was still in love with my project; shaping it into a coherent narrative while reflecting on my academic development brought immense satisfaction, and this, along with supervisory support and desperately wanting to be finished, kept me going.

Tracking back a year from the end, I had finished the analysis and had well over half the thesis written. I presented some of the findings at a conference in the autumn and thought I‘d be done by Christmas. I’d underestimated how much was still to do by some margin! Some chapters were far from polished, while others were far too big, and it took me until the end of March to get to a full draft. By that point I’d been beavering away for 20-30 hours a week in addition to work, plus trying to be involved in family life. I had a little respite while my supervisors chewed through the draft, then it was another three months of the same. Draft Mark I went through various incarnations until it reached Mark III, and even then there were weeks of tweaking and tuning. Having thought for long periods that I was never going to be done, I worked through a final list of changes and suddenly, it seemed, it was off my desk.

One of the big problems for me over this period was not knowing where the finishing line was. Trying to work out what ‘enough’ might look like is pretty hard. Your supervisors have a good idea, but it is a tricky thing to articulate. Overall, in addition to the thesis being original and your own work, it has to be presented as a coherent, appropriately justified argument, and you need to know where it sits in the field/literature. These are big questions, and I’ve broken them down in more detail elsewhere: see ‘Unpacking the viva’ at ddubdrahcir.wordpress.com.

After submitting in July, I left it alone it for over a month. I needed to reconnect with family life, sleep, and revel in not feeling guilty for loafing about aimlessly in my free time. Free time! A few weeks before the viva, I read it through again. This was initially not very helpful, in that — in addition to the typos — I’d had time to reflect on the whole from a distance; you can’t do this just before submission because you’re too close, too caught up in the detail. I spent a few days worrying about how I could — should — have improved it, and one piece of advice really helped. This was that a PhD was always imperfect. It is supposed to be as far as you can go in the given time frame, and if you tried to perfect it, you’d never hand it in.

By the morning of the viva, I’d worked through rafts of potential questions and felt that I could answer them with confidence. Looking back, this was when I somehow knew that I’d (probably) pass; being able to field those questions made me realise the scale, depth and nuance I’d achieved in the thesis. The chief remaining question was the extent of the corrections: how much would be left to do? I was comfortable in the knowledge that I could have done some things differently; being aware of the pros and cons of all of your decisions over the lifecycle of the project is a key part of the process, not a sign of failure. I spent the morning talking it all through with a friend, and this warm-up — without any pressure — really helped. By the time I walked into the viva itself I was internally contorted with apprehensive tension, but then it got going and I was too busy thinking on my feet to have space for nerves. The defence took about two hours, although it felt like far less. The first half was heavy going and very challenging, but after a while it developed into something more conversational, a healthy exchange and discussion. After a brief break at the end, I was invited back in, was told I’d passed, and had pretty minor corrections.

The corrections took a (very long) day and now, a month after the viva, it has sunk in. At first I couldn’t believe that it was over, that this ‘thing’ I’d been gestating for years no longer needed any attention. I also missed it. There are publications and presentations to come, but the thesis itself is finished. Having it behind you is a serious fillip, a sign of being accepted into the academic ranks. It goes some way to assuaging the ‘imposter syndrome’ that I felt most of the way through my doctorate, that I was woefully short of some of the stuff I was reading, and my unmasking as an imbecile could come any minute. I’m still a little self-conscious about being ‘Dr Budd’, not quite used to wearing it, but it’s a marker of having changed. I’m intellectually unrecognisable from the person who walked into my first supervision meeting, and that’s the point of the whole exercise.

Belonging in archives

Posted on 1 October 2014 by Doctoral College

Louise Wingrove is a third-year postgraduate researcher in the department of Drama: Theatre, Film and Television. Her research is focused on how the lives of working women were represented by serio-comediennes on the Victorian music-hall stage, using the characters and careers of Jenny Hill (1848-1896) and Bessie Bellwood (1856-1896) as case studies. Most of her research is archive based, piecing together long lost careers, songs and venues through files of reviews, photographs and sheet music.

I didn’t do GCSE history, deciding on Geography after being told by my teacher that those with a nervous disposition should avoid the tales of war told on the syllabus. At college and university, my focus was whole-heartedly on Theatre and Music; with Literature and Psychology guest starring, but still the worlds of Sociology, History and Politics never really came into play. Theatre was my all – the immediacy, the audience, the buzz of writing and directing. So, following some dabbling in stand-up comedy at the age of 18, my choice to do a PhD stemmed from a fascination with audience psychology and the exploration of the reasons why women are so often deemed “not funny.” It combined all my key interests and I was passionate about it. But all that changed with one small exercise: “Look back through the decades to the roots of modern stand-up comedy and note how womens styles have changed throughout.”

I had never been to an archive. I had no idea how to access catalogues, who to email for help, or even how to log and organise the data I found. However, as time progressed, and with the help of many a patient archivist, I started piecing it together and what I found gave me a bigger buzz than I could have ever expected. The first time I saw actual newspaper cuttings and photographs of Jenny Hill I felt as if doing a PhD – well – made sense! I had to find out more about the women I had found and I had to tell the world about them. I had a responsibility to these women! I became obsessed with trawling through newspapers to find what characters they performed as and how they were effected by social movements and events – the fight for Suffrage, the Married Women’s Property act and the Education Act. How the Governments affected them and – more importantly – how they reflected and gave voices to working class women.

Luckily there have been many eureka moments for me in the archives, from the first time I met Jenny Hill and Bessie Bellwood in the archive boxes containing aspects of their lives and careers, to each moment I found a new piece of sheet music. For every eureka moment I have had, there have been thousands of frustrating ones too, though. The records lost, or too fragile, or seemingly non-existent. But strangely they balance each other – keeping me going but stopping me from being complacent (and even more of a bore to those around me who have to hear every little detail!). Last June, through the British Library’s online newspaper archive, I found an interview with Jenny Hill in the theatrical newspaper The Era. In this she describes her famous character “The Coffee Shop Gal” and how she was based on a real girl working in a Shoreditch coffee house. She and the composer wrote this song based on their observations made through visiting the same establishment constantly. That, combined with her accounts of buying second-hand costumes and holidays with East-end girls, starts to uncover her observational working method and helps support my theory of her as an early observational comedienne. I may have discovered this in June, but I still do a little happy dance whenever I re-read it!

I think that, when considering ‘a year in the life of a PhD’, I look back over my last two years and see how quickly all your initial ideas and pre-conceptions can vanish, leaving you in a world of research that you never expected, or even wanted, and yet fits you so perfectly you can’t remember a time without it.

~ Louise Wingrove, PhD Candidate, Drama