The journey is only just beginning

Posted on 10 December 2014 by Doctoral College

Tessa Coombes is a first year postgraduate researcher in the School for Policy Studies. After recently completing the MSc in Public Policy at the University of Bristol, involving a dissertation on affordable housing, she decided to stay on and continue her research interest in politics, policy process and housing. Her research is focused on how housing policy is treated at a time of political change, using the General Election 2015 and Bristol Mayoral Election 2016 as the basis of her study she will look at political influences on policy formation and change.

I started my PhD in October this year, just a couple of months ago. My journey to this point started out in full time work, as a Senior Manager, thinking about all the things I’d rather be doing and wondering why I’d ever left the academic world some 20 years ago. I then travelled through the pain of redundancy and the challenge of a year doing an MSc and here I am now, signed up for three years full time to do a Social Policy PhD – how did that happen?

Well, the starting point for this phase of my journey was the rapid realisation, during my MSc year, that I really enjoyed the studying, the learning and the intellectual challenge of being in the academic world. I also realised that my frustrations with the MSc dissertation process were about not having enough time to properly delve into the literature, to do the research I wanted to do, or to really understand the issues that arose during interviews. Four months was just not long enough.

During my MSc year various people had asked me if I was considering doing a PhD and my response was largely to laugh at the idea – me, do a PhD, at my age? But then I got to thinking, about how much I still had to learn, how much reading I still wanted to do and how I wanted to challenge myself more in a different way, and the idea began to take hold. Maybe I could do a PhD after all? From that point forward, it was actually quite an easy process from taking the decision, putting together a proposal and completing my application.

Everyone in the School for Policy Studies was incredibly helpful and encouraging, from administrative staff and existing PhD students, to lecturers and the Head of the School, they helped me to make sense of the process, complete the online forms and shape a proposal that at least would act as a starting point for discussion. And so, here I am now, a few months into the programme, doing taught units and assignments on research methods and developing my research proposal further.

My ascent from MSc to PhD was almost seamless; as I finished one course I was starting on the next, so there was little time for a break or to reflect. But in the first few months I have picked up some sound advice and guidance from supervisors and existing PhD students and have equally learnt a little from the MSc process. So, for anyone who is thinking about doing a PhD or just embarking on the first stages of their research, here are three of the key things I have learnt in the first few months that are already beginning to make the process easier and more enjoyable: get organised, get visible, and get trained.

Get Organised – a critical piece of advice shared by others who had embarked on doing a PhD and also emphasised by my supervisor. This I interpreted partially as working out what bits of kit and software I should become familiar with to help me collate, organise and annotate all the information I was likely to collect throughout my research. I personally have hooked up with Zotero for citations and referencing; Evernote for saving web based information and annotating it; and Scrivener to help organise my thoughts when developing coursework and writing. I’m sure there are many others that are available and just as good, the key point here is about finding out what works best for you and getting to know your way around it as early as possible.

Get Visible – this was advice I was given by a very good friend when I first lost my job; don’t disappear she said, keep your profile! Sound advice which I think is just as relevant now that I’m embarking on a new programme of research and a new stage in my own personal journey. It’s about sharing that learning and research, and making contact with others with similar research interests. I find social media extremely useful for this, I use twitter (@policytessa) and run my own blog site (www.tessacoombes.wordpress.com) to share my views and connect with others; and I use LinkedIn groups to engage in discussion and debate. All are useful ways of making contact with others and putting your views out there for challenge and feedback. It can be scary to begin with but extremely useful once you start and get the hang of it. I have engaged with many who share similar interests through discussion on twitter and my blog, who I now meet in real life regularly to debate and discuss issues with. I have also in the last month or so learnt about new engagement platforms such as ResearchGate which has a much more academic focus. This is only the first step, getting published and speaking at conferences has to be an aim, but I see that as something further down the line.

Get Trained – this is something I am only just beginning to get to grips with, but as a PhD researcher the opportunities for development and training appear to be endless. In over 20 years of work I can’t ever remember being given the chance to engage in so much ‘free’ training, which ranges from formal training sessions to informal seminar series. I plan to make much more use of this over the coming months, to get up to date with all sorts of things I’ve never had the opportunity or time to engage with before. I have the opportunity to learn how to deal with issues I will undoubtedly face over the next few years and to overcome things I am not good at now. The training is there to help me both through the Bristol Doctoral College and the School for Policy Studies. There are opportunities to engage with other PhD students from different subject areas, to widen my knowledge and learning beyond my own field of study.

Two weeks in the ‘Avenue of Volcanoes’

Posted on 3 December 2014 by Doctoral College

James Hickey is a final year PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences. His research is focused on unravelling the mechanisms that cause volcanoes to become restless prior to eruptions. Ultimately, the aim is to improve our understanding of precursory signals to enhance forecasting and mitigation efforts.

Workshops, conferences, field work – national and international travel is an essential part of many PhD programs. I’ve been lucky enough to see numerous new parts of the globe during my studies, and, less luckily, numerous different airport layovers (I’m currently writing this post from a corridor between terminals at Washington airport…!).

I’m on my way back to Bristol from a workshop in Ecuador on volcanic unrest, which culminated with an eruption simulation exercise. As my PhD is focused on unravelling the science behind volcanic unrest, these trips (this is the second of three with this specific aim) form a main focus for the real-world application of my research.

This workshop was split into 3 different parts. The first was a series of lectures on how volcanologists, social scientists, emergency managers, civil protection officials, and the general public interact during volcanic crises. Each specialist contributed their individual expertise, in my case as a volcanologist interpreting the signals that the volcano gives off, but the main message was that communication at all times between all parties must be especially clear. As with almost all lectures though, this part of the workshop obviously wasn’t the most exciting – especially with the inevitable jet-lagged tiredness kicking in for the first few days.

The second part of the workshop took us out into the field to explore two of Ecuador’s most famous volcanoes: Cotopaxi and Tungurahua. This was my favourite part! These are two quite epic volcanoes with the classical conical shape you imagine when you think of a volcano. By examining them in situ we learnt about the hazards they pose today to many nearby towns and cities. This really helps to put my research into perspective, as I know that by contributing to a better understanding of how volcanoes work I am helping to protect the people whose livelihood’s depend on the benefits the volcano brings them (for example, the more fertile soil).

The final part of the workshop took us to the Ecuadorian national centre for crisis management in Quito (cue vigilant security checks!). Here we conducted the volcanic unrest and eruption simulation. This is similar in some ways to a fire drill but a whole lot more complicated. Simulated monitoring ‘data’ from the volcano is fed to a team of volcanologists who have to quickly interpret what the data means and feed that information in a clear, coherent and understandable way to emergency managers, politicians and civil authorities. Upon the advice of the volcanologists, the decision makers can then choose how best to respond and mitigate a potential impending crisis. As this was just an exercise, different stages in the unrest crisis were dealt with all in one very busy day, with ‘data’ from the volcano arriving every couple of hours but representing several weeks or months in simulated time.

The final ‘update’ from the volcano: BIG eruption! I think we all could have predicted that – everyone likes a grand finale.

Despite the Hollywood firework finish, these exercises are crucial to prepare those individuals who will actually be in positions of responsibility when a true volcanic crisis develops. By playing out the different stages in as close to real-life as possible, strengths and weaknesses were highlighted that will allow for improvements to be made in the future. Improvements that may just save extra lives or livelihoods, and foster improved relationships between the public and the scientists trying to help them.

As one of those scientists, I was just happy enough to be able to take part.

Escaping the lab

Posted on 26 November 2014 by Doctoral College

Rebecca Ingle is a second year PhD student in the Bristol Laser Group in the School of Chemistry. Her research involves studying photodissociation dynamics in both the gas and solution phase using a combination of laser experiments and computational chemistry methods.

You often hear about how difficult PhDs can be, trying to juggle running your own experiments, analysing the data, thinking of fresh ideas and finding a way to squeeze a life in between it all. However, there is definitely one glamorous highlight to PhD life and that’s the numerous opportunities for travel, both in the UK and abroad.

Unfortunately, I’m not an environmental chemist and don’t have the excuse of needing to do fieldwork in remote, exotic locations. However, lasers are popular worldwide, and thanks to some help from the Bristol-Kyoto strategic fund, I was lucky enough to spend this summer working at Kyoto University.

To say I had no reservations about flying alone half way around the world to work on an unfamiliar experiment would be a lie. There were a few moments when I wondered if I had fully appreciated what I had signed up for and horrifying tales of Japan’s bounteous insect life in the summer months didn’t exactly help.

However, once I’d arrived in Kyoto, it didn’t take long at all for me to feel at home. Complaining about the weather is definitely a universal language and my Japanese hosts could regularly be heard proclaiming ‘atsui desune…’ (it’s hot, isn’t it?) in response to the insufferable 30 degree heat. Unlike the weather, I quickly acclimatised to a diet of udon, matcha bread and macadamia nut ice cream and the experiment turned out to have a lot more in common with my experiments at Bristol than I was expecting.

It ended up being an incredible few months and I learnt a huge amount about new experimental techniques. But how do you actually organise a research collaboration like this and what are some the advantages to getting away from your home lab?

Advantages of working away

One of the best parts about working away, be it for a research collaboration or conference, is it’s a bit like being away on a science holiday. You generally get fed and don’t have to worry about domestic drudgery, so you can spend all day focusing on your work. It’s hard not to be productive in this kind of environment, at least when the jetlag has passed.

Another huge advantage is having the chance for some fresh insight on your own work. Not only will you be exposed to new ideas and set-ups, but you’ll be asked questions about what you do from a completely different perspective. It’s often easy to be complacent and not think about why you use certain methods and techniques in your lab, simply because it’s the way it has always been done but it’s good to be forced to think about absolutely every aspect of your research.

If you’re going away for a conference, you’ll be inundated with novel work from a wide range of universities. It’s definitely an easier way of getting a feel for the latest developments in your field in a livelier, more interactive manner than trawling through the literature and may even be a good chance to start building some collaborative links with other research groups.

Depending on where you go, you might get to pick up some new language skills or even get to eat food that looks like this:

How to make it happen

Travelling for conference or collaborations can be prohibitively expensive, even if you’re staying within the UK. However, particularly if you want to go abroad, there are numerous funding opportunities available though, be warned, you often need to look a long way in advance for them. If you are funded through one of the research councils, there is often a budget for your skills development and travel so that may be another avenue worth exploring.

If you think you’d like to escape your lab but have no idea where to go or who to work with, your supervisor can be a good starting point. Just emailing other academics, even if you’ve never met, with an explanation of why you’re interested in their work and what you can contribute can be a surprisingly successful method too.

I had a wonderful time in Japan and am hoping to go back again next year. Meanwhile, I’ve got a few conferences and events to keep me excited about both my own work and my field as a whole.

Stellingen: The ten most important propositions from my PhD journey

Posted on 19 November 201419 November 2014 by Doctoral College

Dominika Bijoś is a final year postgraduate researcher from the School of Clinical Sciences, based in the School of Physiology and Pharmacology. She studies smooth muscle contraction and examines how other cell types influence it in bladder tissue and in the whole organ. Initially, she used molecular and cell biology techniques, but spent last year watching and analysing moving bladders and the conclusion was – they dance the samba!

Getting a PhD is a ritual. Different countries have their own customs surrounding the process, preparations, ceremony, and so on. The thesis I spent the past three and a half years doing experiments for and writing up (like Richard), is an impressive brick containing over 40 000 words and 50 data figures. Let’s be honest: despite my best efforts to make this book readable, accessible and nicely presented, not many people except for my colleagues and examiners will read it. To ease this problem, Dutch tradition has a solution – stellingen (propositions).

In the old days, the 10 propositions (stellingen) would have been the ten statements of the thesis you actually defend. Nowadays, they present the most accessible summary of a few years of work and characterise the PhD candidate: their values and reflections regarding their work. So, I decided to borrow this custom to say what it is that I have learned over the past few years, not only scientifically but also personally. If you would like to know what I spent over 3 years researching, you can watch me tell the story in 3 minutes.

The top 10 messages of my thesis are:

1) A PhD is a Gesamtkunstwerk (from my friend Babett)

This German word describes a piece of art which uses many forms, a total artwork. I see my PhD as a total artwork: the art of honing my microsurgical skills, the creativity of troubleshooting, the beauty of statistical significance stars, the poetry in writing papers and reports, etc. The endless hours, months, years of perfecting all the techniques culminating in the thesis and title of “Dr”. The PhD is an all-together-piece-of-art.

2) If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? (Albert Einstein)

Doing postgraduate research is about answering questions NO ONE, not a single person in the world, knows the answer to. I often felt dumb (just like Madeline), and I didn’t always know what I was doing. Technical learning challenges were huge, data analysis difficulties were even harder. I struggled; I fought hard to trust the method, to distinguish a real effect from the noise. I won and I found out something no one knew.

3) Ano1 in juvenile rat urinary bladder (my thesis)

This is the title of the paper I published in the open access journal PLOS ONE. Getting my research peer reviewed and published makes my contribution to world knowledge publicly and freely accessible (and makes life easier for my examiners).

4) Movement depends on initiation, propagation and tone. (my thesis)

Although my research was on the movement of the bladder wall, what I learned throughout the project was that every action needs to start (initiate) and then be followed through (propagated). I made action plans, but they only mattered if I executed them.

There were times when I worked too much… and I also learned that constant contraction of the system is impossible. You need to relax too! This is a tricky balance, but when achieved, it gives happiness 🙂

5) In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm…in the real world all rests on perseverance. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Science isn’t achieved easily, but enthusiasm and perseverance drive it.

For me, it was curiosity and love of discovery during the good times, and perseverance all the rest of time, learning to take things one step at a time (just like Rhiannon!)

I told my friend Bartholomew, we get the PhD for surviving the process rather than the actual achievement. It isn’t entirely true, but because in science we do so much more than the world will ever see, it cheered me up on many occasions after failed experiments. Every step, even failure, was a part of figuring out how the world works.

6) Your life, your PhD, your problem

I had problems. If you’re doing a PhD – you will have problems. It is your life, so take control over your career. Being at Bristol, there are plenty of options to solve the problems you might have: technical or personal. You’re not alone! Take control and act – plenty of opportunities land in your mailbox every week.

7) Curiouser and curiouser! (Alice in Wonderland)

During a postgraduate degree, we are surrounded by loads of amazingly smart and passionate people. During my PhD I had the chance to hear about fascinating science and meet inspiring scientists. Did you know that this year’s 2014 Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, Edvard Moser, gave a talk in the Neuroscience department exactly two years ago (19 Nov 2012)?

I got my nose out of the lab and went to seminars to hear what else is out there and asked colleagues what they do. For science, one of the best forms of communication is coffee breaks, so use them – not to network, but to make friends. It worked for me – thanks to this I have an entire thesis chapter based on collaboration!

8) Communication – the human connection – is the key to personal and career success (Paul J Meyer)

So you are a rocket scientist? Well, unless you can write a paper about it, give a talk I can follow and understand – no one cares.

Writing is difficult for everyone, but you can learn to be an effective writer and better communicator. Online courses, onsite courses, practice, practice…There are plenty of options at Bristol Uni. Writing well and speaking well are assets, whatever you do.

9) Constitutive response to when something turns up is YES (Jim Smith)

When an opportunity came – I said yes. I had a chance to do something for others and created a yearly meeting for early career researchers in my field (the Young Urology Meeting). Saying yes to new opportunities gave me experience and created even more opportunities.

10) To pee or not to pee? (adapted from Shakespeare)

My research has contributed a tiny bit to the understanding of how the body works and parts of this might be used to answer the existentially painful question of patients in the clinics with bladder problems. But it left me perpetually full of questions no one knows the answers to. So for me, the only option is: Science: yes or KNOW!

Getting a PhD is a journey full of obstacles and interesting people, struggles and discoveries, dumb moments and personal growth.

My journey not only pushed the knowledge boundaries of the field, but most definitely pushed me. It pushed me to be at my personal best: in the lab and in the office, to be a better person, to be a thorough and tireless researcher and to be in charge of my project, my time and my life.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Top Tips

Posted on 12 November 2014 by Doctoral College

“Between a Rock and a Hard Place” began as an Earth Science PhD blog in February 2013, as a place to ramble on about PhD life and general science topics. Almost two years later, some of the contributors have finished, others have submitted, and the rest are nearing the end.

Together, they have compiled a list of their best moments and top tips, to showcase just how varied experiences can be, even within one department.

Piston cylinder — Sorcha using the piston cylinder apparatus in the Petrology labs at the University of Bristol. She is manually topping up the pressure (to 30 kbar, equivalent to ~100 km depth!) whilst checking the run temperature recorded by the thermocouple – lots of multitasking!

Sorcha

PhD highlight:

Working in the lab was both the most exciting, and most frustrating, aspect of my PhD. Rather than jetting off to exotic field locations, I spent most of my days heading downstairs to the basement to carry out experiments on a piston cylinder apparatus to provide insights into deep mantle melting. Despite shedding blood, sweat and tears down there, the satisfaction of deliberately ending a successful experiment is hard to beat! Lab work was made all the more fun when shared with fellow experimentalists – discussing similar experiences, particularly failures (unfortunately rather common!) proved to be incredibly useful in planning future experiments and trying different approaches to improve methods.

Top tip:

My top tip is to talk to lots of people in the lab, and attend lots of seminars/discussion groups, about different techniques that you could possibly try out on your samples. Most lab-based PhDs tend to be a case of trial-and-error for the appropriate method so the more options that you are aware of, the better!

Charly

PhD highlight:

Bristol itself!

Having completed my undergraduate at Bristol, I never intended to remain in the same city for my PhD. Then up came an opportunity that was too good to turn down.

By the time I finished my PhD, I’d been in the same department for 7.5 years (!), but I definitely don’t regret being flexible and being prepared to stay. Bristol has a thriving academic scene and throughout my research I was able to interact with a constant flux of interesting and cosmopolitan people. Outside of my studies I got involved with student sports, which helped to prolong my undergraduate experience (even if my nickname was inevitably something along the lines of ‘grandma’), and Bristol itself is an evolving and exciting city – in my time here I’ve seen so much change that there hasn’t been a chance to get bored.

I know that some people in academia say that you shouldn’t do your undergraduate and PhD at the same place, but I truly feel like the most important aspect is have a stimulating project and inspirational supervisors. For me, this just happened to be at Bristol.

Top tip:

One of the best things about doing a PhD is the flexibility of (generally) being able to work whenever and wherever you want; however, most people find that slogging away in the early hours of the morning isn’t always the most productive approach. Try and treat the PhD like you would a job. Having a routine means that you’ll keep going even when lacking motivation, and limiting work to regular office hours during the week means that it won’t become an all-consuming, isolating experience.

Melanie

PhD highlight:

Whilst my research didn’t involve fieldwork in exotic places (or anywhere, for that matter), I was lucky enough to be able to attend conferences and see volcanoes up close in both Mexico (Cities on Volcanoes 7) and Japan (IAVCEI Scientific Assembly); they are most definitely the highlight of my PhD! Presenting and discussing my work, receiving feedback, and seeing others’ findings with the backdrop of an active volcano is a pretty unbeatable experience. The social side is great too – I’ve made lots of friends from all over the world at international conferences!

Top tip:

Take ownership early. Obviously your supervisors are academically senior to you, but it’s your project and end decisions are ultimately yours. Take guidance, not orders!

Elspeth

PhD highlight:

I have lots of little highlights: celebrating friend’s vivas; submitting my first paper; getting that code to finally work; and discovering something unusual and interesting in the data. The PhD process is long, very long and I’ve found that lots of little achievements have kept me motivated. In general, I think the aspects I thought would be the easiest during my PhD turned out to be the hardest, whilst the bits I thought would be hard were also hard! A PhD definitely requires commitment.

My best highlight was a great month on fieldwork in East Africa. Nothing beats seeing the volcano you’re studying up close and personal. Sure it was challenging and exhausting (working day-to-night for a month), but completing the fieldwork came with a great sense of achievement. As a bonus, climbing up volcanoes each day forced me to get into better shape!

Top tip:

Read blogs like this to get insight of what a PhD involves!

PhD highlight:

One of the best parts about being a geologist is the travel. As an undergraduate you get the opportunity to visit some amazing places on fieldwork and for me this has spilled over to my PhD studies. A significant part of my project has been based on North Andros in the Bahamas, and although I have been protesting for a long time that fieldwork isn’t a holiday, it is still a breath-taking location to work. One of my favourite things has been sharing the experience with field assistants and watching their reactions as we reach the island for the first time; the people may be different but the reaction is the same – awe. Field assistants are also great at keeping you relatively sane when you have been sampling (in the rain) all day and filtering most of the night.

Top tip:

Say yes (to most things). I view the PhD as a training ground for a career, either in or out of academia, and that saying yes can help give you experiences and skills, which can be invaluable further down the line. But be careful not to overstretch yourself too much because you still need time to finish the PhD!

Hickey

PhD highlight:

By a long stretch, the best part of my PhD has been the travel I have been able to do as part of my research. I’ve been lucky enough to do fieldwork and attend conferences in all corners of the globe. My fieldwork has taken me to South America (Bolivia and Ecuador), Asia (Japan), Europe (Italy) and the Caribbean (Montserrat and Dominica), while I have been to conferences in the USA, Japan and (less glamorously) different parts of the UK. On top of this I did a study visit at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Admittedly, my carbon footprint is probably huge, but the experiences, skills and network I’ve built up are priceless.

Top tip:

Take all your opportunities, and then make your own. While you’re doing a PhD there are numerous chances to attend extra conferences and workshops on various things. These are a great way to develop new skills. Plus, by talking to different people you can create your own opportunities for extra fieldwork and study exchanges.

One step at a time

Posted on 5 November 2014 by Doctoral College

Rhiannon Easterbrook is a second-year PhD candidate in the Department of Classics and Ancient History. Having gained degrees from Cambridge and UCL, she took a few years out to work but is delighted to be back in academia. Her work is on classical reception in performance and performativity in Britain, 1895-1914. She is interested in how the Edwardians used ideas from the ancient world to think about embodiment, gender, and sexuality.

When, in my first meeting, my supervisor asked me if I was familiar with the psychology of long-distance running, I was apprehensive. When he followed this up with a warning that I will “face [my] demons” as part of my research, I really began to wonder what I was letting myself in for.

I have never liked running and am not particularly into demons – my own or other people’s. I began to worry that I had set myself up for the sequel of Marathon Man. Trying not to clutch my mouth in self-defence, I waited for whatever grim surprises lay ahead.

Looking back, my supervisor had a point, however. Although I haven’t exactly been tormented by nightly apparitions of my deepest, darkest self, I have had to keep an eye on my mind-set and this has been more obvious to me now than at any other point since I started. You see, two months ago I completed my upgrade.

For those of you who don’t know, an upgrade is where you go from being a lowly MLitt student to the, err, heights of doctoral candidate. In order to make the change you have to demonstrate through a written submission and viva that you have made sufficient progress in your research and that you have project which is worthwhile and able to be completed on time. Hours of toil went into producing an 11,000-word sample of my first chapter, a detailed thesis plan, and a schedule of work. Bearing in mind that prior to this degree, I had never studied the Edwardian period or used an archive and that, while my MA thesis had been in the same field, was on something completely different, you can imagine that it took me quite a lot of work to get to this point. And that’s on top of settling into a new city and earning my keep. Suffice to say, an upgrade can be a pretty stressful way to end your first year!

After all that work is the assessment with two internal examiners. There were some good moments, such as the time I almost got an impression that they might have enjoyed reading the thing. There were some not-so-good moments (oddly enough, those tangential paragraphs I tried to sneak in did actually get noticed by two people with years of experience in academic writing). There was one bit that was just plain embarrassing (not sure how I managed to start talking about the Singing Bush in The Three Amigos but it was something about slaves being treated as part of the flora and fauna). Overall, it was tough and I came out feeling bruised but positive, tired but hopeful.

However, as helpful as the process is (or should be) in getting you to evaluate your project, the period afterwards is, in many ways, even more difficult than the weeks before submission. The first year is dominated by this looming deadline but, once that passes, all that is left is handing in the full thesis, an event which is at least two years down the line. Now that the pressure is off, self-discipline and focus become even more important in the intellectual marathon my supervisor warned me about. In addition, being forced by my assessors to reappraise my work – despite knowing that it needed reappraisal – is still a blow to the ego. PhD research becomes a part of your identity and no one likes having their identity challenged. Having repeatedly chewed over the upgrade problem with friends who are ahead of me, I knew this would happen but there’s a difference between seeing a route and running it.

So, how am I doing? Well, it could be better. Like many a self-funded arts PhD, I work to support myself and there are times when my various side-jobs and duties threaten to take me on a detour. I also occasionally like to pretend I have a social life. Yet, I still seem to be researching. I look out for the landmarks on my way – the conferences I’m contributing to, the mutual support from my comrades-in-research, those small but significant breakthroughs in my thinking – and most of all, I keep putting one foot in front of the other.

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.