2017 — a year of growth and learning

There are times when you try to pretend that you’ve learnt enough, that you can actually do this. Every time I think this, or if I utter it aloud, send me back to this post. Everyday is a school day. Everyday of this year was a school day.

Here are a few snippets of what I’ve learnt this year.

Science is about people

Our teams are made of people & their stories matter. Most of the Experimental Micromechanics team (L-R: Rocco, Ruth, Vivian, Jim, Josie, Simon, Giorgio, Tianhong, Siyang, Alex, and Ben)

We do science. We find things out. We explore the world. Our teams are made up of people, and trying to do their day jobs and explore their passions.

I have learnt that the people in my team have drives that are different to mine. The simple objectives of my team align with mine (akin to — do awesome work, have fun, talk to others about our work, share our passion, and learn more about the world).

However, as a principle investigator (PI) I realise I have the responsibility, and honour, to try to help them move forward with their careers. To realise this, I have to help them on their paths. In that process, I will seize opportunities to work with them to further and support my work, but I have learned that this is not their primary driver.

The greatest thing I did to support them this year, and my proudest achievement, was focusing on having a half hourone-on-one with all my PhDs and staff, towards the end of the calendar year. This was fitted into a 45 min slot, as we often ran over. This meeting was not a technical meeting, we did not talk about their projects (except in passing).

I asked them to lead the discussion, but centred this upon them considering the following questions:

• What has gone well this year?
• What has gone less well/what could have been improved?
• Am I on track (completion, career)?
• Where do I need more help/assistance, and where can I help others?
• Are there any things about how our supervision relationships works/does not work, and how the group operates that could be improved?
• What are key milestones to think about?

This gave us a great chance to take a step back and think about the bigger picture. It felt really rewarding, and I now have a whole range of ‘little things’ that I can do to provide indivudal help and support for my team.

It felt so successful that I plan on repeating this every year.

I’m very privileged — and as a result, I need to (actively) support others

I am not an poster person for diversity. That means I have to be an ally, and utilise my privilege to support and enable others.

I am a white, western educated (Oxford, Independent Schools), middle class, and I have a stable group of friends and family. That provides me with a significant amount of help in establishing and growing my academic career. Most people are not as lucky as me, and there are ‘other things’ that get in the way.

This means that I, and people like me, need to stand up, listen to minorities, and enact systematic change. I have discussed this on the issue of diversity in another post (my favourite of my year). This means I am going to be more open, and I am going to work very hard to unpick some unconscious bias from my daily life. As a little step in that direction, I have actively sought out minorities (especially women and people of colour) to follow on Twitter and increase the potential for me to hear their stories and their experiences, with a view that I can help more people have a fair stab at life (HT @JessWade for this suggestion).

I still say yes too often and learning to say no is tough

There are some many shiny and exciting things to do. So many fun people to work with. So many projects to get involved with. I’m learning to understand where, and how, I can add most value. This means I have to say no more often. (Photo by Diego PH from Unsplash)

I find my academic life a bit like living in a sweet shop. There are so many fantastic opportunities to explore, and so many activities I can get involved in.

However, I have a finite amount of time and energy, and I know that I have a limited ability to add value if I am over extended. This means I learning to say no, but trying to be constructive about it.

Communicating this can be tough at times (I have a bad habit of hiding away from big things that need sorting when I get stressed), but each time I manage it I know it’s the right choice. As many of these come because of some of my privilege, I try to offer constructive suggestions so that others may get involved.

The battle with the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’ has been a longstanding issue for me, and I’m sure it’ll dog me for the rest of my career. Lets see if I can continue to learn a few tricks that stick with me.

Celebrating the little successes is important to me

Celebrate success. We fail often, and these successes keep us going. It’s even better if you can share in the success of others. This can be work or play. Here a group of us have just run half marathons, and it was an amazing day.

I have learnt to cope with failure. Doors close all the time. Ideas do not pan out. I get scooped. Part of my coping mechanism is to ensure that I focus on celebrating little successes, whenever they happen, and significantly more often than not these successes are of my friends and colleagues.

Envy and jealousy at other people’s success, especially in a stressful work environment, is not healthy. It does not help you get better. And if that doesn’t persuade you, if your friends are doing well there is a chance that they’ll extend an olive branch to you and help you get your mojo back.

Be generous and sincere in your celebrations. Take some time to think about why it matters to them.

These little celebrations will happen for things you do to. Share them and we’ll all get excited with you. But don’t just fill your life with self promotion, as naval-gazing is not a good look.

Stubbornness pays off

Life will throw many brick walls up at you, limiting your progress. When it matters, search within yourself for that extra energy to keep plugging at it. Academia is long game where the prizes are difficult to obtain. (Photo by Gabriele Diwald from Unsplash)

Academic success is marked by tenacious victories. I learn this everyday, as I fail often.

I know that there are external factors that influence decisions. However, working away at things and being reasonably stubborn is a trait that works for me. This is extended into my work, and I’m encouraging my team to grow their tenacity in this regards. A recent example of this success was the publication of a paper on deformation in MgO. This was a many year adventure and the story is best told elsewhere.

The key to this episode of stubbornness was a desire to be reasonable, and to keep at it. We knew our work was good, and we had evidence to support this. We had to work with the system to make it all work, and this took several knocks along the way.

Academia is a varied career — and you can do things differently if you want

There are many paths in academia. (Photo by Jens Lelie from Unsplash)

I’ve rushed much of my academic career. This has been useful for lots of good reasons, but it’s been terrible in terms of enabling me to become a bit more rounded and to explore other avenues. Now that I have a bit more stability, and an awesome team to work with, I can reflect and try to explore a bit more of other potential avenues. I’m learning that there’s a whole range of interesting things to explore, and fun people to work with.

Learning in 2018

Looking into the future is a bit like gazing into a crystal ball, but in academia you don’t know where and when the great things will nucleate. (Photo by Aaron Burden from Unsplash)

I’m not sure what I will learn in 2018. I am sure if I time travelled back to this time to December-2016, I would never have predicted the journey I’m going to have in 2017.

I’ve realised that I’m driven by serendipity, so I try my best to put myself in positions where it’s easier to be ‘lucky’. Much of this luck this year has been through growing some really neat relationships on twitter, and I’ve been lucky to turn some of these into budding offline friendships (shout outs to Jess, Chris, Bat, Chad, and the zillions of others who make my academic water-cooler that much more interesting and valuable).

I have a few exciting ideas in the making, and I’ve been lucky enough to reschedule my academic year to enable me to focus on research for the next two terms, so fingers crossed that gives me a chance to continue my enjoyable journey.

2018 is the dawn of another year. Where will my path take me?

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If your are interested in my research group head to: http://expmicromech.com

If you fancy getting in touch, telling me your stories, and helping me learn more about the world, you can find me on twitter as @BMatB, or keep up to date with the group’s work via @ExpMicroMech.