The Graduate Junction Blog
Welcome to the new Graduate Junction blog. A place where we can keep you informed of changes
to The Graduate Junction and also keep you up to date with important news in the graduate world.
If you have an important piece of information or news you would like to see featured here then please, please get in touch with the team.
Changes to Graduate Junction
Alongside what we hope are some interesting thoughts on the life of a postgraduate researcher, we would like to use this blog to let you know about improvements to Graduate Junction.
Recently, we have created an Open Access Profile option allowing graduates to distribute their profile amongst the wider academic community.
An Open Access profile only exists once a researcher has enabled it by selecting their own personalised url. This url can then be distributed by researchers to whoever they choose. To make use of this new feature, simply visit your profile page and scroll to the account options box.
As always, we very much welcome feedback and new suggestions for how we may improve Graduate Junction and continue to build the global graduate community.
Best wishes,
The Graduate Junction Team
Posted by Daniel Colegate, 4 days ago
0 comments so far Click here to comment or read all
Does Teaching More Mean Researching Less?
As I mentioned in a previous post, I have taken on a lot more teaching this year, having requested it back in those naive days of Summer sun when I assumed I would have submitted my thesis by September. As I said before, the combined load of teaching and research has put me under a lot of strain.
However, unexpectedly, some positive things have come out of teaching many different groups across different modules, with a workload which is relatively representative of the normal lecturer's. My experience may well be typical of postgraduates moving from a very restricted teaching role of their PhD years, to more extensive duties post-doctorate. And although I am talking about my experience in an Arts' faculty, I am sure many of the same themes will occur to any new university teacher.
As three of my tutorials are on the introductory modules of the first-year English Literature degree, the main thing I have noticed is that the different modules have ideas and historical contexts which cut across them. So, for example, teaching on the early eighteenth-century novel, Robinson Crusoe, I tried to get my tutorial groups to explore the way in which the fact that Daniel Defoe was a Protestant may have informed his representation of Crusoe's spiritual epiphany on the island. Feeling that God must be punishing him for his youthful arrogance in leaving home, Crusoe reads the signs of a Providential God in the events that happen to him. He also embodies a Protestant work ethic, so that he does not expect to drop to his knees and find his prayers for deliverance being answered; rather, he must work for himself, in the process learning to farm and fabricate the food and tools he needs to survive, discoveries which form much of the novel's plot.
Now as some one who researches postmodern fiction, much of this religious context was comparatively new to me. And I was therefore glad that I gained a mutual insight from my work in teaching the poet, John Donne. Donne was born in 1571 of a Catholic family, in an England where Catholics could expect to be persecuted, totured and arrested. Having seen his brother die in prison for harbouring a Catholic priest, Donne was torn between the religious expectations of his family, and his ambitions to climb the career ladder of the civil service. Eventually, Donne did convert to Protestantism, preaching fierce sermons at St. Paul's Cathedral, and receiving the respect he craved. However, just as Crusoe is repeatedly anxious that God has got it in for him, Donne too is never quite sure of the theological ground he stands on. For Catholics, performing the expected rites is the way to reach closer to God; and what could be a better way to guarantee passage to Heaven than if one has been willing to die for the faith, as Donne's brother did? And what could be less certain than Protestantism, with its salvation through faith alone? How could Donne know how much faith is enough? How could he know that his personal reading of the Bible was done with enough conviction? That there are no guarantees in Protestantism, only questions and doubts, lies at the heart of Donne's poetry, which offers some of the most elegantly tortured verse in the English language.
As you can tell by this brief excursion through the religious detail of English literary history, this postmodernist scholar has got surprisingly engaged with this earlier material, and though it is by no means my usual field, I had the experience over the course of these two authors of conducting what felt like personally original research. Although I have always loved the unpredictable excitement of face-to-face teaching, and the feeling that I am actually doing something productive with my time, I have rarely had that buzz of discovery that I know from my PhD life. That energy, though, did start to flicker in my mind as I researched these general periods and ideas, rather than just particular texts to be taught on a single module.
In a different relationship between teaching and research, my own research into literary theory has, naturally, informed and guided my teaching on the module of that name. For example, whilst lectures on the canon discuss whether Shakespeare could ever be considered "bad" literature in a different culture or period, my own research into cybernetic fiction led me to ask the inverse question of my tutorial groups: can we imagine a time in the future when a computer-generated poem is considered to be "good" literature? And not only has my research helped my teaching here, my research has benefited from some of the esoteric background reading I had to do in order to teach the rest of the syllabus on this module. It is not quite a teach one module, get some research in for free; but the more teaching you do, the more likely it is that you will mutually accrue benefits on both sides of the teaching-research equation.
The other benefit of teaching more groups in more subjects is that I start to see the same faces and to build a relationship with students, rather than having them simply flicker into my life at certain periods, before then fading away again. If I know a student is particularly vocal in one class, but silent in another, I can start to guage where their particular interests and abilities lie. If a student writes one good essay, and one bad one, I can say more usefully specific things about where they need to improve, and where they are already doing well, because I have a relative understanding of how good they are overall.
Finally, and egocentrically, I am better able to evaluate my own teaching. If I have really engaged discussions with five groups for one module, then find the sixth to be comparatively silent and inert, I guess that it is probably not due to the content of the tutorial I have designed, but rather to the idiosyncrasies of the individuals in the sixth group. Conversely, if one group is very vocal in my tutorial for one module, but the same group seems quite quiet in the tutorial for a different module, I figure that either they are not so engaged with the subject matter of the latter, or - more likely - that I need to adapt my teaching style to fit with their predispositions and the ways they are responding to the different material.
So whilst we are all familiar with professorial grumbles about the teaching-research imbalance, it seems to me worth thinking about how more teaching can actually be a bonus, even if it does take up a remarkably disproportionate amount of time. Maybe I am at that naive stage when teaching is still exciting and new enough for me to feel pleasure in it; maybe, after fielding a whole load more emails asking when our next tutorial is or when a certain author died, I will have become a grumpily resentful of the claims on my research time that teaching makes. But hey, at least this arts' teacher can always escape to those desert islands in the mind, like Robinson Crusoe.
Posted by Alistair Brown, 18 days ago
0 comments so far Click here to comment or read all
Where there's Muck, there's Brass
Hi I'm Phil, a PhD student at Durham University, although you'll probably have worked that out already if you're half as nosey as me. I'm in my fourth year, squeaky bum time, which goes some way towards explaining why it has taken me so long to get round to writing this blog. At least that's my excuse. In my defence I have been quite busy recently juggling the demands of a full-time research degree and the not entirely dissimilar demands of playing in and/or conducting three separate brass bands. Both are occupations that become all-consuming, preying on your every waking thought, lurking in the dark recesses of your mind waiting to pounce at the most inopportune moment. They are also, ultimately, things that we choose to do for fun.
You see, all the real world talk that's been flying around got me thinking about my own relationship with the world outside the rarefied atmosphere of the research laboratory. I consider myself to be relatively fortunate, possibly even slightly unusual, to have a hobby that allows me to sit down twice a week (in fact every day for the last fortnight) with an assortment of teachers, councillors, policemen, retirees, mechanics, civil servants, lawyers, coal miners, nurses, pharmacists, architects, bus drivers, cricketers, town planners and other bona fide tax-paying members of the big wide non-academic world. This to me is the main difference between the "real" world inhabited by our parents and the PhD "experience" we have subjected ourselves to. Within the university we are largely self-contained both socially and intellectually, preserved in a bubble of simillarity (of age, knowledge etc.) that distorts our view of what is average, normal and (at times, let's be honest) important. With the bands, however, I am surrounded by diversity- of backgrounds, interests and opinions- and individuality- the array of life stories and tall tales is at times bewildering- on a far greater scale. In this sense my two alter-egos are entirely complimentary. The stressed fourth year gets to challenge himself intellectually amongst his peers, the slightly overweight tuba player is afforded a change of scenery and the chance to unwind, and in doing so both are successfully avoiding growing up.
In its own way brass banding has taught me just as much about life as my time at university has about Chemistry, and I think that the value of such "real world" experiences are all too often forgotten amidst the myopic charge toward intellectual progress.
This leads to the obvious question- what on Earth am I talking about? I suppose I chose to write about this for two reasons. The first is to share my belief in the value of the non-academic world to the research student. The second is to convince myself that a trip to Pontin's this weekend is a good idea.
Happy researching,
Phil.
Posted by Philip Ash, about 1 month ago
0 comments so far Click here to comment or read all
Getting Real
Dan commented recently on his frustration that his parents still ask him when he intends to get a real job. I - like those who commented back on that post - know how he feels. I have spent the last three years trying to convince my parents that, surely, starting writing at 9.00 and finishing writing at 5.00 or thereabouts is what they mean by "real work." I know from my year in this supposed other reality that office life often involves chatting, discussion, making phone calls and filling in paperwork mindlessly; and at the end of the day, office life ends the moment you kick back your desk chair, to begin your leisure time, usually using the money you have earned to pay for it. Surely it is the world of normal work that is the more unreal, requiring you to inhabit a split personality, acting and existing differently depending on whether you are before your family or your boss. I suspect what parents everywhere mean by the "real" world is that there is some sort of oversight, chains of responsibility tying you to times and tasks that you must do, lest you get the sack.
But what could be stranger, less real, than this artificial system in which work and life are kept apart from each other by the glass of 9.00 and 5.00? By contrast, PhD life has a total presence: the mind you occupy whilst doing your PhD is, to a large extent, the only one you have. PhD life is solipsistic and demands total concentration; there are few opportunities to do mindless things like paperwork or phone calls, because by definition a PhD is the use of the mind and the application of the pen or keyboard, not casual chat or filling in time sheets. So the PhD becomes your total reality. You eat, sleep and breathe it. The PhD is with you when you shower. It creeps into your consciousness just when you are drifting off to sleep. And it waits at the end of the bed to welcome you with the crack of dawn. So the call to all parents everywhere has to be: "get real." Doing a PhD is probably the hardest work anyone can do, because it is so self-driven and so intimate to the cells of brain and body whilst doing it.
But there comes a stage towards the end of your PhD when most researchers find that the PhD finds a way to press itself even into those precious cracks of time you call your "time off." Most significantly, of course, is the need to complete by a certain deadline. But there is also the fact that after three years, funding will dry up (if you have been lucky enough to have some in the first place), and you will need to start looking for temporary jobs and long-term futures, those entities that allegedly belong to the maternal "real" world.
Now at this stage in may career, I realise how naive I was ever to believe that a PhD was "hard" work. For at this point I find myself holding down six different jobs or positions, some of them paid and some of them voluntary. In addition to trying to polish off the last few footnotes and dropped apostrophes of my thesis, I have been allocated to teach across five different modules. I asked for this amount of teaching back in the glorious days at the start of summer, when I naively imagined I would have finished researching by September. Now, though, I am essentially trying to do all the reading and lectures for an undergraduate degree, whilst adding the PhD on top of that. In addition, I've got a larger than normal pastoral tutor group in my college, have started a job in the library three evenings a week, and am working as publicity officer for my department. In an unpaid capacity, I'm editor of a journal, volunteering for our local literature festival - and, dear reader, moonlighting for Graduate Junction as this blogging voice.
These days, I seem to jump from one thing to the next, like an errant fly alighting on one subject only for a moment, before something else calls. I am living and working minute by minute, squeezing in research in the odd half hour between ending library shifts and the bus back home, or doing teaching admin and photocopying first thing in the morning, before my email inbox comes alive. I am stressed and tired. But in a funny way, I also feel peculiarly satisfied with my work in a way that I have not experienced over the previous three years of doing pure research. Now, for the first time since my year out in the "real world" of an office job, I start to tick things off on a daily basis. Tasks get done, and the list of things still to do gets smaller (at least until another head of the email hydra glowers from my refreshed inbox). With a PhD being as it is, you never feel quite finished, and at the end of the day, no matter how superficially productive, you never feel quite as if you have worked enough or to a sufficient standard. Now, though, I find myself to be a doer, a finisher. People task me with jobs, I work through them, and move on to something else. So it is this sort of experience that outsiders or parents probably mean by the "real," the mentality of the production line and the in-tray out-tray with which they are familiar. So what, I wonder, could be better or more real, more productive and more satisfying, than finally completing my bloody PhD?
Posted by Alistair Brown, about 1 month ago
1 comments so far Click here to comment or read all
Return of the Natives
The yellow AA signs are out, banners hang from motorway bridges, and girls in short skirts wander up and down the streets handing out flyers for the hottest bars in town. A strange cuddly kangaroo waits outside the student's union, ready to pounce on any unwitting passerby who looks younger than 30, and who might be tempted by the some Australian-themed nightlife. Walking alongside the queues of traffic, I see Dads sweating at the steering wheels of their cars, whilst their children struggle with downloaded maps; meanwhile mothers anxiously ferret in the boots - did that fifteenth towel kindly donated by Aunty Wilma really get packed? Smiling and ready to alleviate such concerns, in their multicoloured t-shirts freshers' helpers fall over each other in their desire to help.
Yes, it's that time of year again. A university town, especially when it has a relatively high proportion of students as mine has, is ghostly quiet during the summer. For these three months, it is possible to go to the cinema without worrying about booking, navigate the shops without dodging the strings of girls woven together into arm-in-arm chains. Buses are discovered to have seats in them after all. Pedestrian crossings are respected. And so this grumpy postgraduate, feeling old and increasingly comfortable in a city that has now become home, can't help but feel slightly resentful that 10,000 people will march in this weekend, like some colonial horde arrogantly reclaiming land that is not natively theirs.
But then again, with the invaders comes a current of happiness that is maintained in a high buzz of voices throughout the year, even during the permanent dullness of winter, dipping perhaps only just before exams. I live in a village three miles out of town, so I escape to the countryside each night, when the buzz spills over into kebab shop debris and a boozy bustle of clubbers. But even if I lived in the town, I expect I could cope with the odd stray traffic cone and errant garden gnome, coincidental pieces of evidence of the high spirits students bring with them, along with their bootloads of scrappy posters and laptops. Speaking to a policeman the other day, he admitted that they have far more serious trouble over the summer of long hours of sunsoaked drinking, than when the students, noisy but usually good-natured, are around for their ten week termly intervals.
And, after all, I was a real student once, practiced in the arts of the night as well as writing and researching from 9 to 5. Some former student housemates and I were having a gentle reminisce the other day about the period which seems destined to remain, in spite of forcoming weddings and kids and steady money and nice houses, the "best days of our lives." Rather worryingly, we realised that this year's new intake of students were children of a different decade, kids of the nineties too young to remember the Gulf War, or to have ever cast a vote for Tony Blair.
Nevertheless, in spite of this looming age gap, I still hope to be able to pull off an old trick when I start teaching again this term. As my students line up nervously along the wall outside the seminar room, I try and join in the banter: yes, I did go out last night and stagger down to this silly tutorial this morning; no, I haven't read all the books on the reading list sent during the holidays. The look on their faces when I sit down, open my files, and take the register is a memory that will remain with me throughout the year. It is a welcome early score that I can reflect upon when, later in the term, I am parrying emails which are trying to persuade me that, really sorry, sir, the essay has not yet been finished because they have been laid in bed all week with a cold. Which is funny, as I'm sure I saw them saunter past the library window when I was there, burning the dull candle of study late into the previous night.
Posted by Alistair Brown, about 1 month ago
0 comments so far Click here to comment or read all
Not a real job?
Following a on from Candice's last post I would like to share a recent experience of mine with the graduate community.
As a third year PhD researcher at Durham University I think I work fairly hard. Whilst I benefit from flexi-time and the autonomy that goes with organising your own project, I certainly don't take that freedom for granted. I get up early and try and arrive at the lab in good time. I don't take unnecessary breaks and overall I make good progress.
So I am sure you can imagine my horror when, during a recent visit to see my parents, I was asked what I would do when I had to get a real job next year. I was genuinely surprised to discover that after all the time and effort I have poured into my project, my parents still perceive me as a student and that real work will follow in the future.
Perhaps I am not alone in this experience and it does raise the question, if one were to stay in academia, at what stage does research become a real job? I suppose that the obvious answer to this question (in the UK at least) is when I start paying tax even though my actual role and workload would change very little.
Does anybody else have experiences like this? How are graduate students perceived in the country you work in?
Posted by Daniel Colegate, about 1 month ago
4 comments so far Click here to comment or read all
Not the Real World?
To ring in the start of term and another crisp autumn season here in England, a colleague of mine recently threw an impromptu dinner gathering which, much to my delight, ended up in front of a log fire. There we were, 8 postgraduate students pursuing 6 very different research topics, representing 5 different nations engaged in yet another series of late night conversations. When the medieval historian from Moscow and I had exhausted the topic of bizarre facts about Kim Jong Il’s diplomatic relations with Putin (possibly relevant to my research?), our attention ricocheted to a discussion on green investing between an MBA, an environmental scientist and an MBA turned environmentalist. During this time the sole maths DPhil among us, having remained silent for most of the evening, managed humbly to make his presence known by offering a bit of classical guitar relief to the more heated social scientific buzz about.
As the last drop was being drained from our host’s glass thus signaling the end of the night, one couldn’t deny how cliché the entire event must seem to the outsider nor escape previous exclamations made by friends with city jobs - or by parents who wished we had one – about how ‘this isn’t the real world'. On the contrary, I find that ‘this’ is very much the life and work of a graduate student. It was, after all, this very same natural inclination toward curiosity beyond our undergraduate years that led us here in the first place, curiosity first about our personal academic interests, gradually expanding outwards into a larger intellectual debate. Perhaps this occurred across disciplines, at times across borders.
And somewhere on a beach in Holland, two other graduate students, Dan and Esther, were already at work designing The Graduate Junction to facilitate precisely that. Since joining the team, I’ve been motivated tremendously by their responsible vision and overachieving dedication (Dan bought a ‘how to’ book and taught himself to code practically overnight while Esther managed to complete her Master’s thesis soon after relaunch!) as well as by the collaborative energy coming from others in our rapidly growing global graduate research community. Next step? Recreating any and all late night fireside chats online so as to spark future global conversations across The Graduate Junction community. Unfortunately, cool guitar playing maths postgrad not included.
Posted by Candice Kay Lee, about 1 month ago
0 comments so far Click here to comment or read all
Welcome
Thank you for visiting The Graduate Junction.
Esther and I launched the Graduate Junction in May 2008 as a way of helping graduate researchers and scholars get in touch with others who shared their research interests.
We have been encouraged by the overwhelmingly positive response from fellow researchers and academics alike. The Graduate Junction has changed a lot since May and has rapidly grown. It will take some time to spread the news globally but The Graduate Junction already has more than 10,000 researchers registered from more than 70 countries.
It is this response that sustains our efforts and we hope that you enjoy the community we are striving for.
Posted by Daniel Colegate, 2 months ago
2 comments so far Click here to comment or read all
