Remaining Engaged in Research and Outreach

Lizzie Driscoll is a PGR in the School of Chemistry and a winner of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s 2021 Inspirational Member Award. In this post she shares her experience of outreach and science education and how she has balanced this alongside her research.

If you can’t explain your research to a non-scientific audience, do you really understand your research?

My name is Lizzie, I’m on the final hurdle of my PhD studies within Chemistry (the viva to go!), and I’m going to discuss the Birmingham Battery Bunch’s outreach efforts, the highs, the lows and how this “procrastination” paid off (a comment made when this work was awarded an Institutional award for these efforts – hurtful at best).

I’ve been at the University since 2013 – I’m now a Research Fellow in the School of Metallurgy and Materials with Prof. Emma Kendrick. In starting my PhD, Dr Ruth Patchett joined the School of Chemistry as the outreach liaison officer – and with the support of Prof. Peter Slater (Pete; my PhD supervisor) our battery outreach work started with a Jenga set to explain how Li-ion batteries work – this involved approximately 20 hours of painting the set in my own time.

Lizzie takes her Li-ion battery Jenga sets into schools.

What makes postgraduate mental health fragile and what can we do about it?

Sometimes a topic deserves more than 500 words.  Following Mental Health Awareness Week last week, Bianca Diaconu, a PGR in Psychology, reviews the stressors which make PGRs vulnerable to poor mental health, and looks at ways to address these, in the first of our “in depth” posts.

March 2019 marked the beginning of a strenuous period for the entire world. Everyone was urged to adapt to an extremely disruptive way of working and for the PGR community, this disruption brought even more pressure. Considerable evidence showed that PhD researchers are 3 times more likely to experience mental health problems compared to the general population, with 48% considering leaving and 60% suspending their doctoral studies (Evans et al., 2018). Needless to say, the pandemic has only accentuated this tendency, making it imperative that the matter is no longer overlooked.

Resilience during a pandemic

In this post, Simona Scanni, a distance learning PGR from the Department of Modern Languages, shares her challenges and the ways in which she has built her resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic.

You will feel alone. Nobody will understand your research work, nobody will ask you about it. So be prepared to feel alone as a part of the journey.

This was, more or less, the advice we were given by some PGR fellows during the very first residential week in September, on my first year as a PhD student. At the time, I opted for the distance learning programme, so I was already prepared about the idea of being far away from the campus and university services, and somehow isolated from the campus life. My research is about online learning which, ironically, was something existing but still “remote” for many people. The pro was that I could actually conduct my research from home or from any part of the world.

PhD Chats: (re)connecting with the PGR community

Faith Van Horne, a PGR in the Department of Theology and Religion and Diana Cruz de Oliveira, a PGR in Mechanical Engineering introduce PhD Chats, informal, guided conversations reconnecting PGRs.

When Faith started her PhD program, one of the first events she attended was a PhD Chat, an informal guided conversation to discuss some of the challenges associated with the often-lonely PGR journey. As Westmere Scholars, Diana and Faith are part of the team leading the current PhD Chat series. All of the sessions fit the theme of (Re)Connection. As pandemic restrictions lift, many of us are curious about how we will connect again with the PGR community (or for the first time, if we’ve had trouble establishing those connections already). Last week was the initial chat in the series. This was a very informal check-in, just to see how PGRs were doing, and their hopes and fears about (re)connecting with the larger community.

Diana (left) and Faith (right), Westmere Scholars

Survive and Thrive: Adaptability and Resilience

Continuing her occasional series, “survive and thrive”, Katie Hoare from Careers Network explores a key skill sought after by employers in the post-COVID-19 world.  It’s likely that you are already developing and using these highly transferable skills in your research.

What

According to The Cambridge Dictionary, adaptability is “an ability or willingness to change in order to suit different conditions”.  The term can be applied to people, businesses, physical spaces and technology.  If something or someone is not adaptable, its use and benefit can be short lived.  Resilience has become a buzz word in recent years.  It can be defined as the “ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change” (Merriam-Webster).  In order to be resilient, you need to be adaptable.

Spotlight on the RDF: “Perseverance”

In this series of “Spotlight on…” posts, we’ll be delving into the detail of the descriptors in Vitae‘s Researcher Development Framework (RDF).  Each one of the sixty-three descriptors is a characteristic of an excellent researcher, and we’ll be looking at how UoB PGRs can develop these characteristics.

Elizabeth Warren: “Nevertheless, she persisted”

Perseverance is a valuable quality for a research programme, so much so that one of its synonyms is specifically mentioned in the Seven Secrets of Highly Successful Research Students:  “a PhD is 10% intelligence and 90% persistence”.   Perseverance requires self-discipline and motivation in general, but also specifically refers to your response when things go wrong.  

Feedback’s coming home!

Our helpful and honest panel of PGRs at the PGR Writing Summer School 2018. L-R: Martine, Sian, Anna, Farhan, Frankie, Tom

This week, we’ve had the annual PGR Writing Summer School, with a range of insightful workshops on various aspects of academic and thesis writing.  And, of course, we’ve had national excitement around England’s place in the semi-finals of the 2018 FIFA World Cup.  I’d been wondering how to tie these together for this blog, when this article on football psychology caught my eye, and chimed with a couple of comments made during the Writing Summer School.  How can we build our resilience to tackle a fear of failure and deal with difficult feedback constructively?