EGU Blogs

PhD

Making the Most of your PhD: Think about the next move

November 27, 2013

Welcome to the second post in this series of how to make the most of your PhD. If you missed what these posts are all about, check out last week’s post to get all the details!

Credit: Wikimedia Commons, user unknown

Credit: Wikimedia Commons, user unknown

For this post, I wanted to talk about getting some generic (and very transferable, also known as soft) skills. They are the sort of thing any employer, whether you want to continue in an academic career or are thinking of make the move into industry, or even think you might want to go into something totally new, will look for. Trawl through any job ad and you’ll soon see these kinds of skills are important to employers. Unfortunately, how to go about gaining these skills doesn’t lend it’s self to creating a list, like I did last time, so this is more of a word heavy post.

Top Tip #1! Even if you are in the very early stages of your PhD, it is worth while keeping an eye on the job market and checking job descriptions, especially if you know what it is you want to go into once you finish your PhD. This way, you’ll be able to hone, from the start, the kind of skills and experience you’ll need to land your dream job (if such a thing truly exists!).

So, what are these skills I’m talking about? I’m certain the majority of you are familiar with what I mean, but just in case, here are a few examples: leadership, communication, organisational, time management skills, amongst many others etc… The truth is, you’ll get a lot of these through just completing your Phd, but it is important to think about being able to prove you’ve got these skills! You might think about using the Researcher Development Framework (Vitae) to monitor and assess how your skills are developing.

Top Tip #2! Consider signing up to PGR Tips email bulletin from Vitae -it has LOTS of information on how to deal with the challenges of completing a PhD.

Make the most of the resources on offer at your institution. Training for researchers varies from Institution to Institution, but in most cases, you should be able to access training resources (usually on-line) and opportunities (I’m thinking courses) via a ‘Graduate School’. I use inverted commas, because that is how it is know at my University, but it may vary. As part of my doctoral training, I am required to complete a number of training modules specified by my Graduate School (I could write a whole post on whether I’ve found them useful or not), but in addition, I can access a LOT of on-line training resources and other courses, that I’ve been able to complete at my own pace. I’ve targeted that training to address areas where I felt I needed to make improvements. Needless to say, not everything you may come across will be of interest. It is just a good place to start looking for opportunities.

Top Tip #3!  If you aren’t familiar with your ‘graduate school’ website, I encourage you to visit it now!

VITAE

An organisation that works towards the professional development of early career researchers.  Vitae often works in partnership with Universities, research organisations and funders, so it is worthwhile finding out if your institution has links to Vitae as you may well be able to take advantage of what training they have on offer. Even if that is not the case, their website is full of information about the PhD process and online resources that are extremely helpful, user friends and useful.

A full list of course available can be found here. You can expect to find courses on:

  1. Leadership in action
  2. Collaborative research
  3. Digital research
  4. Advancing in academia
  5. UK Grad School – three day practical learning and development programmes which enable researchers to reflect upon and develop their skills as doctoral researchers. I’ve not been on this course myself, but I know people who have and rate it highly.

AGU

The AGU website has a whole section on geosciences careers and LOTS of information, including regular career advice webinars and workshops. With the AGU Fall Meeting coming up in a few weeks time, it’s worth while having a look at what is on offer at the meeting. You can also arrange to get one on one careers advice at the meeting, follow this link. Here is a selection of things you might consider attending:

EGU

The EGU website has a couple of places to look for information, as well as job opportunities. With the newly created Young Scientists website, networking opportunities and sharing of experiences and resources should also become easier via the EGU, so keep checking!  There already are a list of technical training opportunities (which I should have listed last week :s!). Plus, a fantastic list of resources with tips on all the topics I’ll cover during this series of posts. In addition, there is a Jobs tab on the main EGU website.

Publications

Stay tuned to the careers/jobs pages of both Nature and Science, as they have a selection of blog posts, articles, tool kits (Nature), tips and tools (Science) where you may find information on how to develop transferable skills.  Science even holds its own Workshops (so depending where you are based, this may well be of interest). Whilst there isn’t quite as much information, it worth while scanning the New Scientist career pages for some useful resources too.

Next Scientist

Is a website with a range of blog posts and articles on all things PhD! There are posts about how to improve your communication skills, why blogging is useful, links to free e-books on how to get through your PhD and you can even volunteer to write a blog post of your own. You can also follow Next Scientist on twitter (@NextScientist).

Blogs

Here is just a selection of blogs where I’ve either found useful information or links to resources and opportunities. Admittedly, this list is based on my personal taste, by no means exhaustive and focuses on the overall academic experience, rather than being specific to Earth Science, but they may be relevant to you too.

 

That’s all for now! Next Week: Public Engagement, Science Communication and Outreach.

 

Soliciting peer reviews from PhD students

October 2, 2013

This post does not discuss science per se but the topic is important from a personal point of view and hopefully useful to others in a similar position (i.e., PhD student currently putting together their first papers and hoping to learn more about the peer-review process). Feedback from those at a similar stage as well as more experienced members of academia is most welcome.

The British Society for Geomorphology Annual Conference held last year in Nottingham featured a Meet the Editor workshop for Early Career Researchers, including PhD students, which was a resounding success. It was hosted by Editors from several prestigious Geomorphology-focused journals and attendees learned more about the process of submitting a paper, gleaned considerable advice on the Do’s and Don’ts of academic publishing as well as what Editors are seeking in a good manuscript review. Until this workshop I had not considered PhD students as viable reviewers, but the positive encouragement from Editors at the workshop led me to investigate further the potential to act as a reviewer for other Journals. The responses were intriguing and I feel they are worth sharing with the wider community.

My research area is reconstructing recent environmental change, particularly historic floods, using lake sediment records but I am interested in most branches of Quaternary Science so I set about contacting Editors of various relevant journals. I explained I was a PhD student, that I had recently attended a workshop where the possibility of acting as a reviewer was highlighted and enquired as to their feelings on soliciting reviews from PhD students.

Firstly, I can confirm each Editor kindly replied very promptly with a detailed response. The responses fell into three general categories:

  • Some thanked me for my interest and stated that, while they recognized it would be a tremendous opportunity for a PhD student to be involved in the peer-review process, they felt it was inappropriate for one major reason: our lack of breadth of knowledge of the literature outside our specific fields. I tend to agree; while I attempt to read extensively around all aspects of Quaternary Science and try to keep abreast of recent methodological developments, I have no doubt that my three years’ experience of reading as a PhD student has barely scratched the surface of relevant literature. A member of staff in my Department who acts as an Associate Editor for a peer-reviewed journal confirmed this as being their view too.

  • Secondly, some Editors replied saying they had simply never before considered asking PhD students to act as reviewers. They invited me to submit my contact details and indicated they’d perhaps be in touch in the future. This suggests it is rather uncommon?

  • The third theme was entirely positive; Editors replied confirming they had solicited reviews from PhD students in the past and, in fact, these reviews had turned out to be some of their highest-quality reviews. The student had clearly taken the responsibility extremely seriously and had spent a huge amount of time going through manuscript in great detail. In these cases, I was asked to provide my contact details and they would add me to the database and be in touch if an appropriate manuscript appeared, which I was delighted to do.

    • I have intentionally left this post rather open-ended. I’d love to hear from any PhD students who have acted as a reviewer in the past. Did the Editor contact you directly or did your Supervisor put forward your name? (I’ve heard of this before from other colleagues). Was it challenging? Fun?

    I’m also keen to hear thoughts of those with much more peer-reviewed publishing experience on the appropriateness of PhD students as reviewers or from Editors in any field as to whether they have solicited reviews from PhD students in the past. If so, how did you go about finding them? I imagine the most common source is via an academic search engine (i.e., GoogleScholar, Scopus, etc.); this suggests once you have published your first paper, you are much more likely to receive requests to act as a reviewer. Is this indeed the case?

    Contact me on Twitter (@dschillereff) if the information may be of relevance to a wider audience, or indeed in the Comments section below.

    (Photo uploaded to the public domain on WikiCommons by M. Imran)

    (Photo uploaded to the public domain on WikiCommons by M. Imran)