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Resilience: The feedback dynamics between you and academia

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Dr Emily Troscianko and Dr Rachel Bray In the first post in this series on resilience, we thought about how you and the academic environment interact. We considered some of the benefits and drawbacks of working in academia, and some of the personal characteristics that might make you more or less resilient in the face of its stresses. In this post, we offer a way of modelling these interactions in more visual, dynamic terms. Seeing things drawn as well as written can be helpful in understanding the underlying structures (it’s not just about me…), and in adopting a fresh perspective on choices available to you. Once you start thinking of yourself, your life, and the world as a feedback system, it can become an addictively satisfying way of seeing the bigger picture. Feedback dynamics are fundamental to pretty much any system you can think of – biological, technological, institutional, psychological… This means that grasping some feedback basics is crucial to understanding how instabili...
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CV obsession: why fixating on past experience is costing you valuable time and energy

Steve Joy “Please will you have a look at my CV?” “The thing I’m most worried about is my CV!” “If we have a few minutes left, I was wondering whether you could have a quick look at my CV.” I long ago lost track of the proportion of one-to-one appointments, informal chats at conferences, and even phone calls with friends that have included these words. The CV seems to be the idée fixe of the vast majority of early career researchers I speak to. You probably think that it’s perfectly reasonable. But I have news for you: stop obsessing about your CV. It’s rarely the real question. It’s often a cause for self-doubt. It’s almost always a signal of not having the right mindset. And it’s energy which you can much better channel in more productive directions. Let me explain. Not the real question The thing is, I don’t really believe 99% of the people who tell me that their CV is the thing they’re most worried about. Not literally. That’s because the real question, in most cases, is not “What...
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Resilience: does academia complement or conflict with who you are?

Emily Troscianko and Rachel Bray Everything in life has its stresses, and academia isn’t necessarily more stressful than any other professional sector. But academia does have particular contours of cost and benefit, some of which we readily talk about while others are easier to ignore. Opening a conversation is often the key to igniting personal reflection and action, and it’s in this spirit that we offer six posts over the coming months on the linked topics of resilience, self-awareness, and identity in academia. They address two simple questions: Q. If staying in academia is so hard, why do so many people want it?   and   Q. If you do want it, how can you work towards it whilst  preserving your sanity ?  And they propose and elaborate on two simple answers:  A. Because it still offers so much that is intellectually and personally appealing.   and   A. By being honest with yourself about what it's really like...
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What do you mean you don’t have a Plan B?

Diane Caldwell “What’s your ‘ Plan B?’” When do you stop pursuing ‘Plan A’ and turn to identifying options for your ‘Plan B’?  Or is it too late to develop an appealing and viable ‘Plan B’? Our everyday reference to ‘Plan A’ for academia and ‘Plan B’ for the other, often less well-known world, is so natural that we hardly notice.  But what are the implications of this binary way of thinking and conversation?  And what do these mean if you think of yourself, or consider others to view you as, having invested in the first stages of an academic career?  There can be many and varied reasons why you might consider ‘leaving academia’.  Common rational reasons: you can’t uproot your life to meet the dictates of the job market; the intensity of the competition is too great; there are no reasonable professional development opportunities etc.  In some of these cases, you may have an accompanying disenchantment with the subject or a desire (at least perceived) t...
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