I have been at a few conferences over the past few weeks some of which talked about grant writing and responsible research. It has struck me how much we, as researchers, are sometimes asked to do with often little support for things that could easily be managed by others more suited to the jobs. Sometimes it can feel like “they” are asking us as young researchers to almost do four full time jobs (researcher, teacher, communicator, and everything else) before it is even possible to apply for large grants or tenure positions and that can be a daunting feeling*. We are asked to wear many hats. . . but how long can we wear each and still get anything productive done?
The Researcher
Many of us in academia find research to be the thing we want to do. We are curious about the world around us. We want to explore the world, enhance knowledge, create things, learn. Research is both a talent and a skill. But the researcher hat is not just about thinking up and executing research projects. In order to fund our research we have to explain it to others (funding committees or businesses) to get the money to do the research. After the research is done we need to be able to publish it (papers, books, or patents) so that others in our own community can understand and build upon what we have done. We also have the responsibility to train new researchers to continue the work. Otherwise all of our work is in vain as it will not advance the understanding of our research community. Ideally many of us want to spead as much time with this hat as possible. This is often the hat that we wear after hours, on weekends, on vaccations, when in the shower or bathtub. But more an more we are forced to give up time wearing this hat in order to wear - very important, but not necessarily comfortable - other hats.
The Teacher
Teaching is a core part of how many research academics have salaries. By this I do not mean training researchers or teaching PhD students. I mean teaching general college courses on our subjects. Don’t get me wrong, teaching is incredibly important. I love teaching and I like to think I’m good at it sometimes. But many research academics don’t love it. Many research academics aren’t good at it. Many research academics scar their students for life about topics because they are so poor at teaching. Most institutions have attepted to solve this problem by training all their research academics as educators. I feel strongly that this training should happen, but at the same time there are wonderful researchers who are horrible teachers and all of the “teaching courses” in the world won’t fix that fact. Should these individuals be forced to teach because research and teaching are considered two parts of the same profession?
And the fact that basic courses have been taught by research professors for so long has led to an underlying idea that basic courses need to teach students facts. Basic biology for non-science majors at many Universities teaches students the chemical equation for photosynthesis but frequently fails to impress upon students a desire to look around them at the different types of life that make up our planet. When do most non-biology majors (and even most biology majors) need to have memorized the chemical equation for photosynthesis? Almost never! When does everyone need to look around at the life on our planet? Everyday! If people don’t connect with the planet and the life on it, then how can we begin to ask people to participate in conservation projects, to recycle, to purchase local and sustainable even when it is more expensive? So maybe even at college level the teacher hat is not the other side of the researcher hat. Maybe it is it’s own hat that requires just as much creativity and work as the researcher hat. Some people can and do want to wear both, but should it be almost required?
The Communicator
More and more research projects require an outreach componant. This component used to be “go and run a booth at a science fair” but now the expectations are getting larger and larger. Again, public communication and outreach are incredibly important. However, successful public events that create an impact require large amount of planning and logistics; skills which many research scientists lack when it comes to anything outside their research. Learning all of the skills to plan and execute a major event is a full time job and one that a project manager or science comminicator is much better suited to do because they learn these skills to use them over and over again for different projects not for one project every few years. Public events that create an impact are awesome as part of a grant and learning how to communicate to the general public is an important skill; but, should we have to reinvent the logistical wheel every time.
The Open Access and Data Archieving Expert
Open access for publications and data has become a major issue in science for many, valid reasons. Transparency, reproducabilty, and collaboration are all very, very important and open access facilitates them. However, figuring out how to publish open access (it’s not straightforward) can be difficult and time consuming and often times we don’t know where to go to get help. Open access of data is even more difficult as it requires standard formats, annotations to make sure it is used with the appropraite context, getting multiple permissions for making it accessible, finding a platform to host it, putting it in collections, answering questions about the data, and often finding the money to pay for it to be in a collection. Again, important, but it is reinventing the logistical wheel every time we produce a new data set.
The Gender Expert
With gender being a hot issue in science, it is important to consider it. Apparently car crash test dummies and models are all male and therefore this actually can cause women to be less safe in cars. Medication works differnetly in men and women. There are more men research scientists than women. Gender is important both to consider in our work life and our research projects. However, I just attended a conference and was told that all of us young career research scientists should learn “advanced sex-gender analysis”. This is an entire field of research - in fact probably several. I am working in my own area and asking me to learn an entirely different field of research to the advanced level not only frustrates me, but in my mind demeans the research by those individuals who are working in the sex-gender field.
I’ll stop here but you can include the ethics expert, the mentor, the reviewer, the social media expert, and the grant writer to the list of hats that young researchers are expected to balance. Formost we are told that we are required to publish big, impressive papers with broad reaching impacts to get a good job. This is hard enough to do and requires massive amounts of creativity and hard work and more than a little luck to achieve. And to keep that job we are told we need to keep up the publication bit, be an excellent mentor for our grad students and post docs, get excellent teaching reviews from the students who take our classes who often base their review on the grade they got in class, and prove our ability to get grant money. We have accepted these facts as part of our academic life. But now with no more money or time in our grants we are being asked to prove ourselves as science communicators who can put together increasingly large impact events, prove that we have considered gender and ethics in our research in a complex and advanced way, and open access publish our research and our data. I’m not saying that all of these things aren’t important. I’m just musing on how over-reached young researchers can feel when it seems like it all on our backs.
*I just want to say that I work with a GREAT team at BioArCh (University of York) who provide amazing support, but the more I go to workshops and listen to grant application comments the more I realize “they” want us to do.
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