Learning from my Research Experience

Today I have the pleasure of hosting Vijay Thamarai who discusses his research journey, and what he learned to be crucial for carrying out research. Vijay is an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering department in SRM University, Chennai, India with research and design-professional interests in Finite Element Analysis, blast engineering, underground infrastructure and translucent concrete. He obtained his Master’s in Structural Engineering from SRM University, Chennai (2013) and Bachelor’s in Civil Engineering from Anna University, Chennai (2010). His research in blast analysis and design received recognition from Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in March 2011. Besides receiving a ‘Best Performance Award’ for academics in M.Tech program, he also received many awards for national level service in scouting. He has published journals on blast resistant design, outrigger frames and pushover analysis and a book titled ‘Modern Heliport Design'. He runs his own structural consultancy firm ‘Trustus Structural Consultancy’ and started an educational foundation for helping the needy and empowering poor people.

My experience in carrying out research began when I was consistently tried to explore different projects in which I can learn more about structural engineering (I decided to choose Structural engineering as my specialization in the second year of my undergraduate studies) and that fire my imagination. During my second year of undergrad I got a chance to watch a movie with my family members and there was a scene in which the heroine dies in a bomb blast. That triggered my desire to design the structures that are resistant against blast load. The very next day, I started collecting journals, books and other articles related to the blast resistant design of structures. I was so excited and started learning with a good level of confidence. My undergrad project and postgraduate thesis are on the analysis and design of blast resistant structures. These research experiences have strengthened my intellectual ability and leadership qualities. I have published several articles, few journals and a book as a postgraduate , which taught me how to effectively convey my thoughts and research to the community.

The topics of my research have varied in structural analysis and design, nonlinear static procedures, strengthening of reinforced concrete members and Translucent Concrete , and the breadth of these topics will facilitate my future research. The common objective I have with my research is to produce a positive impact in society. Before joining the postgraduate course I was working as an Assistant Engineer for Design in an architect firm at Chennai, India. The learning process during the postgraduate pulled my mind out from returning to a corporate office after the course and pushed me in the direction of research. I am currently working as an Assistant Professor in the department of Civil Engineering at SRM University, India (Sri Ramasamy Memorial). Still I am learning and working towards joining a Ph.D program. My thoughts are widespread with different problem statements, selection of universities and funding. So, I am now in a stage of exploring various Ph.D opportunities. Let me share something I learned during my past years of research.

First of all, there is no recipe for good research. Some students expect or hope to be provided with step-by-step instructions or guidelines on how to find or tackle problems. Research is all about thinking, thinking and thinking again. Never hesitate to throw your mind at anything. Before looking up a book or paper, before asking anyone, think. Never be lazy about thinking. That's how you build up understanding and develop a bag of useful techniques. Thinking is fun.

In a second step, you will work on the idea that functions as a benchmark for your research. You pick up how research is done by seeing examples and extrapolating. Attending conferences, reading journal papers, and discussions with your advisor or peers are great sources of research material. Learn how to write a paper by looking at other papers. Make analogies. When you see a new problem, ask yourself which questions were asked previously and use that to ask questions about your new problem. Don't be narrow or concentrate only on your particular problem. Learn things from all over your field, and beyond. The facts, methods, and insights from elsewhere will be much more useful than you might realize, possibly in your thesis, and most definitely afterwards. Being broad is a good way of learning to develop interesting questions.

The third point is understanding your research question. It is more important to understand deeply what you know than to know a lot. Successful research comes from having a good understanding, especially of the basics. When you read a research paper, ask yourself questions. Understanding means the ability to go beyond the immediate. It means knowing not just what the item in question is, but how it fits into a larger context, what are its variants, and what happens if you perturb it one way or another. I follow the quote, “Know something about everything and everything about something”. Knowing everything about something will empower you on the research part you have chosen and will lead you to reach milestones.

The fourth and most important point is ‘Time’. How people allocate research time varies enormously, not only from person to person, but, for a given person, from week to week or quarter to quarter. Some people work on an inspiration or deadline basis, sometimes putting in long hours, then doing nothing for a few days. Others maintain a steady schedule, coming to the lab at a certain time in the morning and leaving a certain time in the evening. Neither is right or wrong or better or worse; it is a question of finding what works best for you.
I always look for long-term productivity. A successful researcher should display some degree of productivity and progress over the course of a reasonably long period, like a summer, a quarter, or more typically, a year. This would include signs of increased understanding, confidence and maturity, and some visible output or deliverable, like a complete paper.

Self-confidence comes next to time as an important asset as a fifth element. Self-confidence affects our performance and success in all walks of life, from sports to socializing to dating. It plays a role in research too. Lack of self-confidence leads to disinclination of work. Fear of failure leads to inactivity. People freeze up because they are so worried they aren't good enough. If this sounds familiar, at least you know you are not alone. Increasing your self-confidence is very much a personal issue, but here are some reflections from my experience. You can find confidence only within yourself. Don't expect to get it from others. Someone telling you that you did well is useful to boost morale, but in the end you must believe in yourself.

If you are afraid of failure you will have a hard time succeeding. You have to fall a few times to learn to skate or ride a bicycle. Research is worse. Once you learn to ride a bicycle you don't fall again, but in research you never stop failing. Failures increase your understanding and maturity. If you find the process of research fun, failure to solve a problem is not daunting. In fact, it leads to all kinds of discoveries. You should feel proud, because you are a problem-solver. One nice thing about research is that nobody needs to know when you failed. You write papers only about your successes. But that is also deceptive, because you don't see the failures of others. But they are there. Even the top people don't always succeed. Gauss failed sometimes, as did Einstein.

Setting goals for 2014

2013 was the first year for which I set goals - unfortunately I moved to another continent and left the diary behind which had my list of goals. Oops.

For 2014, I made goals, added a timeline and actionable steps to them, and saved them as well in my Todoist account. It might be a lot that I'm trying to achieve, but I like keeping my standards high. Even if I only get a fraction of everything done, I will still have done quite a number of things.

And because accountability is scary and all that, I decided to share my goals, and review at the end of the year how well or poorly I fared.

My academic goals for 2014 are the following:
- try a month of writing daily from 6am to 8am
- start up a laboratory at the university where I'm currently employed
- get involved in a bridge design project
- teach awesome courses to my students
- organize a science communication course
- graduate 4 thesis students
- write a grant proposal
- submit at least 6 journal papers for review (priority number 1!)
- learn Spanish

My health/personal goals for 2014 are the following:
- get back onto the FLO living protocol for eating and time management
- try a month of going to the gym daily at 6am
- eat vegan for a month
- revisit the Silva course
- find friends in my new city Quito
- give up refined sugar for 40 days
- buy an apartment
- exercise daily
- meditate daily
- journal daily
- read 60 books

And for PhD Talk, I'd like to do the following:
- transform PhD Talk
- write a book
- teach a social media workshop
- write 10 guest posts for other blogs

And a few fun activities that I want to do:
- go hike in a national park
- run a race
- play more music
- go horseriding in nature
- volunteer a couple of days on an organic farm and forest-keeping project
- get involved with the local TEDx community
- write a bundle of poems and publish them
- go for a singing weekend
- study an NLP course
- climb the Cotopaxi volcano
- attend a meditation workshop
- do one handscraft project
- go on a yoga weekend
- draw 7 mandalas

What are your goals for 2014? Have you made a list of fun things that you would like to do as well, to get enough downtime?

How Successful Women Balance Work and Life

Today, we are looking at the topic of balance and employment. Work-life balance and staying sane in graduate school are topics that I write about frequently here at PhD Talk, so I was glad when Ashley Jones pitched me for a guest post on combining work and life. While this post is tailored to women, I think the ideas in here are valid for all of us - regardless of our gender

As women move through their live, the approach to finding a balance between work and life is becoming an important issue in contemporary life. Women are rightfully taking on many of the most demanding occupations that society can offer and as a result are increasingly responsible for a majority of the most difficult jobs in the country.

Among this subset of skilled workers, women with doctoral degrees are particularly accustomed to work schedules that leave little time for personal space and reflection. Accordingly, it may be of benefit to list just some of the ways that successful women are striking balances between their careers and their personal lives.

1. Meditation
Long an activity that stood at the forefront of Eastern philosophies, meditation is now recognized by many health professionals as an engaging way to promote self-care. By reducing rumination and other forms of anxious thinking, meditation is a particularly apt way for successful women to direct the watercraft of their days into calmer waters. Numerous practitioners of meditation find that the activity becomes an anchor of calm in their busy lives and leads to a greater sense of focus and overall health. Whether done by oneself or with the help of experts, meditation is only likely to gain more followers in the future.

2. Creative Work
Even when free-time can seem limited, finding a few minutes a day to do creative work can be a major way to promote a work-life balance. For example, writing fiction or personal essays can provide an outlet for experience that can feel immensely rewarding; even finding an hour a day to write can bring numerous benefits. Other forms of creative work such as painting and sculpture can also provide relief from the stresses of work and create a sense of happiness and satisfaction both on and off the job.

3. Life-long Learning
Learning about new ideas in life doesn't have to stop once a doctoral thesis is finished. Finding area colleges that offer evening or weekend classes are great ways to keep the mind sharp and skills current. By choosing a subject that’s unfamiliar but interesting, successful women can often find that while knowledge is always changing, learning is a life-long process. As a means for socializing, taking classes can also introduce non-traditional students to new friends and even mentors. For many people, a love of learning can become a daily practice even after they’re experts in a field.

4. Love of Travel
Sometimes learning to take time for oneself is among the most important lessons anyone can gain in life. For example, taking a period of time to examine another country will often teach a person more about different cultures than anything else, and travel can often act as a sort of deep breath from our careers. As a field of interest, travel has become one of the most popular ways to understand ourselves and others, and its proponents often wouldn't trade the experiences they've gained in foreign countries for the world.

Ashley Jones is the author of many articles with resources for professional women. Her recent work is on the Best Online Master of Science in Education (MSEd) Degree Programs for women who want to work while learning

Preparing for life after the PhD: re-train your brain

Today, I have the pleasure to host Dr Chris Humphrey who shines his light on that dreaded topic of getting a job after the PhD.  

Dr Humphrey is the founder of Jobs on Toast, a blog dedicated to helping masters students and PhDs to find fulfilling careers outside of academia. Chris obtained his PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of York (UK) in 1997, and he is the author of The Politics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in Medieval England. 

Since leaving academia in 2000, Chris has worked in a range of project and programme management roles in the areas of sustainability, finance, transport and training. 

Chris regularly gives workshops at UK universities on the subject of marketing yourself for a career outside academia, and he will shortly be launching an online directory of paid-for products and services benefiting doctoral researchers. Follow Chris on twitter: @chrishumphrey.

In the final stages of your PhD you can get so absorbed in finishing that the last thing on your mind is what happens next! The risk of becoming too focussed however is that you don’t make the mind-set changes you’ll need to sustain yourself in post-PhD life. Life after the PhD is going to be very different, but no-one really warns you or helps you to prepare for it. In this post I’m going to explain a new attitude that you need to cultivate in order to survive and thrive post-PhD, drawing on my own experience of making the transition from a PhD and post-doc in Medieval Studies into a business career.

My story
During my post-doc I was interviewed for a number of permanent academic posts around the UK. After my fifth interview rejection the third and final year of my funding was coming to an end. So I decided to leave academia and get a job in business instead. The main driver for me quitting academia was my unwillingness to accept part-time teaching and associated pay just to 'stay in the game' for a permanent academic post. My choice of sector, e-learning and web-based training, left the door open to a return to academia, but once I started in business I knew there was no going back.

Reflecting on this decision more than a decade later, especially now that I'm thinking about serious stuff like paying into my pension and when (if!) I might ever be able to retire, I realise how costly those years of low wages and insecurity could have been. I’m glad I made the decision that I did. If I had hung on in there and taught part-time after my post-doc funding ended, when I was already 30 years old, as a family we would definitely have been scraping by financially (my wife was a newly-qualified teacher at that point and we had a toddler too).

To some people I’m sure this would have been a price worth paying, as the prize of a lectureship or professorship would outweigh the prospect of a few months of hardship. In my case it wasn’t a price I was prepared to pay. It got me thinking about how my attitude changed at some point, especially since I’d subsisted on a very low grant income throughout my PhD.

Making the switch
As I said in my introduction, life after the PhD is very different and you need to be mentally prepared for this difference. One major change I believe you need to make in the final six months is to gradually switch off a powerful force that has sustained you for so long: deferred gratification. Delaying gratification is the ability to make do with less now, in the anticipation of future gains. It’s great when you’re in a structured environment like education, as it keeps you focussed on the end goal of achieving your qualification. It gives you the power to knuckle down and write that chapter, read that book, rather than give in to distractions and interruptions. But it’s not such a great capability when it comes to the next major priority after completing your PhD: finding a secure job that will pay you a decent salary and has benefits like a pension and health insurance.

So after having spent more than two decades of your life in school deferring gratification, you are suddenly in the position towards at the end of your PhD where you need to start to embrace it! All those things that we as PhDs have had to put off: having a family, buying and furnishing a home, going on holiday, paying off debt, suddenly become a real possibility. In fact you have to transition quite rapidly from the approach of just getting by, into someone who can really start to ‘make a living’. You have to quickly learn how to present yourself to a hiring committee (i.e. no longer act like a grad student), negotiate yourself a good salary and benefits package, and start work in an unfamiliar place with sufficient professionalism to get you through your probation. The Professor Is In website has lots of great advice in this area by the way, relevant to both academic and non-academic careers.

The true cost of adjuncting
Already I can hear people yelling ‘Yeah great in principle Chris we would wholeheartedly love to embrace gratification like you say, but where are all the well-paid jobs in academia?!’ True enough, the academic job market is currently terrible. Many of our peers are toiling away in under-employment as a result: working as adjuncts, or employed in the university bookshop, as a lab assistant or as a local tour guides, waiting for things to improve. However, what started as a few months of ‘staying in the game’ can easily extend into a few years and then into a whole adjunct or under-employed way of life. As many of our peers have found to their cost, especially in the US, temporary and part-time work is now entrenched in the higher education system. In the US there is the now infamous statistic that 75% of faculty work part-time on temporary contracts, while in the UK, more than a third of academics are now on fixed-term contracts, according to a recent story in The Guardian. The dream job that so many aspire to may turn out to be just that: a dream that will never materialize. Ironically the academy, that last bastion of tenure, is today fronted by an army of casual workers on short-term and temporary contracts.

So in my view adjuncting and other kinds of under-employment done ‘while I’m waiting for my professorship to come up’ reflect to a degree the mind-set that I’ve already identified: a willingness to delay gratification for the prospect of future gain. Yes there's a chance that things’ll work out next year on the academic job track, but you have to weigh that slim chance against the impact on your whole life of things not working out. Although some folks are willing to take a hit on their income in the short term, as already mentioned this can turn into a serious long-term problem, putting at risk many of the things that will help to define a ‘good life’ for them and their family. This is what we can describe as ‘the true cost of adjuncting’: the risk of becoming permanently locked into under-employment. Many of our peers are facing up to the harsh reality that they are becoming LESS employable as they go on in under-employment, rather than more employable. This is a crushing blow if you’re still wedded to the idea of accepting less now in the prospect of getting more tomorrow.

Empower yourself economically
So what’s the take-away here? Well to me the first thing is to recognise that your ability to delay gratification has been a powerful force that has sustained you throughout your university career. But as you near the completion of your PhD, you need to acknowledge that this driver has done its job, and you need to start to train yourself in the art and science of making a living instead. The blunt message is that you’ve used up all the slack in your life by doing a PhD: now you need to start taking serious steps to assure the comfort, health and dignity of you and your family, not just post-PhD, but for the rest of your life.

Having learned to empower ourselves intellectually, as PhDs we also need to learn how to empower ourselves economically. This doesn’t mean throwing away our principles in the blind pursuit of money. What I’m talking about here is a principled way forward, rejecting the exploitation of low paid and insecure work (adjuncting) or working for free (unpaid internships), in favour of a decent wage in return for our valuable skills and experience. As mature, educated and committed workers we can be of tremendous value to all kinds of organisations outside of academia, including charities, government or business. Check out the profiles on PhDs at Work to see some real-life examples, including my own story. Take some time to read about people who’ve successfully shifted their focus from just getting by (as a grad student), to getting on in life (as a professional with a great job and career). The sooner you can make this mental shift for yourself, the sooner you can begin to realise your full potential and enjoy life after the PhD!

So don’t sleepwalk down the academic job route just because you’re still in delayed gratification mode, or because you’re afraid of upsetting your supervisors. Once you’re awarded your PhD you’re not a student any more – you are your own person who has to make their way in a very challenging world. Yes it can feel like ‘selling out’ or ‘giving up everything’ to go for a job outside of academia. Yes it can sound crass and materialistic to even talk in terms of a desire to own property or assure yourself a decent retirement income. But if higher education can’t offer you a means to support yourself and your family now and in the future, that is a structural problem that isn’t going to be fixed in the near future. Be bold and take matters into your own hands. Make a start today and consider your options for a career outside of academia, even if that plan is only your Plan B. There’s a very good chance it’ll become your Plan A before too long.

Introducing Universidad San Francisco de Quito

I'm taking a break from the regular posting in the Writers' Lab this week to introduce my new location to you. I'll be starting in November as an assistant professor at Universidad San Francisco de Quito.

The following is what Wikipedia tells us about USFQ:

Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ (informally Universidad San Francisco, or simply USFQ) is a liberal-arts, non-profit, private university located in Quito, Ecuador. It was the first totally private self-financed university in Ecuador and the first liberal-arts institution in the Andean region.

Academically, USFQ ranks as one of the eleven-top universities (category A) in the ranking of Ecuadorian universities (being the only totally private university to qualify for the highest category), issued by the Ecuadorian Council of Evaluation and Accreditation of High Education (Consejo Nacional de Evaluación y Acreditación de la Educación Superior CONEA). In 2009, it was ranked first in Ecuador in relation to the number of peer-reviewed scientific publications.

The university now enrolls 5,500 students, 4,500 of whom are undergraduates. The university each year has about 100 indigenous students and 1000 international students participate in USFQ academic programs. USFQ has developed a scholarship program for indigenous students, offering full scholarships to the best students of public high schools throughout Ecuador. Although USFQ receives no funding from the government of Ecuador, its faculty comprises one-half of all the people in that nation who hold a doctorate.

USFQ main campus is located in Cumbayá, outside of Quito (capital city of Ecuador), where students use a library, education and research laboratories, classrooms, and seven restaurants. USFQ is the only university in the world that owns a campus in the Galapagos Islands, and a campus in the Yasuni Biosphere Reserve (Tiputini Biodiversity Station), one of Earth's most biodiverse area.

That's a short introduction to my soon-to-be work place. I'll blog over time about my experiences here, as a lecturer, an expat and growing early career researcher.

Writers' Lab: Why Writing is your Single Most Important Skill

I've spent significantly more attention to writing about writing in my posts this year, as I started the Writers' Lab. As I was preparing my thesis, and now am working towards my defense, writing felt like a suitable subject to explore even further.

When I read this recent post at Study Hacks, I realized how important writing actually is.

It turns out that a lot of publications, and getting a lot of citations from these, are the most important factors for a successful academic career.

You can rephrase that by saying that writing is the single most important skill you need to master for success in academia.

When I read this post, it felt like a wake-up call to me - and it should feel like that to you too.

Make writing a priority.

Make improving your writing a priority.

Check with others to see if your message is clear.

Check with your field to see if your message fulfills a research need.

And then, get writing again and again!