I’ve recently had A LOT of conversations with people where the other person says, with some considerable exasperation, ”I’m 40+ and….” describing a situation where they are about to complete a substantial period of growth and achievement only to find themselves on a cliff edge that seems to miss the bridge.
Continue readingOne thing that, on hindsight, I believe has been really challenging about the clinical academic career is the not knowing what the journey should look like. The lack of markers that would allow me make sense of where I am, how far have I come, how long will it be, or even where will I eventually end up.
Continue readingWhen I got my PhD, I had two focuses. To avoid falling off some sudden edge that would leave me jobless for life. And to avoid the comfy slippers.
Rejected ideas, funding applications, papers, conference abstracts, applications to join panels and groups… this is a core feature of academic life. Especially of mid-career stage, where I am broadly at. It’s roughly one rejection per month, of one sort or another.
Over time I’ve kept a bit of a reflective account of the different narratives that I and others seem to weave around the rejection. As another rejection came in last night, I thought I’d share it.
The undervalued. Sometimes rejections can feel like a signal that one as a person, one’s work, or one’s discipline is not viewed as important, are not valued, or are fundamentally misunderstood. For the first 10yrs of my academic training the ’undervalued’ narrative was the dominant way of explaining rejections in allied health. Pretty much every conversation I had with my discipline colleagues included ”No point in that, they don’t fund/publish/accept our kind of research”…. ”Sometimes this becomes a strong shared narrative among a group of people, where rejections that have happened to any one member of the group are cumulatively a symbol of the low value attached to the field. These shared narratives can become very powerful, and rejections become viewed through a lens of a permanent, marginalised position.
The undervalued narrative can feel very tempting and for sure, every now and then I feel the appeal of it too. But ultimately I try to remind myself that it’s an unhelpful narrative. It saps energy and does very little to move us forward. So I try to resist it, even when I know the marginalisation is factually true just now (e.g. when I knew that it was statistically and factually correct that there were pretty much no OTs with NIHR grants). I don’t want to believe that the current state is inevitable, or to accept that something I believe in just simply cannot be done. So when I emotionally feel the temptation of this, I try to ask myself and colleagues: ”They are not getting this at the moment – how do we change this, prove our case, and change the outcome?”.
Mini tests. I think that, until fairly recently, my dominant personal narrative has largely been viewing the entire academic career as a long series of tests. As if our education and working lives from school entry to senior professor where gates with locks that one needed to figure out. A primary school maths test. An end-of-school exam. Masters thesis. Job applications and interviews. PhD Viva. Test after test, pass or fail. Get through or get rejected. I just assumed they were part of what life is about. I assumed it was a case of content knowledge and skills, and if I applied those I’d pass. In this, I saw rejections as a signal that I had not yet mastered the right knowledge or skills, or that I had not yet developed the right approach to applying them.
For sure, there’s skills and ability involved in success, but thinking about this now makes me laugh out loud. For I now realise there’s a huge component of I might call ”intelligence” and others might call ”politics” or ”game”. Basically, none of the decisions and rejections are value-free, but a function of who is making them, how have they been briefed and what goals do they have in mind. Some of that is the official, published brief. But there’ll also be the unofficial brief. And having accurate, close hand intelligence about that is crucial.
Reading the game. Becoming more aware of the unofficial intelligence, I’ve started to think of rejections as a dynamic signal that we are not yet reading the game as it is at the monent. In this rejections begin to feel like a missed pass from a team mate, they are the wrong guess by the goalie, they are the blocking we didn’t expect. I tell myself that if we read the game well, we see these things coming before they happen. And we adapt, adjust, do something different. And so when we arrive to the point in game where the knock back is likely, we know how to navigate it, we glide on, and we avoid falling on our faces.
There are two major challenges I am experiencing with this. First is, where does the information about the game come from and how good is that information? Second is, the game is dynamic and ever changing, so each round is different and so it can be hard to prepare. How to get valid intelligence about all the relevant things, and adjust our play to the game at hand. It feels tricky.
The unpredictable system. This is the one consistent message I have always heard from the most senior people. That one’s application can be absolutely ideal – but something happens at the panel, and it’s rejected. I am not really sure what to make of this one. It feels a bit hopeless.
The biased system. That in fact the outcome is only in a very limited way a reflection of the quality of the proposals. And maybe more of a reflection of eg politics, the self-preservation of elites, biases, or just randomness of the system. This too feels hard to work with. For if I believe it’s random then I lose motivation to work with it.
I did like a suggestion I heard recently, that all proposals that pass a basic eligibility check would go in a lottery and be allocated from there. It would certainly save a lot of time and money, and work to lessen some of the persistent systematic bias related to e.g. gender, age, disability, ethnicity.
Are you a clinical academic feeling you’ve not quite managed to make the clinical academic equation work? Feeling a bit sad, guilty, inadequate? For sure it must be you not getting, since so many others seem to have cracked it?
Continue readingI’m so excited I might just burst! I think I may have today figured out my super power!!
Continue readingIn the past 15 years, I’ve worked with a range of NHS managers at different levels across a number of organisations. I’ve also mentored a sizable pool of further clinician academics working with their managers. Reflecting back, what realisations would I like to share with both NHS managers and clinical academics?
“I have recently (pretty) successfully completed the task of co-ordinating an international visit as part of my NIHR Clinical Lectureship. I thought it might be helpful to others planning training to share some of the things that worked well for me…and some that didn’t!!”
Do you feel a “a serious lack of organisational and professional value” placed on NMAHP clinical academic skills, knowledge and, ultimately, roles that you try to advance? Continue reading
What am I? Where am I going? Am I actually achieving anything worth while? What should I be doing?
These questions have grown louder and louder in my mind over the past year, and as I recently read Jemma’s post it did not go un-noticed that some of these might be questions inherently built into being a clinical academic. So I thought I would share my ponderings of these questions, in what seems to have turned out a somewhat personal post. Continue reading
Clinician Academic 