Words, words, words…

I have the good fortune of having three PhD theses on my desk at present, two where I am the external examiner and one where I am the internal. They are all on interesting topics, one very related to my own work and the other two a little more obliquely related. While reading theses for examination is a chore – you need to make lots of notes and make sure you have sensible questions to probe the student on, it is also a really good way to concentrate on a specific subject and hopefully learn something along the way.

Having picked up the first one to read my heart sank a little as it became clear that there were going to be lots of rather strangled grammar. If you are an aspiring or current PhD student, you need to know that the quality of your science is what will take you through in the end, but your viva is likely to be a hell of a lot easier if the examiner does not need to stop every paragraph to note how you have deviated from the norms of good English.

My strong advice: throughout your PhD, write as much as you can and get feedback on your work. This can be from your supervisor, lab mates or friends or through courses that I imagine all Universities (certainly in the UK) offer on academic writing. Or maybe by writing a blog. Also try, and this can be hard, to thoroughly proofread your final thesis, and get others to do so too. This will make your examiner’s job so much easier, and so much more enjoyable, allowing them to focus on what you have done. Words your means of delivering your message. Make sure they are your friends.

IoP Schools Outreach Meeting

Yesterday I took an early flight down to London to attend an Institute of Physics (IoP) School Outreach Support Network meeting. I’m reasonably active in schools outreach work, and a little support never hurts. Overall the day was very positive, and I took home lots of little hints and tips that I might try and apply here, while it was also a chance to speak to range of academics that I might not normally come across. The slightly disappointing thing was that the flagship IoP activities in this area are funded in and for English schools exclusively. This ticks me off a little – a co-ordinated approach across the UK would seem appropriate, but I often find that people from ‘down South’ have difficultly dealing with a wholly different education system: there is a little of ‘I did A-levels, I understand them, the majority in the UK do them, so I need not concern myself further with anything else.’ This is disappointing, but it is a fact of life considering how eduction in the Uk is funded through devolved means – but I pay my membership fees to the IoP in London, and it’d be good to see maximum efficiency through shared schemes.

The main instrument the IoP is pushing is the ‘Stimulating Physics Network‘ which is designed to offer practical support and mentoring for physics teachers; pilot schemes are being set up with a range of partner schools who traditionally do not have much physics uptake at A level, with 35 support ‘coaches’ being available within the 420 partner schools to facilitate this. There is a great push to try and look and gender balance in physics (and through some of the schemes on offer, the wider school community) through direct work with girls, running workshops, offering peer mentoring support and senior pupil mentoring of junior pupils, increased STEM Ambassador support, highlighting gender aware pedagogy and the like. In general all positive and fairly sensible stuff, much of it on the back of previous IoP reports in this area: “It’s Different for Girls” and “Closing Doors“. The funding is there for 2-3 years and we’ll see how it all pans out. Additionally there is a scheme aimed at just London and surrounds funded by the Drayson Foundation. Physics does appear to have quite a big gender imbalance problem, and it’s good to see it being tackled head on on a number of fronts.

Other schemes currently include the ‘Your Life‘ initiative, which is led through private funding and is designed to promote better female participation in STEM subjects, aimed especially at 14-16 year olds. [Having just looked at their website, I am not quite sure what it’s all about, but hopefully the industry input will be a positive step]. There is also the Researchers in Schools project which will pay a premium of £40k a year for trainee teachers in physics and maths (for two years I believe), although I think the target number for the scheme is very low. This is aimed at PhD students and postdocs. It sounds attractive, but I can’t help feel that it would be somewhat divisive in a staff room.

We also heard from Gareth Edwards from the Open University about a RCUK funded scheme , the Schools-University Partnership which at the OU is designed to look at a number of different activities to promote engagement – open lectures, open inquiry, open dialogues and open creativity. The study will then look at the evidence base for the success of such projects. Gareth’s talk and little activity session was designed to highlight how one might measure success in these areas. The example used was in the ‘Open creativity’ section where students received media training, just like staff at the OU would and then were going to make a video making use of an element of current OU research. I think we’ll need to wait a wee while to see the project outcomes (it runs to 2015).

We also heard from a few physics academics on their outreach projects, one from Phil Furneaux from Lancaster about making better use of PhD students for outreach and the types of things they need if you are training them for such events; another from Heather MacRae from Venture Thinking and Helen Mason from University of Cambridge who produced an excellent project engaging pupils from an East London school to produce an iBook about the sun, “A big ball of fire“. The students got to visit Cambridge, took in a special lecture and worked on the multimedia aspects of putting their book together. The researchers were surprised at the range of media they got back. The idea can be readily ported to almost any subject area, although a lecture in your University might not be quite as swanky as one at Cambridge.

In the final talk we learned about the University of Bradford’s Robotic Telescope Project. This allows schools access to the telescope, which is in Tenerife, and to take real data and interact with astronomers. The idea being to provide a cross curricula opportunity which will hopefully also inspire pupils to stay with STEM.

So all in all a pretty good day, aside from the delayed flight home which mean to bed after 1am, and I have a few new ideas to try and push here, should I get a spare few minutes.

 

 

 

 

 

Summer Studentship Dilemma

We have been lucky enough to have been awarded two summer studentships through the Institute of Physics Top50 placement scheme this year. This has meant that we have had a large number of applications for summer studentships from outside the University, whereas normally, most of our summer students tend to be pretty local. We have had twenty eight applications for our posts and having read through them all it looks like it is going to be a tough decision.

This got me to thinking: what is the purpose of a summer studentship? If this were a PhD position, or postdoc, or permanent staff member I’d be looking for the very best applicant, who shows the most potential, but reading through the CVs made me wonder, if an 8-week studentship, which is clearly not a job in any sense, should be judged in the same way? It is clear from the CVs there there a bunch of talented, motivated and above all experienced undergraduate students out there – they have undertaken previous research projects and tick the boxes in terms of writing a decent CV; they have things to talk about. But equally there a bunch of students who I started to worry about – they are clearly bright, with good grades and I am sure would do a good job over the summer, but they have little experience. Some have little experience of anything with patchy evidence of summer jobs or part time jobs, others can show that they have worked in a shop, but little else. I worry that many of these students, when it comes to getting real jobs after graduation, will struggle, based on their CVs. I know some of this is self-imposed, but equally I know many students simply can’t either find, or can’t afford to do, shiny research placements. There are many restrictions on finding such roles. I also know that when I was in a similar position my CV was somewhat thin – I’ve always been fairly reserved and wasn’t so good at putting myself ‘out there’. Unfortunately, now more than ever, it’s what you do in your holidays that marks you out for employers, especially when there are so many graduates with 1sts and 2.1s.

And so I wonder – is the purpose of my summer studentships to offer the opportunity to students who have never had it, or to propel on even further their more experienced peers – do I want to help improve some of the those CVs, offer some training and mentoring and the chance for something different to those who might not have had it before, or just go for the best qualified? Bear in mind that the students are unlikely to do anything earth shattering in 8 weeks, so I can genuinely offer these placements without worrying if the student is going to be absolutely brilliant – I’m mainly looking for application and a genuine interest in the topic area of biophotonics. I could also look at getting the best students in with a view to PhD places next year – but the less experienced could be just as good as the experienced if given a chance. I am still mulling over how best to approach this task.

[Also, 29% of applicants are female, 71% male, so still a bit of a hill to climb to get to any sense of equality in the physical sciences. In fact this is a decent ratio compared to other application processes for more senior posts that I have seen].

A different way

Like many physicists, I suspect, I grew up gripped by the developments in quantum mechanics that happened at the start of the 20th century. This is often portrayed as the work of lone geniuses: Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and the rest. That this work was carried out in isolation is to some extent true, but there was a surprising amount of collaboration and certainly discussion between the big hitters of the time. This work, and related studies in areas such as radioactivity, ultimately led to one of the biggest scientific collaborations that had ever existed – the Manhattan Project. This was an altogether different beast: one goal, build a bomb. Many of the brightest minds, engineers, physicists and chemists came together to work out how to achieve what they viewed as something that could help to win the war.

In modern times we have our own parallels of such large scale collaborations, CERN being the most obvious example. These mainly occur because of the huge scale and expense of the projects under consideration. I do often wonder though if we wouldn’t be much better placed to carried out nearly all scientific research through such large ‘crowdsourced’ efforts.

I have a small research group, too small to easily carry out the various ideas that I might have, too small to have the resources to fund all the experiments I’d like to try. It may be that I can persuade a funding council to give me money for these ideas, but the odds are against me. I can then wait and see if we can do them on the fly somehow, or find, depressingly, that someone beaten us to it, a few years after my original thought. I suspect nearly every scientist has similar thoughts about work that just never gets done.

But there are lots of groups out there, lots of talented people, lots of equipment going spare – lots of slack at certain times within any research group, big or small – why don’t I just publicly lists all my ideas and hope someone else runs with it and sees if it’ll work or not? It doesn’t work like that of course. We are precious with our ideas as they define our careers, the funding that we do get, which in turn allows us to build our groups and justify the continued need to employ us. Even collaborations, which are a way to help realise ideas that often we can’t do ourselves can be difficult, time consuming and often not quite what you need if you team up with the wrong group.

This does, I suspect, also have the problem of massively slowing down progress. We all want to win the prize, get the plaudits, get the pay rise, and this stems from doing the work and having your name in the right place on the author list. In this day and age of open access publishing, open data and near instantaneous access to all knowledge it does seem that if the end goal, the experiments, the finding things out is what we want to achieve , that our current way of ‘doing’ science seems increasingly outdated.

Could we do things differently? Would it be possible simply to fund research teams that can then respond to new ideas – take the very best ideas and see them through – have secure funding for staffing and equipment at certain Universities and then let academics the world over provide them with the ideas? This would provide much greater focus and possibly much greater efficiency in how we spend research money. An example would be, say, a centre for optical microscopy in the life sciences, based, for arguments sake at Dundee. We fill it with 100 staff and then throw open to the world the idea to present us with the most pressing problems in the area. It may be that these ideas receive some peer review to set priorities and then we task the centre with solving the problems. The originator of the idea gets appropriate credit, and the centre works collaboratively with the research community to help it make progress. We set up these little ‘Manhattan Projects’ with stability for staff, enhanced training for students, and better opportunities to exploit the research through critical mass. In a sense it centralises the experimental skills and distributes the ideas. It is a model that appears to work for very large scale experimental work, but would it be more efficient than our current massive distribution of experimental skills?

As it happens I am reading J. Craig Venter’s most recent book ‘Life at the speed of light‘ which in a way promotes this idea – a highly skilled, well funded lab pushing for a clear and ambitious research goal. Admittedly he was (and is) in competition with other groups, but if that funding was more concentrated and the initial thinking open and free for wider input and discussion to happen, could things have gone even more quickly? Do we want to see the results and the progress and quickly as we can or keep all the glory for ourselves?

The answer is that I am not sure – the model would seem to work in some cases, but clearly has problems, and would more than likely have to be globally accepted to work in the way I think it could. But with new paradigms appearing in the field of ‘open’ academia very rapidly, maybe there is a different way that we could do science, and actually see more of the collective ideas of the research community come to light and bear fruit.

Going on a summer holiday, quantum style

The Academic Summer is an oft discussed thing. There are usually two camps, the outraged non-academic, moaning about taxpayers money going to fund four months of time off for lazy academics to swan about and not teach anybody anything, and the aghast academic bemoaning the fact that they work bloody hard thank you very much during the summer, and barely have time for a real holiday anyway.

I don’t think I fall in the latter camp – I have a 12 month job, some of which involves contact teaching while the undergraduates are about, but which also involves a myriad of other things, like for example, today I was attending graduation and a garden party. It’s a hard life. I also hope to get at least one grant submitted in the next couple of weeks and the list of things to do on my whiteboard seems to grow each day – writing a whole new lecture course for September being very high on the list. So, like most people, I work hard, and this is in large part due to the fact that I enjoy my job. But the reality is that it can be hard to find time to take off on holiday. This is compounded by the odd way in which academics often end up to all intents and purposes as their own boss – so if you are mainly having to justify time off to yourself, it can be hard to tell yourself you really deserve it, or can really afford to take it off.

This is interesting as I have just finished reading “Quantum” by Manjit Kumar (which is well worth reading – it gives an excellent overview of the development of quantum mechanics in that golden area before the second world war, but rather rushes later developments that came later). In the book it tells the story of scientists who once upon a time led very different lives to us – no internet, no email, telephony in its infancy – you could wait years to see papers in print. This meant that scientists worked in greater isolation, but nonetheless the cohort of scientists who worked developing quantum mechanics managed to do something perhaps that has never really been done since. And, what kept cropping up was that they took lots of holidays. Bohr, Heisenberg etc were always popping off on walking trips, skiing outings, sailing and even going on academic ‘tours’ which probably involved a fair bit of travelling. Perhaps if you are a bunch of geniuses you can get away with lots of holiday – but I do think it perhaps suggests that sometimes academia takes its self rather seriously. Breaks are needed by everyone, working all the time is simply not good for the majority of us. Holidays perhaps allow a bit of that much needed thinking time. Me? Well, I had planned to take a week away with the family during the school holidays. After reading ‘Quantum’ I’d really love to take three, but have convinced myself that I definitively have to take two full weeks to recharge. Then I can come back and get stuck into the new challenges that will be coming my way in the next year or so. If you are an overworked academic – just ask yourself, ‘what would Bohr do?’. He’d go walking.

Physics and Life Sciences/Biophotonics Initiative

It seems appropriate that as EPSRC starts up its ‘Understanding the Physics of Life‘ network (also discussed by Athene Donald on Occam’s Razor) that we in Dundee are also starting up a new collaborative project between Life Sciences and Physics. The College of Life Sciences in Dundee is a world leading centre of research in a range of biological topics and in many ways is the dominant research centre in Dundee. Physics plays a rather more modest role in the life of the University, but in recent years we have been gathering significant momentum, and a range of pilot projects between physics and life sciences have now started to deliver results.

We have had some grant success recently as well, playing a part in an MRC Optical Microscopy proposal funded through Life Sciences and we have also just been awarded an Innovative Doctoral Programme ITN based at Dundee to help train a number of early career researchers in fully interdisciplinary projects. This should become active next year and lead to a significant boost in the number of projects we run between our two departments.

To try and cement these relationships further we have also established a trial project to host a space within Life Sciences that can be used by physicists to develop new techniques and tools side by side with the biologists. Our initial goals are to look at the development of new light sheet microscopy devices as well as test out in-house developed lasers for suitability as multiphoton imaging sources. We have a one year postdoctoral position advertised at present to work on these topics and also try and act as an interface point for staff looking to try out new pilot projects – including some of my own on intracellular optical manipulation. So if you are looking for a new interdisciplinary biophotonics role or know someone who is, please apply at the link above (you can contact me for more info).

We are also expanding our staff in biophysics – we have just welcomed Dr Ulrich Zachariae to the Division, who will work on computational biophysics problems, and hopefully will form close ties to the Drug Discovery Unit here, and will be welcoming a further biophotonics staff member next month. We have also been very lucky in our recruitment process for ‘Dundee Fellows’ and we’ll be adding another computational biophysicist later in the year, and hopefully to other biophysics areas depending on if offers are accepted.

Our goal in all this is to try and tackle new and bigger scientific problems by working together and we have exciting plans to try and make this area grow further at Dundee. So I am hopeful that we can make a big mark in the ever expanding research world at the physics and life sciences interface.

Printing the Moon

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to attend a conference (in a loose sense) that was a million miles away from my normal academic meetings – South by Southwest (SxSW). This is a huge multifacted event, with over 100,000 attendees covering interactive. film, music, education and every other form of tech meets new media that you can think of.

I was there because I know a man who knows a woman who happens to work at NASA. My brilliant colleague Jon Rogers, a product designer in our Art School, works on a range of projects exploring how to make data ‘physical’. NASA, who have a desire to make their open data more used by interested parties have been developing a ‘Space Apps‘ challenge to try and focus people, in a crowdsourced manner, around certain topic areas. As one might imagine these challenges and their solutions are fairly software based, but NASA also wanted something a bit more hardware oreintated – hence ‘Making Space Apps Physical’. Jon wanted to try and broaded this idea out and so asked a couple of other designers, Sandra Wilson and Jayne Wallace and myself to get involved, adding to the team that already included Ali Llewellyn from NASA. This led to us submitting a panel proposal for SxSW this year, which was (surprisingly) accepted, based around this idea of making space a bit more immediate, a bit easier to interact with.

And so the “Print the Moon” project was born – my little contribution. The idea arose from an Advanced Higher (final year Scottish high school pupil) who wanted to try and do an experiment on Astronomy. We lent her a telescope and then suggested that she could try and do some measurement on craters on the moon looking at their shadows. Even with a decent telescope like ours this is not so easy, so I thought about how you might be able to do the same thing in the lab. With the ability to 3D print objects it seemed like it should be possible to print out a crater and then just use a torch or other light source to do the experiment, and this was the challenge I sent to a group of our keen undergraduates.

Essentially the problem was to find the right data and then take that and turn it into something readable by the 3D printer (or rapid prototyper). The data was provided by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaisence Orbiter with it’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter instrument providing 3D surface topography. The students then ported this into Matlab to plot the surface, sent it over to Meshlab for cleaning up and then sent it to Solidworks to output it to the printer. As an educational tool this has proved very valuable, as the students had never really used any of these before (expect Matlab). A copy of the Korolev Crater is shown below, from the dark side of the moon. You can then do a bit of trigonometry to try and get the crater dimensions based on shadow data. So all in all it works quite well.

3D version of Korolev on the dark side of the Moon. Spot the deliberate mistake.

And we took this over to South by Southwest and talked about it on the panel, and I even got to meet an astronaut. I’m very proud of my students getting stuck into something like this – a project that has no academic bearing on their courses – done just as it’s a bit of fun and it helps you to learn some new skills. I also think we could maybe push this towards a publication in something like the American Journal of Physics and will hopefully have some Nuffield Bursary students working on this over the summer to try and gather the necessary data.

Our students were also on hand at an event organised by New Media Scotland, the LateLab, as part of the Edinburgh Science Festival to talk about their work. And there is still more to come, with other events still to make use of out little chunk of the moon. Oh, and if you want to get involved, there is a Space Apps Challenge: “Dark Side of the Moon“.

Science Grrl and the Community

Last year I noted that as the new head of physics at Dundee I should do more to promote women in STEM fields. This came after a bit of homework that my daughter received highlighted the stereotypes that schoolkids get all too readily when thinking and discussing scientific issues. As it turns out part of my role is to try and help guide the Physics Division towards accreditation in programmes such as Athena Swan and the Institute of Physics’ Project Juno. These have certainly got me thinking much more about the diversity issues that both Higher Education organisations and the wider community face.

The first thing I am pleased to be able to announce that we are doing is a small bit of community engagement. I am very much of the opinion that Universities have an important role to play in their local communities, and that we can in our own way help to transform the environment around us by opening up new opportunities, introducing new ideas and providing the best education we can to our local young people. I wanted to try and let schools know that there is an issue with the way in which girls at school interact with and perceive science, and that this ultimately impacts on the number of girls who end up on STEM courses and in STEM jobs, and that this, in my opinion is a huge waste of talent. I think this dovetails quite nicely with the goals of the Science Grrl group and the idea that “Science is for everyone”. To try and highlight this idea we have sent out a Science Grrl calendar to all the schools in Dundee. This is just a small action, but I hope, from a personal point of view, that it is just the start of wider engagement that we can make with these issues, and just the start of a processes of making more of an impact in and around Dundee.

The Science Grrl 2013 Calendar

if you happen to be a Dundee based teacher, I’d be interested in hearing your views on these ideas, and if we can help in anyway, just get in touch.

Many thanks also to Heather, Louise and everyone else at Science Grrl for sorting out all the calendars!

The Faculty Search

Currently my department is hiring. We have at least one position for a lecturer (equivalent to a US Assistant Professor) and one for a full Professor. You have to be a big cheese in the UK to get to call yourself “Professor”. This is the first time I have been on a search and selection committee for a faculty member and it’s a interesting and tough process. I thought I’d just share some thoughts on how we have gone about this, for prospective applicants into UK Universities. In our case we spread our net fairly wide. The position is in a generic area called “Physics Aligned to the Life Sciences” which is one of the core themes of the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance or SUPA, which Dundee is part of. Within this theme pretty much anything bio-related to physics is covered. We decided not to hone down on a more specific area and try and recruit the best person we could that aligned with one or more of our research themes. This led to us getting a large number of very high quality applications. It was a tough choice – so how did we decide?

Fit to specification: The first bit of advice I have is to make sure that you write your cover letter, CV and research statement so as to clearly state how you fit the position. While our call wasn’t specific as to topic area it would seem clear that applicants should be able to state how their work aligned itself to the life sciences. Writing that you were really interested in biology wasn’t going to cut it, and for some really strong physical sciences applicants this is where they fell down. We wanted to see at least some evidence of how applicant’s work either had been applied to biophysics research or evidence that they had thought out how their work might be applied in Dundee (and not just generically).

Experience: Clearly what you have done to date matters a lot – it shows the kind of trajectory that you are on, how much of an original thinker you are and what you might be capable of. So the areas you have worked on, your general productivity and the papers you have produced make a big difference, but the reality is that this is only part of the package – you might have been unlucky in where you have worked, or the projects you had been assigned may just not have gone to plan. We recognise this, and so if your papers and background are a little lacking for whatever reason then your research statement becomes really important. We did consider how applicants would look as far as the upcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF) review is concerned. This is perhaps a little unfortunate, but the reality is this is a strong consideration.

Metrics: So does your h-index matter? Does your publication count make a difference? Number of citations? Where you publish? In modern academia these things to have a huge significance attached, and probably much more than they should. I don’t think we compared anybody’s h-index – bearing in mind these are entry positions, and the wide variety of postdoc positions that people have means you can’t compare such things, or even the number of publications in any strong meaningful way. One of my colleagues had a clear idea that as a postdoc you should be producing one decent paper per year, and this was used as a rough kind of bar, but not a digital pass/fail barrier. I think we did consider numbers of citations as part of the indication of the value of the papers published, but this, again, was to help us form a view of how valued work was, and clearly for a paper published the week before application there will be no citation data. Papers that were in peer review or ‘to be submitted’ were of little value in helping any decision to be reached, but those under review gave some small indication of overall productivity, if not quality. Finally I think the panel probably paid more attention to where papers were published over other metrics, but again we did very much try and look at the whole picture – I’m fairly pleased that we put more emphasis on the research ideas and potential to deliver than pure numbers.

Potential: So you want to come and work with us, but what are you going to be doing? Your research statement  needs to outline a coherent program of work, and has to address something interesting in an innovative way. Incremental changes are not so persuasive. Clearly you also have to be realistic, and this is where the challenge lies – outline something of grand enough ambition but in such a way that we can believe you will be able to deliver. For our position we also wanted applicants to try and identify how their proposed work would fit in Dundee – one of the criteria was to bridge gaps between physics and life sciences and medicine – so we wanted them to really think about how they would fit in and who they might work with. We wanted them to show that they really wanted to be at Dundee. In my mind this is almost the most important section – it gives you the opportunity to show your talent regardless of what you have achieved.

Interview: You make a good impression on paper but you have to be to talk the talk as well. We decided on an American style full day visit for each interviewee. So the candidates got to speak to a range of people across the University. Again we asked applicants to think about who they might like to see, with a view to pushing them to think about why they wanted to be here and what they might do when they arrived. They were also asked to give a talk. All this information was fed back to the interview panel to try and give us a rounder picture of each applicant. Our interview panel had physicists, biologists and others on it, and it meant that we could push candidates to really get down to the detail, the potential and the importance of what they were proposing to do. The main thing that came out from this was that candidates who had written strong research statements were able to give much clearer answers as to what they would be doing should they come to work in Dundee.

The bottom line was we want new colleagues with great potential, people who will try and push at big challenges, either by attacking them directly or by developing new and innovative techniques that can be applied in a more general sense. We are looking for people who would be good colleagues, who would ‘fit in’ and who were able to interact with undergraduates and help grow our teaching programmes. After this really interesting process I think that is what we will get.

How do you choose what PhD to do?

Or perhaps my question is, “how the hell do students choose what PhD to do?” I was having a discussion (not the first of it’s kind) with a colleague about a PhD position he had, and the bottom line was that we still really have no idea how students choose which PhDs to do and where they do them. The biggest issue I think is how do students find out about PhDs? Clearly local knowledge will help, so finding stuff in the department you are working in isn’t too hard, but beyond that?

When I was a student the web was still a bit of an infant and most departments had postgraduate research brochures, sort of like undergraduate prospectuses. You could ask for one and it would give an overview of department research and who was doing what. It gave no real indication of current PhD funding in specific projects and you tended then to email someone doing something that looked interesting and seeing where it got you. Of course many of the people listed weren’t terribly research active and even if they were they didn’t necessarily have any PhD funding that year. So it was a bit confusing. My final year project supervisor, Miles Padgett, gave me me sage advice – make sure that you go and visit everywhere and then only come back here (St. Andrews) if you’re convinced it’s the best. He suggested some people I should speak to and I went and visited a bunch of places. Looking back though, it’s clear I had a very poor overview of what was going on in most of the departments in the UK. I was also fairly uneducated in assessing the relative merits of research publications, finding out if PIs had grants, and if ,in genera,l the people I was seeing were really any good. I’m not sure undergraduates these days are any better prepared than I was. The web has a lot more info on it, but still how do you find that perfect PhD…

The nature of PhD funding is complicated in many instances and PhD positions come up at different points of the year, so it may not be possible to have some form of centralised clearing house for projects. Also funding is often nebulous – if there is department funding available and you can find someone good to take it, you may just get an award, even if others have good projects on offer. The Doctoral Training Centres act as sort of clearing houses for some areas, but these are often not the most transparent. Other approaches let students apply to a department and then they can do little rotations and choose a supervisor – like in many American Universities. This idea is more focussed on the place than the project for my liking though, and I find it a bit unsatisfactory.

It’s also not clear to me if things like advertising making any difference, or if it does where is the best place to advertise – is the best thing just to email every Academic Departmental Secretary in the UK and ask them to send an ad to all their final year students, or do any students know of the existence of jobs.ac.uk or findaphd.com? IS the time of year your ad goes out important/critical? Also is location/perceived prestige a big factor? What role do personal recommendations play? How much info on a potential project do you need? Do DTCs have a big influence? How many academic groups are you aware of going into your final year?

I’m not sure I have an ideal solution, but I’d be keen to hear the views of those who have PhDs, are doing PhDs or are thinking of doing them – how did you, or are you, choosing?