Reflecting on my career to date

My blog has been inactive a really long time, and a lot has happened since my last blog post on 31 December 2019. I had just moved to York to work at the Hull York Medical School. Below will give a fairly big update, but this was actually written as a piece of reflective work for a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice aka PGCAP (an academic qualification that is now effectively required to teach in postgraduate institutions in the UK). It was written back around September/October so might be a little dated, and has undergone minor revision, specifically removing a few sentences about courses I was looking at attending that do not add anything to the story for you as a (hopefully enthused) reader.

Background

I was an associate lecturer working in the Hull York Medical School (HYMS) employed on a two-year full-time teaching and scholarship contract. During this time, I taught on the undergraduate medical programme, as well as the MSc in Human Anatomy and Evolution. At the end of my contract in September 2021, I left the medical school to move to the University of Liverpool on a permanent, full-time, teaching and scholarship contract.

 

Higher education has long been understood to be a continuation of the education process, with increasing knowledge and skill development in specialised subjects. In the UK, it is a continuation of the specialisation that students first undertake in reducing their number of subjects from GCSE to A-levels. Higher education covers the delivery and awarding of a diversity of degree levels from bachelors (Tier 6), masters (Tier 7) or doctorates (Tier 8). For many undergraduates in the medical school this description of higher education is a fair assessment of their views when they start; effectively a means to an end of developing the skills and knowledge to become doctors. In this respect, my contributions to higher education are that of a teacher.

 

I have always enjoyed teaching in previous positions, but teaching experiences are limited for most postgraduate positions in the UK unless the speciality is teaching. For me, the position within HYMS was my first major experience of teaching having completed a series of postdoctoral research roles prior to this post. It has therefore been critical for me to learn how to teach. This extends beyond the delivering of material, and highlights some of the other important aspects of higher education beyond the core curriculum. Increasingly universities are under pressure from the government to not just teach and develop students’ critical thinking, but to ensure students are ready for jobs from the moment they graduate. At the medical school, this ethos already exists, and the medical students are treated as junior doctors from day one. This policy holds the students to a higher level of conduct than most students across the university, fitness to practice panels are convened for violation of rules (instead of fitness to study, which also exist). This professional responsibility is also apparent in the anatomy laboratories where I teach. We have cadaveric material which is regulated under the Human Tissues Act. Behaviour within the labs is strictly monitored, and professional behaviours reinforced in keeping with the medical field.

 

However, higher education is more than just an education for students. Higher education plays an important role in social mobility and the economy as a whole. Up to 80% of the difference in earnings between sons from the same region can be traced to their education (Carniero et al., 2020). The Hull York Medical School was founded on the basis that there was a shortage of general practitioners in the local area. This was likely due, at least in part, to the relatively low income of the region which limits recruitment and retainment of doctors. The hope is that local students would be more likely to come and work in their home region (GMC, 2015), especially those who are first generation students, or those whose grades would normally have excluded them from medical degrees in other universities. This is particularly important as the most advantaged students are still over two times as likely to enter higher education, and almost five times as likely to enter universities with the highest entry tariffs (UCAS, 2020).

 

I am incredibly lucky as I come from a privileged background as a white male who went to a public school. But, at the same time my sister and I were the first in our family to get degrees. We are part of the generation where massification of higher education has become the norm and have benefited from it. With massification, higher education has increasingly become a business where the commercial benefits of a degree may be a bigger influence for attendance than learning for the sake of learning. My parents have been highly successful in their chosen careers, but they would not be qualified for their jobs today as they did not obtain the required degrees or qualifications. Higher education provides the opportunity for many students to obtain qualifications and degrees that allow social mobility, but I am concerned rising fees for attending university, and rising costs for repayment of loans particularly for lower earning individuals (Independent, 2021) are actually running the risk of undoing a lot of the gains made in the last decade.

 

This massification and commercialisation of higher education plays a role in how universities market, and manage, their courses. STEM subjects often take priority as they are often subsidised by the government in alignment with their priorities. As such we have seen closures of not just subjects, but entire departments if they are viewed as underrecruiting or not profitable (e.g. Sheffield Archaeology – BBC, 2021). We also have seen universities relying more on external sources of funding such as research and third stream activities. For the University of York, almost 25% of the university’s income derives from research grants (vs about 50% directly from student teaching – University of York, 2020).

 

With research being such an important component of university income, there is a lot of pressure for staff to produce excellent, innovative, impactful research, driven increasingly by the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The REF ranks university research outputs, and government funding is adjusted in line with rankings. As such there is much “gaming” of the system with universities strategically hiring staff around REF cycles. Additionally, the creation of teaching intensive positions splits academic workloads, so academics who are viewed as producing the best research are freed from large teaching responsibilities. However, the quest for high quality research extends even to those on teaching heavy contracts especially within the Russell Group universities where research-led teaching is the norm. Research was one of my major motivations about academia. I really enjoy finding the solution to complex problems and my previous postdoctoral positions were purely research. However, my own research has been heavily restricted due to being on a teaching and scholarship post, with Covid mitigations further reducing research time. However, I have had to transition my research to student projects and developing their skills. This is particularly true for postgraduate students who have large research projects as part of their programmes and the MSc programme I taught upon prides itself in developing the students into researchers with around half of the students going onto doctoral programmes.

 

The unusual development trajectory of academic staff from undergraduate to lecturer by way of research positions leads to an unusual situation. Many early career researchers, myself included, have spent years honing their research skills. However lecturing posts require teaching experience, as well as additional management and citizenship skills that are not often developed in research posts. York defined academic citizenship as “activities additional to ‘normal’ teaching and research… [and] engagement with those elements of university life that enable the smooth and collegial operation of the institution” (University of York, unknown). For me, this included large numbers of committees, including Board of Studies, Postgraduate Boards, Student Support, Covid planning and mitigation, as well as fitness to study and the HYMS ethics panel. These commitments absorb a huge amount of time, but have been hugely fulfilling particularly with regards to ensuring everything has continued to run smoothly, and students have been fully supported through the incredibly difficult Covid restrictions. Additionally, I was expected to attend open days and be involved in outreach events (for example Festival of Ideas where I hosted a speaker), which continue to be vital for recruitment and the maintenance of the university image. I found these events the most rewarding as they allowed for engagement with a wider audience, including those who may have been uncertain about attending university.

 

Disciplinary identity

My role at the medical school has continued drag into question where I view myself with regards to my discipline. Since my undergraduate days I have always viewed myself as a palaeontologist, someone who studies fossils. However, through my PhD, postdoctoral roles, my associate lectureship and my current lecturer position there are countless other subjects, disciplines or even fields, that I could use to classify myself. Palaeontology on its own is the intersection of biology and geology, with fossils being the remains of life preserved in the rocks. My PhD in Geology was awarded for my thesis on dinosaurs. My thesis involved understanding the anatomy of these species and using biomechanics to study their feeding. Biomechanics itself is the intersection of biology and physics to understand how biological things move, whether this is feeding, locomotion or any of the multitude of other movements. The tools we use to study a lot of the biomechanics derive from engineering. My research since my PhD has and continues to follow this same pattern and has also included worked linked to veterinary medicine. I have also transitioned from focussing on non-human animals, to teaching anatomy at the Hull York Medical School, and now the University of Liverpool. It therefore is incredibly difficult to pin down just where my academic “allegiance” lies.

 

So where do I place myself? My discipline could be natural sciences or even the professions/applied sciences with the engineering and medical backgrounds. I could be a biologist, physicist or an earth scientist. However, I would still align myself most closely to biology. Within biology I fall across anatomy (comparative and human), ecology, evolution (particularly systematics), palaeontology, and zoology. Funnily with such a diversity of ways I could define myself, and having published more on modern species than fossils, I would still be inclined to call myself a palaeontologist first and foremost. Why this would be is likely due to a lifelong dream to be a palaeontologist rather than any pragmatic reason.

 

Palaeontology as a discipline is small and highly specialised, at least relative to either biology or geology. However, defining its boundaries is increasingly complex, and I highlighted some of this complexity within my own background. In the UK, only a handful of universities offer undergraduate degrees and therefore most palaeontologists have undergraduate degrees in one or other of main disciplines (i.e. biology or geology), and only at postgraduate level develop the palaeontology interdisciplinary identity. However, because palaeontology is a niche discipline most researchers remain in either the biology or geology/earth sciences departments at least within UK universities. Historically palaeontologists were linked to anatomy groups, and with funding increasingly difficult to come by, this pattern is re-emerging across both the UK and the USA. Whichever department they end up in, many palaeontologists continue to collaborate interdepartmentally, and this may be further necessitated by the fact that many funding agencies now expect applied outcomes of research to secure funding.

 

I suspect many palaeontologists would also have the same debate as I over their exact identity, and likely also recognise themselves as multidisciplinary. Because of this, many are members of organisations or societies outside of their institutions that align closely with their research interests. For example, vertebrate palaeontologists (including myself) may be members of the Society for Vertebrate Palaeontology or other allied societies. These societies tend to advance the science whilst supporting and fostering education and protection of resources (Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology, 2021), whilst providing a set of regulations to which members must follow that can be more stringent than those of their host institutions. Indeed, these societies can play vital roles in lobbying, for example over national parks in the USA (Underwood, 2017), where institutions may not be able due to restrictions from governments. However, because these societies tend to be research focussed, I find it hard to justify my membership when I am not carrying out research in the field.

 

I have highlighted my internal debate over my identity when I can and do recognise how multidisciplinary my background is. It is further complicated by my current post being a permanent teaching position on human anatomy with limited research time to keep up to date with the palaeontology discipline with which I identify. I am conflicted by my want to do palaeontology research, and the inability to do it without aligning to a department that has different priorities, i.e. teaching anatomy. This tension has led to a lot of debate about my role in academia which I will discuss further below.

 

Professional and academic maturation and development

My motivations have long been driven by a single-minded want to be a palaeontologist; a childhood dream that I’ve been questing to fulfil. This intrinsic motivation drove the selection of undergraduate and PhD positions. In the following years, I worked in 2 postdoctoral roles separated by a short technician role. The choice of jobs that I have applied to was mostly driven by their ability to advance my career and learn new skills. That being said, it would be impossible to say I picked those jobs over any others, rather I had the roles because they were the places that I had applied to that picked me. Indeed, this would be the norm within the UK, with 66.6% of research-focussed staff on temporary contracts (HESA, 2019), and postdoctoral roles probably filling the majority of these roles. Despite a large number of publications, I was struggling to find a permanent lectureship position anywhere due to shortcomings in my CV, particularly a lack of teaching experience and a lack of research funding. As such I applied for the temporary associate lectureship at HYMS which was on a teaching and scholarship pathway.

The associate lectureship was based within the anatomy group, but maintained the palaeontology connection I had wanted through their MSc programme. I have been able to gain an abundance of teaching experience across the two years at both undergraduate and masters level, as well as leading supervision on masters projects, and co-supervising a PhD student. I also took over the management of the MSc programme as acting programme director to cover a maternity leave so gained experience across recruiting.  However, the last two years were not easy. Covid arrived six months into my contract, at the same time I took over programme director roles. This meant that I was actively involved in the management and policy making within the medical school for the postgraduate taught programmes. Whilst my contract was teaching focussed, I should have had time for research, but due to workload changes ended up not doing much research across the last two years except through my PhD student.

 

The lack of research has been hard as it was something I really enjoyed within academia. I have loved teaching, but I feel the loss of my inquisitive side and the single-minded quest for answers to questions that intrigue me. I withdrew from the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology, unable to justify the cost and membership when I was not actively researching. As such I have not attended conferences which allowed dissemination of my work, as well as networking and keeping up with the field as a whole. I’ve also felt increasingly disconnected from the palaeontology discipline with the majority of my work focussing on modern human anatomy.

 

For me the hardest reality was that academia today is an uncaring business. There is no loyalty from the university to its staff. If there is no business case for you to be there, you will not be kept on. Despite doing an enormous workload over the last two years, and my team at HYMS wanting to keep me, the business case could not be made to extend my contract beyond another six months. Academia relies so heavily on its staff being passionate that they will work above and beyond their workloads, aware if they do not academics will not progress or will be readily replaced by the many others looking for jobs. All of this happens whilst academics are paid far less than that of other equivalent non-academic/industry careers (Stevens, 2004). It has almost been eight years since submitting my PhD, and in that time, I have had four short-term contracts. In many other jobs I’d be probably not be considered early career, let alone to have been on a temporary contract. My situation is far from unique in academia, with the majority of short-term contracts going to early career researchers (ECR - a vague term that seems to encompass anything from PhD to lecturers within a few years of starting permanent posts). However, it is the current generation of ECRs in the UK who may have even worse career prospects. The massification of higher education has produced a large number of students completing PhDs, whilst not producing even close to the same number of faculty positions (Ghaffarzadeganet al., 2014). Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic have affected the economy, individual academic’s outputs, and university income. All of these will have negative impacts on university finances with knock on effects for hiring decisions. 

 

I would love to continue to complain vociferously about how crazy academia as a career is, but I am one of the lucky ones; I have now obtained a permanent position. It is far from my dream position as it remains teaching intensive, but it provides security that my other posts did not.

 

Future

I do not know what I want with my future in academia anymore. I have arguably been rewarded for my hard work by obtaining a permanent post, but I am very jaded by the last two years. Covid has restricted my ability to see family who are overseas, and my partner remains in York whilst I have moved again for my career. I have questioned my decision to stay in academia now more than ever before, and am reassessing my priorities in life. There remains the question of what I do instead, and for that I do not have a good answer.

 

In my dream world, I would love to stay in academia. There are moments of pure joy, and I have found it hugely rewarding to celebrate my students’ successes. In previous positions I have also loved doing research, so for now my goal is to develop some research and advance myself to a research position. This is most likely to be done by moving institutions again due to the complexity of transferring to a teaching and research contract from my current teaching one. However, I am not in a rush to move again having just moved for a new permanent position that provides a modicum of stability for the first time in my academic career. I will have to work to secure my current position over the next three years – the duration of my “probation” before confirmation. That will require me to continue developing my teaching, including new PGCert courses, supporting and supervising students and taking on leadership roles as I had done at HYMS.

 

Of particular concern to my current position is the development of my teaching skills. I have been teaching for two years, and in that time Covid has really accelerated changes to how teaching is delivered with increased use of online lecturers, flipped classrooms and blended learning. With more online delivery, I need to work on developing new skills that allow for better delivery of online content. The two new PGCerts that are being planned are hoped to be primarily online, with two residential weeks where students will attend in person. Whilst I have delivered material online through Covid, that was based around emergency changes, and materials developed for online specific programmes will have to be to a much higher standard. Longer term, I suspect I will look towards gaining a senior fellowship in the higher education academy, which increasingly has become used as an indicator for promotion within many universities.

 

The other major career development step will be securing some research funding. To date, my research has been carried out through other people’s grants rather than securing my own. Therefore, my CV is lacking one of the major requirements for most research positions. As such I will have to be clever and try to eek out some time to apply for grants between the teaching workload. I have started writing my first grant as primary investigator and will work with the Research Support Office and attend their courses with the aim of maximising funding success. I will continue to look for opportunities to collaborate with colleagues both within my institution and across the globe, and aim to employ PhD students through various doctoral training programmes (e.g. ACCE).

 

If I fail at finding funding or securing a research position, I cannot say what the next steps would be. I will have to see whether the new job brings satisfaction, and how my other life priorities work together. I have sacrificed a lot for my career over the years in the hopes it would bring my happiness, but I have found more happiness outside of work of late. Balancing my personal and work lives in such a way that brings me joy is my biggest goal.

 

References

BBC, 2021. University of Sheffield confirms archaeology department closure. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-57820390. (accessed 10/09/2021)

Carneiro, P, Cattan, S, Dearden, L, Erve, L, Krutikova, S & Macmillan, L (2020). The long shadow of deprivation: differences in opportunities across England, Social Mobility Commission, [London].

Ghaffarzadegan, N, Hawley, J, Larson, R, & Xue, Y (2015). A Note on PhD Population Growth in Biomedical Sciences. Syst. Res, 32, 402– 405

GMC (2015). Review of Hull York Medical School. Available at: https://www.gmc-uk.org/-/media/documents/Hull_York_Medical_School_FINAL.pdf_60203362.pdf (accessed 08/09/2021)#

HESA, 2019. Higher Education Student Statistics: UK 2017-2018.

Independent (2021). Government to cut threshold for graduate repayment of student loans, report says. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/student-loan-repayment-graduate-earnings-b1927413.html (accessed 01/10/2021)

Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology, 2021. About the society. Available at: https://vertpaleo.org/about-the-society/ (accessed 10/09/2021).

Stevens PA (2004). Academic salaries in the UK and US. National Institute Economic Review 190, 104-113.

UCAS (2020). End of Cycle Report 2020. Available at: https://www.ucas.com/file/396231/download?token=qcQl7Fyy (accessed 08/09/2021)

Underwood, E (2017). Q&A: Why fossil scientists are suing Trump over monuments downsizing. Scienceinsider. doi: 10.1126/science.aar6856

University of York (2020). Summary of funding and expenditure. Available at https://www.york.ac.uk/about/funding-and-expenditure/ (accessed 10/09/2021).

University of York (unknown). Academic promotion criteria – academic citizenship. Available at: https://www.york.ac.uk/admin/hr/pay-and-grading/promotion/citizenship/#intro (accessed 11/09/2021)