Posted on by mamothena

No matter your PhD needs, PhD Twitter has you covered…

In keeping with the spirit of being a millennial…I’m going talk about PhD Twitter and how great it is 🙂 . Before I did my PhD I hated Twitter. I found it too random, for lack of a better word. And not even lists and carefully curated content made a difference. I would login once and forget to come back for another six months. Until I started my PhD…

It started off with following the organizations I like, and then I got into PhD Twitter hashtags. #PhDchat #PhDlife #PhDadvice, #PhD… you name it. The information was still random, but now I felt connected to it. I was entertained, encouraged, and sometimes even enlightened. You cannot go 2 tweets without something that brings an emotional response out of you. And that’s why the platform is so addictive. Follow with care!

PhD Twitter can encourage you just as much as it can freak you out. Often people share horror stories of their experiences, or their disillusion with the PhD and academia…and you will wonder why you logged in. Here are some of my favourite (and not so favourite) things to engage with on PhD Twitter:

  1. Practical advice

This is a checklist on dealing with supervision. The best part for me is the comment from the PhD student, who balances this neat checklist with a little dose of reality. Some advice out there will miss the nuances of your situation, or your motivations at the time. As one of the responses state, sometimes your desperation to get into a program makes it hard to make sure your supervisor and project meet some criteria.

When you feel you can do the research and the supervisor seems nice enough, you do it.  We settle for the acceptance letter, and plan to solve all other issues later.  For better or worse. But it is good to always have this kind of advice around. PhD consultants abound on Twitter. There’s a checklist for everything.  And we don’t mind… we are begging to graduate and we are not choosers.

  1. Solidarity

Sometimes it takes only a few words to express it all, when others have had that same experience. And that is one of the most comforting feelings for any human — more so the PhD student. This person expressed a challenge without getting into detail, and was able to get support and sympathy from other PhD students. With every little word of encouragement, retweet, and heart, she felt a little better.

Even old acquaintances reached out to suggest a little coffee break…

…you can tell our PhD student hasn’t been all that reachable on the phone.

  1. Much. Relate.

Sometimes you stand in solidarity with others because you know you might need it someday, or you know how it feels to need those words of encouragement. But sometimes someone’s challenge seems like an exact replica of yours. And a comic strip captures everything that you go through or feel. When someone out there tweets about something this real, we can’t help but testify.  We say things like “I feel so attacked right now” (this is a good thing), “stop talking about my life”, and like this person, “behold, the gospel”.

  1. The dark side…

Sometimes someone will give you a little dose of reality regarding the PhD journey – the low paying academic jobs awaiting you, the poor job prospects overall, how overqualified you are for most positions, and how unsuitable you are for industry. When this advice comes from a well-rounded source it is palatable – perhaps a current academic trying to find their way in the milieu, someone who quit but found something valuable to do (“industry”, their own passions etc.).  Anybody who is not all doom and gloom.  But then there are pages like this:

Is not having any more PhD students the solution to all of challenges facing academia and society? With pages like these you don’t even do an example tweet. Just do a quick scroll through the timeline and if you are a PhD student, tell me if you aren’t scared. And discouraged. Or at least mildly concerned.

  1. PhD secrets. How many secrets can one field have?

PhD secrets are like PhD advice 2.0. They aren’t regular advice; they are things Big Academia is hiding from you! Sometimes they are educational; sometimes they are to the tune of number 4 above. These secrets are multifaceted. Some hide in plain sight…

Some are really, really magical hacks you would otherwise have not uncovered…

Who knew changing the name of a file you have been working on forever could give you a new lease on life? Changing your perspective on something changes how you deal with it for sure. Sometimes we make things harder for ourselves by thinking they are more complex than they really are. And little mental hacks like these are the little miraculous things that we didn’t even know could unlock our creativity and keep us going.

  1. Big ideas on the PhD in the 21st century…

Through PhD Twitter you get access to all of the latest ideas on how universities can reinvent the program and stay valuable to society.  Through these ideas, we as students can also see where our careers are headed. We know that change is inevitable, and graduate programs will have to continually evolve to fit better into their contexts. This means negotiating our own place in it, thinking about the meaning of what we do, and because we are the custodians of the future PhD …maybe even think ahead on the best way to advance science and the PhD in the future.

These are just six of the multitude of things you encounter during a brief session of PhD Twitter. Sometimes I get tired of the self-obsession of the platform. But sometimes it’s the only thing that can keep me going. A little bit of hope goes a long way. And virtual hugs sometimes work.  PhD twitter is great. Anyone, big or small, can have a say in things. Get advice. Feel connected to a bigger picture. All at the tap of an app…

Posted on by Mbuyi Shadrack

Moving forward as a continent: How do we close the gap in African research?

Doing research is quite an interesting way of spending one’s time. Come to think of it; we wake up every day to identify problems in our respective fields and hope to solve them, partially if not completely. If somebody has already proposed a solution for such a problem, we hope to make it better than they did and often to fit it into our own geographical context. In my opinion, this is also what keeps the world going. I look in my own little world and in Africa and I see my peers who, like me, are very ambitious and are also looking to transform our world. What happens though when such potential and drive becomes restricted by elements that are impossible to change overnight?

The map of Africa as a continent. Between these many countries, there is no reason why lack ofresources should be a limiting factor to our researchIn my previous blog I looked at how Africa is lagging behind in research compared to the rest of the world. It became apparent that, even though I was just looking at ecotoxicology as my field, Africa is still trailing behind in research entirely. Interestingly though, when I looked at what might be the common denominator in all fields of research, there was just one major thing that is keeping Africa from progressing – resources. These resources may be in terms of funding, laboratories or technology. Many of the labs have to depend on outsourcing processes because they cannot afford to just buy what they need and even if they can, space becomes a limiting factor. This is the reality that most researchers have to deal with and quite frankly, it is my reality as an upcoming potential researcher.

At my institution and my department specifically, there is only one ecotoxicology lab which is the size of an average kitchen. This same lab is used by honours students, other master’s students, senior researchers and postdoctoral fellows. There is also only one molecular lab which can accommodate three people at most. The equipment that I need for the simple analysis which is critical for my research is not available at this institution. As such, I have to use the laboratories from other institutions and pay for the analysis – outsourcing processes.

I am positive that by now you are probably thinking, “Why are you still there?”

Well yes, this is the story for most emerging researchers in Africa. However, most of the established researchers have been able to, against all odds, do exceptional research and contribute more transformatively to their respective fields. It’s a no-brainer why this is. As a person facing this reality every day, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the small labs and limited resources actually create better researchers that are critical thinkers. Instead of following a procedure that was developed somewhere in Asia or Europe, you have to read up on tons of literature and figure out a way of delivering the same results utilizing an alternative, affordable method. Rather than focusing on just producing a paper, you get to dive deeper into the processes that you follow to ensure that whatever that you do can be done again. This is how we create credible research with reliable results. This is how we also produce the best researchers that appreciate the value of every piece of information and those that develop with simple, affordable, ecologically-friendly yet reliable research methods that will ensure that Africa gets to live to see the next century.

As I said in my previous communication, we are still very far from where we need to be. I don’t think, however, that lack of resources should be the reason why we don’t better our lives through research. One of the greatest things I have learned in research this year is that collaboration works. Let us go back to the African way of being – Ubuntu; doing everything as part of a collective whole. If one lab has what another researcher needs, there can be no reason why Africa is not moving forward in research.