So much admiration for your persistence, self-awareness, deliberate collabs and massive brain to be able to pull all this together.
Also glad you ended with the sentiment you did. Recently sitting in a 2 hour meeting with 6 academics at the end of a funded research project I butted in and said something along the lines of "From my privileged perspective as a practitioner whose career is not judged on number or profile of papers published, it doesn't matter how many papers you publish or where you publish them. As long as the science hits the emails or ears of the people who will use it and improves practice then its purpose will be served".
There was shocked silence, confused looks and some shuffling of feet, a brief acknowledgement of the need for a 'Practitioners Guide' and, with a relieved sigh, a return to allocating RAs and PhD students to lead the close out of minor papers to acquit the grant. Fair to say I may have misjudged my setting and overplayed the 'KISS principle' approach.
Your article has given me a better understanding of the complexity my academic partners deal with. Thanks!
Thanks Mick, I love hearing dispatches from the scientist-practitioner front line. Truly a brutal place.
It's great that you are engaging with each other but absolutely, there are some pretty big differences in culture, career and reward structure etc. Hopefully you can find people you're able to work with over a longer period, then you get to know each other a bit better, trust each other and get into the good stuff earlier.
Thanks also for your kind words. A better understanding of some of the realities of doing science is exactly what I'm shooting for with this blog-based bolas.
What a great commentary! I love the narrative of the journey, with a small dabbling of technical droplets and an emphasis on internal processing. It totally conveys the experience of conceiving projects, negotiating roles and timelines, doing analysis, finding the space to actually write articles and then revising them endlessly. I especially enjoyed that feeling of diving back in to a complex process, which takes a day to remember what you're doing and then, all too often, not having any more time to take the next step... very cool.
So much admiration for your persistence, self-awareness, deliberate collabs and massive brain to be able to pull all this together.
Also glad you ended with the sentiment you did. Recently sitting in a 2 hour meeting with 6 academics at the end of a funded research project I butted in and said something along the lines of "From my privileged perspective as a practitioner whose career is not judged on number or profile of papers published, it doesn't matter how many papers you publish or where you publish them. As long as the science hits the emails or ears of the people who will use it and improves practice then its purpose will be served".
There was shocked silence, confused looks and some shuffling of feet, a brief acknowledgement of the need for a 'Practitioners Guide' and, with a relieved sigh, a return to allocating RAs and PhD students to lead the close out of minor papers to acquit the grant. Fair to say I may have misjudged my setting and overplayed the 'KISS principle' approach.
Your article has given me a better understanding of the complexity my academic partners deal with. Thanks!
Thanks Mick, I love hearing dispatches from the scientist-practitioner front line. Truly a brutal place.
It's great that you are engaging with each other but absolutely, there are some pretty big differences in culture, career and reward structure etc. Hopefully you can find people you're able to work with over a longer period, then you get to know each other a bit better, trust each other and get into the good stuff earlier.
Thanks also for your kind words. A better understanding of some of the realities of doing science is exactly what I'm shooting for with this blog-based bolas.
What a great commentary! I love the narrative of the journey, with a small dabbling of technical droplets and an emphasis on internal processing. It totally conveys the experience of conceiving projects, negotiating roles and timelines, doing analysis, finding the space to actually write articles and then revising them endlessly. I especially enjoyed that feeling of diving back in to a complex process, which takes a day to remember what you're doing and then, all too often, not having any more time to take the next step... very cool.
Thanks very much Kat. That's exactly what I was shooting for!