So you want to be a research assistant? Advice for psychologists

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The dire state of the academic jobs market was brought home to me recently. I’d advertised for someone to act as a graduate research assistant/co-ordinator. This kind of post is a good choice for a junior person who wants to gain experience before applying for clinical or educational psychology training, or while considering whether to do a doctorate.  Normally I get around 30-40 applicants for this kind of job. This time it was 123.  This, apparently, is nothing. These days, for psychology assistant jobs, which act as a gateway to oversubscribed clinical psychology doctorate programmes,  the number of applicants can run into the hundreds.

One thing that strikes me is how little insight many applicants have into what happens to their job application. I hope that this post, explaining the process from the employer's perspective, might help aspiring job-seekers improve their chances of getting to interview.

With over 120 applications to process, if I allowed only two minutes for each application, it’d take me four hours to shortlist. Of course, that’s not how it works. There has to be an initial triage procedure where the selection panel views the applications looking for reasons not to shortlist. We were able to exclude around ¾ of the applications on the basis of a fairly brief scan. But we then had to select a shortlist of five from the remainder. This is done on the basis of a careful re-reading of those applications that survive triage.

So how do you get past this double hurdle and avoid initial triage, and then make it to the shortlist? Well, here are some tips. They seem very obvious and simple, but worth stating, as many of the applications we received didn’t seem aware of them.

• Follow the instructions for job applicants, and read the further particulars. I gather that there are some careers advisors who recommend candidates should send their application direct to the principal investigator, rather than via administration, because it will get noticed. It will indeed, but it will create the impression that you are incapable of reading instructions.
• Specify how you meet the selection criteria. Our university bends over backwards to operate a fair and transparent recruitment policy. We need to be able to demonstrate that our decisions are based on the selection criteria in the job advert, and not on some idiosyncratic prejudice. The ideal applicant lists the selection criteria in the same order that they appear in the job description and briefly explains how they meet them. It makes the job of the selection panel much, much easier, and they will give you credit for being both intelligent and considerate.
• Don’t apply if you don’t meet the essential selection criteria. So, if the job requires you to drive, then don’t apply if you don’t have a driving licence (or a chauffeur).  When I was young and naïve, I assumed people wouldn’t apply for a job if they didn’t meet the criteria, and ended up appointing a non-driver to a job that involved travelling to remote locations with heavy equipment. It is not a mistake I’ll make again.
• Don’t assume anything is obvious. To continue with the example above, if the job involves driving and you don’t mention that you can drive, the person evaluating your application won’t know whether you’ve forgotten to tell them, or if you are avoiding mentioning this because you can’t drive. Either way, it’s bad news for your application, and in the current market, it’ll go on the ‘no’ pile.
• Don’t send a standard application that is appropriate for any job. It’s key to include a cover letter or personal statement that indicates that you have read the further particulars for this specific post. Use Google to find out more about the post/employer. On the other hand, the employer really doesn’t want or need to be told about the subject matter of the research - once I had the equivalent of a short undergraduate essay, complete with references, included in an application, and though it demonstrated keeness, it was complete overkill.
• Read through your application before you submit it. I’ve had applicants who describe how enthusiastic they are about the prospect of working, not in my institution, but in another university. I’ve had applications where entire paragraphs were duplicated. A melange of fonts changing mid-paragraph, or even mid-sentence, creates a poor impression.
• Run the cover letter/personal statement through a spell checker, and check the English. Anyone working for me will be sending letters and information sheets out to the general public on my behalf. It creates a bad impression if there are errors, and so you’ve a very high chance of getting on the ‘no’ pile if you make mistakes on an important document like a job application.
• Be honest. If there’s something unusual about your application, explain it. I have, for instance, shortlisted a person who’d had a prolonged period of sick leave, but who gave a clear and honest explanation of the situation and was able to offer reassurance about ability to do the job.
• Be concise, but not too concise. The cover letter/personal statement should cover all the selection criteria, but avoid wordiness. One to two single-spaced pages is about right.

And if you get to interview? Well, this blog post has some useful hints:

10 Psychological Techniques to Help You Get a New Job

But what if you follow all my advice and still fail to get to interview? Alas, given the massive mismatch between the number of bright, talented people and the number of jobs on offer, many good candidates are bound to miss out. It certainly doesn’t mean you are unemployable. But try this exercise: look at the selection criteria and your application, and pretend you are the employer, not the candidate: An employer with a huge stack of applications and limited time. What do you think looks good, and what are the weaker points? Can you gain further experience so that the weaker points can be remedied in future job applications? Or maybe the weaknesses include something like a poor degree class, which can’t be fixed. Perhaps your specific set of talents and interests just aren’t a good fit to this kind of job, in which case you need to consider other options.  

If all else fails, you may want to cheer yourself up by reflecting on how people who don’t go along with the system can nevertheless have interesting and influential lives, by reading  Hunter S. Thompson's 1958 job application to the Vancouver Sun  

Advice for early career researchers re job applications: 1. Work 'in preparation'

Image from: https://fdudhwala.wordpress.com/2017/01/05/first-time-publishing-woerries/

I posted a couple of tweets yesterday giving my personal view of things to avoid when writing a job application. These generated a livelier debate than I had anticipated, and made me think further about the issues I'd raised. I've previously blogged about getting a job as a research assistant in psychology; this piece is directed more at early career researchers aiming for a postdoc or first lectureship. I'll do a separate post about issues raised by my second tweet – inclusion of more personal information in your application. Here I'll focus on this one: 

• Protip for job applicants: 3+ 1st author 'in prep' papers suggests you can't finish things AND that you'll be distracted if appointed

I've been shortlisting for years, and there has been a noticeable trend for publication lists to expand to include papers that are 'in preparation' as well as those that are 'submitted' or 'under review'. One obvious problem with these is that it's unclear what they refer to: they could be nearly-completed manuscripts or a set of bullet points. 
  
My tweet was making the further point that you need to think of the impression you create in the reader if you have five or six papers 'in preparation', especially if you are first author. My guess is that most applicants think that this will indicate their activity and productivity, but that isn't so. I'd wonder whether this is someone who starts things and then can't finish them. I'd also worry that if I took the applicant on, the 'in preparation' papers would come with them and distract them from the job I had employed them to do. I've blogged before about the curse of the 'academic backlog': While I am sympathetic about supporting early researchers in getting their previous work written up, I'd be wary of taking on someone who had already accumulated a large backlog right at the start of their career.

Many people who commented on this tweet supported my views:

• @MdStockbridge We've been advised never to list in prep articles unless explicitly asked in the context of post doc applications?. We were told it makes one looks desperate to "fill the space."

•  @hardsci I usually ignore "in prep" sections, but to me more than 1-2 items look like obvious vita-padding

• @larsjuhljensen "In prep" does not count when I read a CV. The slight plus of having done something is offset by inability to prioritize content.

• @Russwarne You can say anything is "in preparation." My Nobel acceptance speech is "in preparation." I ignore it.

• DuncanAstle I regularly see CVs with ~5 in prep papers... to be honest I don't factor them into my appraisal.?

• @UnhealthyEcon I'm wary if i see in-prep papers at all. Under review papers would be different.

• @davidpoeppel Hey peeps in my labs: finish your papers! Run -don't walk -back to your desks! xoxo David. (And imho, never list any in prep stuff on CV...)

• @janhove 'Submitted' is all right, I think, if turn arounds in your field are glacial. But 'in prep' is highly non-committal.

Others, though, felt this was unfair, because it meant that applicants couldn't refer to work that may be held up by forces beyond their control: 

• @david_colquhoun that one seems quite unfair -timing is often beyond ones's control

• @markwarschauer I disagree completely. The more active job applicants are in research & publishing the better.

• @godze786  if it's a junior applicant it may also mean other authors are holding up. Less power when junior

• @tremodian All good except most often fully drafted papers are stuck in senior author hell and repeated prods to release them often do nothing.

 But then, this very useful suggestion came up:  

• @DrBrocktagon But do get it out as preprint and put *that* on CV

• @maxcoltheart Yes. Never include "in prep" papers on cv/jobapp. Or "submitted" papers? Don't count since they may never appear? Maybe OK if ARKIVed

The point here is that if you deposit your manuscript as a preprint, then it is available for people to read. It is not, of course peer-reviewed, but for a postdoc position, I'd be less interested in counting peer-reviewed papers than in having the opportunity to evaluate the written work of the applicant. Preprints allow one to do that. And it can be effective:

• @BoyleLab we just did a search and one of our candidates did this. It helped them get an interview because it was a great paper

But, of course, there's a sting in the tail: once something is a preprint it will be read by others, including your shortlisting committee, so it had better be as good as you can get it. So the question came up, at what point would you deposit something as a preprint? I put out this question, and Twitter came back with lots of advice:

• @michaelhoffman Preprint ≠ "in prep". But a smart applicant should preprint any of their "submitted" manuscripts.?

• @DoctorZen The term "pre-print" itself suggests an answer. Pre-prints started life as accepted manuscripts. They should not be rough drafts.

• @serjepedia these become part of your work record. Shoddiness could be damaging.

• @m_wall I wouldn't put anything up that hadn't been edited/commented by all authors, so basically ready to submit.

• @restokin If people are reading it to decide if they should give you a job, it would have to be pretty solid. 

All in all, I thought this was a productive discussion. It was clear that many senior academics disregard lists of research outputs that are not in the public domain. Attempts to pad out the CV are counterproductive and create a negative impression. But if work is written up to a point where it can be (or has been) submitted, there's a clear advantage to the researcher in posting it as a preprint, which makes it accessible. It doesn't guarantee that a selection committee will look at it, but it at least gives them that opportunity.

How the media spun the Tim Hunt story

 I had vowed not to blog about the Tim Hunt affair. I thought everything that could have been said had been said, and I'd made my own position clear in a comment on Athene Donald's blog, and in a comment in the Independent.

But then I came across Stephen Ballentyne's petition to "Bring Back Tim Hunt", and I was transported back five years to my first ever blog post on "Academic Mobbing in Cyberspace," a strange tale about sex, fruitbats and internet twittermobs. I started blogging in 2010 because I wanted to highlight how the internet encourages people to jump in to support causes without really examining the facts of the matter. The Ballentyne petition points to an uncannily similar conclusion.

Let me start out by saying I am not arguing against people's right to take Tim Hunt's side. As many people have noted, he is a well-liked man who has done amazing science and there are many women as well as men who will speak up for him as a supporter of female scientists. Many of those who support him do so in full knowledge of the facts, out of a sense of fairness and, in the case of those who know him personally, loyalty.

My concern is about the number of signatories of Ballentyne's petition who have got themselves worked up into a state of indignation on the basis of wrong information. There are three themes that run through the comments that many people have posted:

a) They think that Tim Hunt has been sacked from his job

b) They think he is 'lost to science'

c) They think University College London (UCL) fired him in response to a 'Twitter mob'.

None of these things is true. (a) Hunt is a retired scientist who was asked to resign from an honorary position.  That's shaming and unpleasant, but an order of magnitude different from being sacked and losing your source of income. (b) Hunt continues to have an affiliation to the Crick Institute – a flagship research centre that recently opened in Central London. (c) UCL are explicit that their acceptance of his resignation from an honorary position had nothing to do with the reaction on social media.

So why do people think these things? Quite simply, this is the interpretation that has been put about in many of the mainstream media. The BBC has been particularly culpable. The Today programme on Radio 4 ran a piece which started by saying Hunt had 'lost his job'. This was a couple of days after the UCL resignation, when any self-respecting journalist would have known this to be false. Many newspapers fuelled the flames. An interview with Boris Johnson on the BBC website added the fictitious detail that Hunt had been sacked by the Royal Society. He is in fact still a Fellow – he has simply been asked to step down from a Royal Society committee. It is interesting to ask why the media are so keen to promote the notion of Hunt as victim, cruelly dismissed by a politically correct university.

It's fascinating analysing the comments on the petition.  After deleting duplicates, there were 630 comments. Of those commenters where gender could be judged, 71% were male. Rather surprisingly, only 52% of commenters were from the UK, and 12% from the US, with the remainder scattered all over the world.

There were 93 comments that explicitly indicated they thought that Hunt had been sacked from his job, and/or was now 'lost to science' – and many more that called for his 'reinstatement', where it was unclear whether they were aware this was an honorary position.  They seemed to think that Hunt was dependent on UCL for his laboratory work, and that he had a teaching position. For instance, "Don't let the world lose a great scientist and teacher over a stupid joke." I would agree with them that if he had been sacked from a regular job, then UCL's action would have been disproportionate. However, he wasn't.

Various commentators drew comparisons with repressive fascist or Marxist states, e.g. "It is reminiscent of the cultural revolution in China where 'revisionist' professors were driven out of their offices by their prospective students, to do farm labour." And there was an awful lot of blaming of women, Twitter and feminism in general, with comments such as "Too much of this feminist ranting going on. Men need to get their spines back and bat it away" and "A respected and competent scientist has been hounded out of his job because of an ignorant baying twitter mob who don't happen to like his views". And my favourite: "What he said was a joke. If lesbian feminist women can't take a joke, then they are the joke." Hmm.

It's unfortunate that the spread of misinformation about Hunt's circumstances have muddied the waters in this discussion.  A minority of those commenting on Ballentyne's petition are genuine Hunt supporters who are informed of the circumstances; the bulk seem to be people who are concerned because they have believed the misinformation about what happened to Hunt; a further set are opportunistic misogynists who do Hunt no favours by using his story as a vehicle to support their dislike of women. There is a much more informed debate in the comments section on Athene Donald's blog, which I would recommend to anyone who wants to understand both sides of the story.

Should Vice-Chancellors earn more than the Prime Minister?

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In my previous post about the university as big business, I wrote about the dangers that arise when an institution focuses only on its finances, and fails to foster its key resource - the academic staff. An obsession with the bottom line can lead to staff being treated as disposable commodities, to be hired and fired as convenient. But if a university wants to become renowned for its stellar teaching and research record, it needs to attract and retain academics who have a sense of loyalty to the institution, and will be proud to act as ambassadors for it. The ethos of the institution as a community of scholars requires that there is some continuity, and that members have a sense of common purpose. That's not going to happen if jobs are insecure and people are judged according to grant income rather than academic excellence. As senior management at King's College London (KCL) may be starting to realise, reputation is all-important and should never be compromised in seeking financial solutions. If you lose your reputation as a benign institution that cares for its staff and students, you'll make the financial situation worse rather than better, because you will be shunned by the staff and students you wish to attract.

Of course, universities need money to function, and a good university administration will keep a careful eye on finances. But the troubles start when income becomes an end in itself rather than a means to an end. There was a great piece by Richard Horton in the Lancet this week that said it all far better than I could, noting the chilling effect of the current obsession with league tables and amounts of grant income.

My focus here, though, is on an additional trend that is symptomatic of all that is wrong: the tendency for top university executives to be paid enormous salaries. The arguments used to justify these sums are similar to those used by bankers defending their bonuses. First, the job is demanding and involves responsibility for complex budgets and large numbers of people. Second, you won't be able to attract the right people unless you pay them this much. Neither point seems valid to me. The job of a vice-chancellor is complicated, but so is the job of the Prime Minister, whose salary is £142K. Unless you have an expensive drug habit or a penchant for yachts, you can live a very comfortable life on such an income - I speak as one who earns a very good salary well below that level.  The point was made forcibly by a group of four academics who put in a joint job application for the post of vice-chancellor at the University of Alberta, noting that the salary of Can$400K was sufficient to divide up and still give each of them a decent income.

There are various reasons why someone would demand more than £142K. Maybe a few of them do have an expensive drug habit or a penchant for yachts. It's more likely, though, that their sense of self-worth is tied up with how much they are paid, and their competitive nature means they need to demonstrate that they are better than their contemporaries. They'd be quite happy with £142K if everyone else earned £130K, but once they hear of someone else earning £150K, the iron enters into the soul. Or, like Scrooge, they may get satisfaction from seeing the money building up, even though they don't actually need it. The point is that none of these characteristics is an attractive personality trait, and I would question whether we should regard them as essential criteria when selecting a vice chancellor.

The arguments against paying vice-chancellors such huge sums are clear. First, the money could be better spent: why give an inflated salary to a vice-chancellor to squirrel away in the stock market, when you could use it to address the university's core mission: e.g., for student welfare, scholarships, fellowships or academic posts? There are also interesting psychological considerations. As discussed in a recent piece by Anne Manne, being ultra-rich alters how you see your fellow human beings. You no longer need to do any of the ordinary things that other mortals do, such as worrying about whether you can pay the mortgage, traveling on public transport, or saving for a holiday. You start to see yourself as a different kind of person with a sense of entitlement. It's a dangerous mindset for someone who has to make decisions that impact large numbers of employees.

The senior management at KCL have completely lost the confidence of their staff and students by their recent actions. They maintain that the redundancies that they plan are tough but essential: the only solution after considering all other options. Well, here's an idea that I first mooted in the Comments section of the Times Higher opinion piece that I wrote on the Kings College debacle.  They could voluntarily settle for lower salaries themselves. According to figures from the Times Higher, Rick Trainor, the Vice Chancellor earned a package worth £321K in 2013, compared to an average salary of £50K for non-professorial academic staff. Cutting the VC salary to £142K could provide funds that could save the jobs of three more junior academics*. We don't know how much the Vice-Principals and other senior academics earn - by coincidence, it emerged this week that someone had put in a freedom-of-information request, and KCL was very reluctant to reveal the figures. It seems likely, though that if they were willing to take a cut, a few more posts could be rescued. Overall, only a small proportion of the planned redundancies would be saved by such a step, but it would be a gesture that would demonstrate to staff that their senior management were sincere in taking every possible measure to save jobs, and that they placed the good of the institution above their own egos. And it might also set a precedent for other Universities, and reverse the trend for Vice-Chancellors to create a wedge between themselves and their academic staff by behaving like bankers when negotiating salary deals.

*In this case, it would show remarkable generosity of spirit if my advice was followed, since Trainor is leaving in a few weeks, and so it would be his successor - who no doubt has already negotiated a substantial salary deal - who would be affected.

Postgraduate education: time for a rethink

The Master said: "I never refuse to teach anyone, not even those so lowly they come offering nothing more but a few strips of dried meat."   

Confucius, 

The Analects 7.7

It’s that time of year again when hopeful applicants are being interviewed for postgraduate places in the UK. The bar is set ever higher: gone are the days when a good first degree would guarantee you an interview. In my own department, the sad reality is that even for those with stellar CVs, the amount of funding is pitifully small. If you’re really smart and motivated and determined to get a doctorate, the only way forward may be self-funding. But here’s the problem: student loans will cover undergraduate but not postgraduate study. If you’re on a full-time course, it can be hard to find a job that would begin to cover your costs. So the only option may be to find friends or relatives willing to give or loan you the money. For a doctorate in Experimental Psychology at Oxford (UK and EU students), this comes to £6,659 per annum in fees, plus you have to demonstrate you have £12,900 per annum for living costs. And for overseas students, the fees are nearly three times as much.

At undergraduate level, huge efforts have been made to widen access and to ensure that family background is no barrier to studying at Oxford. Indeed, there have even been complaints that there is a bias against public school applicants. But at postgraduate level, everything is different.

This point has been forcefully brought to the attention of academics here in Oxford because of a legal challenge that was issued last month October by a potential graduate student, Damien Shannon. Mr Shannon had been accepted for an MSc in economic and social history. He obtained a bank loan to cover fees, but was not allowed to take up his place because he could not demonstrate that he had £21,082 to cover living costs. Although Mr Shannon is suing St Hugh’s College, the monetary undertaking is part of the University’s requirements and not specific to any one college. He is challenging this requirement, on the grounds that the financial demands are unreasonable and discriminate against poorer students. Shannon argues that it is perfectly possible to live in Oxford on less than £12K per annum; he objects to the fact that the cost of living level has been set on the assumption that students at Oxford will indulge in a lifestyle that involves “socialising and dining in college”.

I disagree with Shannon’s specific argument, but I’m glad he’s forced this issue into the open. He’s creating a diversion from the real issues by implying that Oxford only wants postgraduates who can sustain some kind of Brideshead Revisited lifestyle. This is just plain daft. If you are going to supervise someone, at Oxford or anywhere else, what you are looking for are the qualities specified by Chris Chambers: “Intelligence, discipline, creativity, rationalism, stubbornness – and sheer nerdiness”. Note that poshness, affluence and a taste for claret don’t feature in the list. Most of us prefer students who can stand on their own two feet without depending on donations from rich parents. But what we definitely don’t want are students whose studies are disrupted by malnutrition, financial stress and the tiredness that comes from trying to do postgraduate work while holding down a job. It’s taxing enough doing postgraduate studies without being in penury, and I reckon that the University’s cost-of-living estimate  is both reasonable in scale and motivated by a consideration for student welfare, not by a desire to exclude the poor.

Nevertheless, under the current system, it’s undeniable that the poor are excluded, and, with students now amassing large debts during undergraduate courses this trend is exacerbated. This can only be bad for social mobility. Employers are increasingly demanding qualifications beyond a first degree: you may not even get shortlisted for a job unless you have at least a Master’s level qualification. On the basis of analysis of longitudinal data from the National Child Development Study and the British Cohort Study, Lindley and Machin (2012) concluded: "It is very clear that the individuals who have done better in terms of wages are those who have acquired higher education qualifications. In turn, the acquisition of higher qualifications has become more skewed towards people from wealthier backgrounds."

So what’s the solution? Perhaps we need to rethink how we structure our educational system. The current model imposes a chasm between studying and employment. The University of Oxford does not offer part-time degrees*(see below!), and discourages students from taking on any but minimal paid work. Contrast this with Birkbeck College London, where my mother studied for both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in the 1960s, while working as a secretary. (She was a mature student, and mealtimes in our household were greatly enlivened by regular “Educating Rita” moments, as when she was first introduced to Kafka :“I just don’t get it. There’s this man who’s turned into a cockroach. I mean, it’s just completely stupid!”).

I don’t see Oxford introducing part-time courses or evening study any time soon. Apart from creating administrative complications, especially in the context of the college system, it would go against an ethos that values the idea of intense scholarship, with the student free from worldly distractions. I’ve always thought that here in the UK our postgraduates have a huge advantage because they can immerse themselves entirely in research, allowing them to complete a doctorate some two to three years ahead of their North American contemporaries. I’d be sorry to see the option for full-time scholarship disappear: there is something special that occurs when a person is entirely free to focus just on academic study, to the exclusion of everything else. But I do think we need other options, especially in view of the growing financial pressures on students.

The introduction of more flexible degrees could make a big difference to students like Damien Shannon, because they would make it feasible to fund oneself through a degree. I can see benefits, too, for those who want to combine an academic degree with child-rearing. We have for many years had models in the UK for institutions offering part-time degrees, evening courses, sandwich courses and distance learning, yet these are regarded as outside the mainstream. My suggestion is that our top universities need to think seriously about offering such alternative modes of study alongside traditional degree courses if we really want to make postgraduate education accessible to all of those who are able to benefit from it.

Reference Lindley, J., & Machin, S. (2012). The Quest for More and More Education: Implications for Social Mobility* Fiscal Studies, 33 (2), 265-286 DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5890.2012.00161.x

*This is what I love about blogging - within minutes of posting this blog, I've been corrected by Tristram - see first comment - Oxford DOES offer some part-time postgrad degrees already! 


PS 28/3/2013
The dispute between Damien Shannon and Oxford University has been resolved. Oxford University is to review its procedures regarding financial guarantees. Mr Shannon has been offered a postgraduate place from October 2013. I'll be following the review process with great interest.