Tag Archives: academia

Conference season thoughts #3 – Hosting a conference

12 September, 2019 Joe Leave a comment

This is part 3 in a series of posts this summer conference season. It isn’t aimed at one particular LOC – I know how hard they all work – but intended as a general reflection.

I’ve been to god-knows how many academic conferences in the last 15-20 years, but I can only really remember a handful (partly due to the post-conference booze, but…) Some stand out for great reasons, others for terrible ones. So I’ve put together a few thoughts I keep in mind when organising a meeting:

Remember your purpose

Some conferences are run as tightly-knit events, where a small, well integrated field essentially perform business type duties of exchanging information and doing deals on collaborations, etc. Others function more like a massive science-bazaar, with a really wide range of talks. Some are focused on an exciting emerging theme, or raise awareness; others are an opportunity to laud an eminent scientist retiring, or to provide students and early-career researchers with an exciting platform. Whatever your purpose, make sure you’re agreed on it, as a committee. Keep your purpose in mind throughout the planning, delivery, and debrief after the conference to make sure you stay focused. For instance, employing a grad student to live-blog the conference (see below) is fairly pointless if literally every scientist in that field is there in the room…

Take the logistics seriously

Your committee is likely to be based in the city/campus where the conference is to be held. This gives you advantages when it comes to organising the event logistics (travel, accommodation, food) but unfortunately, it also means you’re liable to miss some elements which will be vital for others:

How will people get to the conference? Is there public transport? Bike parking? Are people likely to try and drive there? What about pedestrians? And…
Will any of your attendees have particular physical needs around accessibility (spoiler: almost certainly)?
Will the food be acceptable to diverse cultures and diets? Priced sensibly for grad students, including those from developing nations?
Similarly, the accommodation should cater for a wide range of attendees’ needs and budgets.
Will the conference pricing and customer support work well? Can it cope with loads at registration/payment deadlines? Who will provide ‘customer’ support to colleagues with queries, and how? Are you collating an FAQ as you go?
How will abstracts be collected and published?
What will your social media policy be (see below)?
Finally: brief all your staff and volunteers thoroughly!!! There’s nothing worse than seeing an enthusiastic student put on the spot because (for instance) shirty delegates can’t login to the wifi, or realise that the conference programme has been amended from the printed one.

Local entertainment and culture

Many conferences seek to showcase the local culture and/or nightlife. This can be a fantastic addition to the conference, but make sure you plan it ahead, and be inclusive. If drinking loads of alcohol is a big part of the activities, for instance, make sure teetotal attendees are catered for.

Also, while the temptation is for the prime-movers in the conference committee or society to use the conference as an opportunity to socialise amongst themselves, this can rapidly become cliquey and exclude others. Make sure you circulate and socialise with your delegates (some who may have travelled a long way, perhaps to meet you) and even consider specific icebreaking activities.

Delegate safety

This is key. You do have a duty of care over your attendees. If your conference is in an inner city and there are events planned after dark, maybe don’t get your delegates pissed, give them all bright orange rucksacks labelled ‘mug me’ and send them off into the night…

Social media

Social media and liveblogging are really brilliant additions to the conference experience these days. It gives an opportunity for colleagues to meet like-minded scientists; for the more shy to express their opinions in a safe space online; to catch up on parallel sessions; for those unable to attend to follow along; to advertise your next event; and simply to disseminate information such as programme changes. However you must think about a few things:

Will you aim to keep a record or archive online of the conference? If so are you hoping this will happen naturally? Or can you ask a student or ECR to take responsibility?
Will you have a twitter account and hashtag for the conference? If so, make sure the hashtag isn’t taken(!)
Make sure the conference house rules for social media are understood in advance e.g. can slides, videos etc be shared or not?

Scientific content and chairs

Ultimately the science is why we’re here, right? So make sure you pick willing and competent chairs for your sessions. These should be serious-minded, but sociable people who are going to take their responsibility seriously and make sessions flow as smoothly, interestingly, and inclusive-ly (sorry) as possible. Don’t pick chairs just because you can call them easily, or because they are big wings in the field. Try really, really hard to maximise diversity amongst your chairs (so delegates feel welcome), and don’t forget that even relatively junior early-career researchers might make fantastic chairs, depending on their experience. They’ll appreciate the opportunity far more than some introverted old misanthrope who doesn’t even want the job – and make much more of it.

As well as the chairs, the opening and closing remarks should be an opportunity to set the science and tone for the debate. You’ll wish to talk about scientific issues, of course – but the main point of opening and closing remarks is to kick a conference off in the right spirit and summarise highlights (this extends to individual sessions – and you may want to have opening/closing remarks each day, too, for long programmes).

Above all, make sure your chairs all understand that you are trying to foster a lively, open, an inclusive debate throughout the conference – not a narrow, cliquey experience, or a toxic, personalised, hyper-macho slagging match.

Thank everyone

Above all, thank everyone – from the attendees, students, AV techs and soundmen up to your speakers, chairs, and committee!

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Activism, Blog, Science

Science and (small) business

22 October, 2016 Joe Leave a comment

Over the last 10-20 years there’s been a revolution in academic science (or should that be ‘coup’?) where many aspects of the job have been professionalised and formalised, especially project management but management in general. This generally includes tools like GANTTs, milestones, workload models, targets and many other things previously unmentionable in academia but common in industry, especially large organisations. Lots of academics will tell you they think it’s bureaucratic overkill, intrusive, a waste of time, and worse (to put it mildly) but the awkward truth is that, as lab groups steadily increased in size (as fewer, larger grants went to increasingly senior PIs or consortia) many of the limitations of the collegiate style of the past, centred on a single academic with a tight-knit group, have been exposed.

Frequently the introduction of ‘management practices’, often after hiring expensive consultants, is accompanied by compulsory management training. Sometimes it can be an improvement. More normally (in my experience) whether an improvement in outcomes (as distinct from ‘efficiency’) has been achieved probably depends on whether you cost in staff time (or overtime) and morale. You can make arguments either way.

But I can’t help thinking: why are we attempting to replicate practices from big/massive private sector organisations, anyway? I suspect, the answer in part is because those are the clients management consultants have the most experience working with. More seriously, those organisations differ in fundamental respects from even the largest universities, let alone individual research projects. This is because large companies:

Add value to inputs to create physical goods or services that are easily costed by the market mechanism (this is the big one)
Usually have large cash reserves, or easy access to finance (tellingly when this ends they usually get liquidated)
Keep an eye on longer-term outcomes, but primarily focus on the 5-10 year horizon
Compete directly with others for customers (in some respects an infinite resource)
Are answerable, at least, yearly, to shareholders – with share value and dividends being the primary drivers of shareholder satisfaction.

Meanwhile, universities (and to an even greater extreme, research groups/PIs):

Produce knowledge outputs with zero market value*
Live hand-to-mouth on short grants
Need long-term, strategic thinking to succeed (really, this is why we get paid at all)
Compete indirectly for finite resources grants and publications, based partly on track record and partly on potential.
Answer, ultimately, to posterity, their families, and their Head Of Department

I want to be clear here – I’m not saying, by any means, that previous management techniques (ie, ‘none’) work well in today’s science environment – but I do think we should probably look to other models than, say General Motors, or GlaxoSmithKline. The problem is often compounded because PIs have no business experience (certainly not in startups) while consultants often come from big business – their ability to meet in the middle is limited.

Instead small and medium enterprises (SME)s are a much closer model to how science works. Here good management of resources and people is extremely important, but the scale is much smaller, permitting different management methods, often focussing on flexibility and results, not hierarchies and systems. For instance, project goals are often still designed to be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-scaled) but these will be revisited often and informally, and adjusted whenever necessary. Failure is a recognised part of the ongoing process. This is the exact opposite to how a GANTT, say, is used in academia: often drawn up at the project proposal (design) stage, it is then ignored until the end of the grant, when the PI scrabbles to fudge the outcomes, goals, or both to make the work actually carried out fit, so they don’t get a black mark from the funder/HoD for missing targets.

There are plenty of other models, and they vary not just by organisation size/type (e.g. tech startup, games studio, SkunkWorks, logistics distributor, niche construction subcontractor) but you see what I mean: copying ‘big business’ wholesale without looking at the whole ecosystem of business practices makes little sense…

*Obviously not all, or even most, scientific output will never realise any economic value – but it can be years, or centuries removed from the work to create it. And spin-outs are relevant to a tiny proportion of PI’s work, even in applied fields.

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Science

Cheat on your exams

26 October, 2015 Joe Leave a comment

Had a heated discussion with a friend the other day. I went to a school, where ‘exam techniques’ were part of the standard toolkit given to students to get them the best possible grades at GCSE, A-levels, and beyond. She didn’t, and so hadn’t ever heard of a special ‘technique’ for exams until uni. She felt robbed – why should one group of students get an advantage over the others, because their school taught them how to cheat the system?

Well, it’s a fair point; but my reply was that exam techniques really aren’t that complicated. In fact, you can boil most of them down to three simple rules: Answer the Question, Plan Your Time and Plan Your Answers. Look, I can even explain each one in 100 words or fewer 😉

Answer The Question

Every stack of exam scripts that’s ever been marked from Socrates* onwards contains at least one howling stink-bomb of a perfect answer. The student has a deep and broad understanding of their subject. The answer is comprehensive, incisive, and backed up by copious references. Unfortunately, because they’ve misread the question and gone off on a tangent, you sigh, marvelling at the intelligence that manages to completely grasp a difficult concept like mitochondrial introgression, but utterly failed to comprehend the text of the exam paper. Nil marks. Don’t let it be you: read the question carefully and give the examiner only what they’ve asked for.

*Socrates may not have actually sat a single GCSE, but you get the point.

Plan Your Time

This one is too obvious for words, but you must practice and be self-disciplined in the exam for it to work. Basically, most students subconsciously assume that the relationship between time spent on a question and marks collected is linear, something like this:

(Edit: err, ignore the axes’ values… oops!)

Wrong. It’s minimally true that the longer you spend on a question, the more marks you’ll probably* get. But most exams have more than one question, so you must balance trying to get top marks on, say, Question 1, with getting at least some marks on Questions 2, 3 & 4! This is why it’s important to get a grip on the real relationship between effort and marks. It looks a lot more like this:

Can you see what’s going on here? Most exam questions are deliberately structured so that getting a third-class (‘D’) grade is relatively easy, then marks are awarded more-or-less linearly up to the top of an upper-second (‘B). Finally, first-class (‘A’) grade answers usually require substantially more insight – and deliberately and rightly so, since these grades are supposed to mark out the very best exam scripts, usually around 5-10% of the class at most.

In other words, if you spend half of a 100-minute, four-question exam on Question 1, you might get an A for maybe 25% of the marks… but at the cost of achieving a C, maximum, on the other three questions. You’ll be lucky to average a C. Plan your time.

*’probably’ because after you’ve spent too long on a question there’s a temptation to start chucking in the kitchen sink as well, and after a while you’re at risk of saying something stupid or wrong which might actually cost you marks.

Plan Your Answer

When you turn over the exam paper and pick up your pen, your head is likely buzzing – with caffeine, formulae and references you’ve crammed in at the last minute, and possibly with the dull ache of worry that your Mum will kill you if you don’t pass this exam. You want to calmly and methodically, putting the first two exam techniques to devastating effect and dazzling your examiners. You’ll actually probably grab the first question you like the look of and start writing immediately.

This is almost guaranteed to leave you sweating in a heap of confusion half-way through the exam, when you look up from polishing your first answer, realise time’s running out, and start flailing through the others. Without an answer plan you’ll find it hard to stick to time, and in the case of longer questions you’ll be more likely to stray off-piste as well.

Instead, invest some of the exam time into making a plan – with bullet points – for each answer. I always spend at least 5% of the time for each answer writing a plan. Do this on your answer script too, so that in the nightmare scenario that you run out of time the examiner can at least give you some marks. For instance:

Q2: Explain what is meant by Muller’s Ratchet, in the context of natural selection (30% of marks)

A: Outline answer:

Muller’s Ratchet (Muller, 1964) is accumulation of deleterious mutations in asexual populations

‘Deleterious’ means lowering fitness of an organism

Asexual populations (or chromosomes) do not exchange genetic material in meiosis by recombination, unlike sexually-reproducing populations/chromosomes.

Mutations in genetic material occur over time at random

Most changes have little effect, or slightly deleterious

Some highly deleterious or advantageous

Natural selection filters randomly-occurring mutations. Under ‘neutral’ selection the effect of all mutations is negligible. Under ‘positive selection’ advantageous mutations’ benefit leads to their higher relative occurrence through evolutionary time. Under ‘negative selection’ deleterious mutations penalised highly

Muller’s Ratchet therefore implies that asexually-reproducing populations subject to negative selection will be disadvantaged compared to sexually-reproducing populations, as they cannot filter out deleterious mutations through recombination.

It probably took about 5 minutes to think about and write that plan – but it would likely get at least half-marks, on its own…

In many cases you will be able to get an idea of how many questions, and which topics, the exam will contain (using nefarious tricks like simply asking the course convenor). Armed with this, you can plan your overall exam strategy, with times. Something like this:

Plan for a 2 hour exam with 3 questions (choice of 7) starting at 10:30am:

10:30 start exam.
10:30-10:45 read exam and pick questions
10:45 start first question
11:15 start second question
11:45 start second questions
12:15-12:30 final proofreading

You can take your exam plan in with you (at least in your head) so you don’t waste valuable time trying to work out your timings in the real thing. You’ll also feel more confident and in control of your performance.

Bonus technique: Practice

The above three techniques will help you make the most of your hard-won knowledge (you did revise the content too, right?) but – trust me on this one, cos I’m an exam machine – you’ll be utterly unable to put them to effect without exam practice. This is probably the biggest difference between schools which actually spend precious teaching time on exam practice, and those which simply point students to blogs like this one as part of their revision.

Get a group of mates on the same course together, get a stack of past exam scripts, and practice in exam conditions. Compare, and mark each others’ scripts. Then repeat, again and again.

Last of all, don’t overdo the coffee. Good luck!

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