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Having a plan for your future

29 December 2023

 Make sure you have a plan

“The Cylons were created by man. They rebelled. They evolved. There are many copies. And they have a plan.”

Battlestar Galactica

Having a plan is an essential part of your PhD strategy. You might think of it as a shining star guiding your way through the dark times. Or, perhaps like me, you are prompted to remember the Cylons in the sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica. However it takes you, having a plan will hold you in good stead throughout your PhD as it will ensure that you have something beyond your PhD to focus on.

There is a temptation, once you have started and invested many years in academia, to simply fall into step and see where it leads you. This lack of a plan will see your life collapse around you once you finish your PhD and wonder what it was all for. Or, more likely, you will get part way through your PhD and start questioning exactly why it is taking up so much of your life.

This chapter aims to help you build a plan for your future career and aid you to see how you can improve your chances on reaching your goal.

What is a long-term plan?

A long-term plan sets a goal for you in 10-15 years from now. This is likely to be a career choice, like joining a particular business or having a position in a certain company. Beware of having a long-term plan to become an academic, as there may not be opportunities (see Part I). Equally, your long-term plan could be about the lifestyle you want to achieve in the long-term, or about where you want to be in the world. All of these are valid plans and they are totally up to you to envisage.

This may be the first time you are thinking about it, or you may have always known what your long-term plan was. In either case, once you have decided on your plan you next need to decide on medium- and short-term goals that will guide your decisions during your PhD years, and the moves that follow.

Long-term plans need medium- and short-term goals

You need to consider your three time periods:

  • Long-term (10 - 15 years)
  • Medium-term (5 years)
  • Short-term (2 years)

The first thing to realise when you are planning for your future is that long-term plans need action in the short- and medium-term. It is only by achieving these actions that will help you reach your long-term goal. Personally, I like the three time period idea as short-term plans might only include getting something ready for the medium-term, and not necessarily doing that action.

If you don’t like to think of specific time periods, you can think of the short-term as the time during your PhD. Medium-term is the years after your PhD and long-term is your career path. Short-term planning will consist not of having to find your primary occupation, but adding tools to your tool-box in order that you have a complete tool box for the long-term. Similarly, you can think of medium-term not as being employed in the actual job you want to do, but in a step along that particular career path.

Having a plan during your PhD is invaluable This diagram shows how your short-term plan is related to your medium-term planning, and how that will influence your long-term goals. In turn, your long-term plans will impact on what you do in the medium- and short-term.

This diagram shows how your short-term plan is related to your medium-term planning, and how that will influence your long-term goals. In turn, your long-term plans will impact on what you do in the medium- and short-term.


Teaching example

If your goal after completing your PhD includes teaching in secondary or tertiary education, you are going to want to make sure that you have teaching experience. Planning to have a teaching experience sufficient to put on your Curriculum Vitae (CV) in the next 2 years is probably unrealistic as you may well be in the midst of your PhD studies (obviously, in some institutions you may get immediate opportunities). But you can plan that within the coming two years you will know exactly when in the medium-term your teaching experience will happen. In turn, this will require that in the short-term you need to actively look for those opportunities.

Research example

If your goal after completing your PhD is for a career in research, then there are definitely steps that you can take in the short- and medium-term that will increase your chances of success. Most research positions require fundraising as a central component of, what is essentially, project work. This means that you will want to have experience of fund raising, probably through grant writing. You might not need to write a grant in the short-term, but you should be looking for opportunities of granting bodies to apply to, and projects that you have the capacity to undertake in the medium-term. Such projects might not be you on your own, but with other people in your group or institution, or connections in your network from another institution.

You will also want to look for opportunities to publish. Publishing your thesis chapters is likely to follow in the medium-term (i.e. once you’ve finished your thesis), but there are likely to be opportunities before this to start getting publications on your CV. Remember that these might not be research papers, but could be publishing a literature review or another type of paper (Measey, 2022).

Other additions to your CV

Teaching, grant writing and research papers are all solid items to add to your CV during your PhD studies, but you may want to consider having some additional items if these will be skills required in your long-term plans. For example, you may be interested in having experience in administration and management. It may well be that you can volunteer to fulfil these roles in your research group or department. For example, you may want to get elected into a student representative role and sit on the department’s management committee. Or it may be that someone has some administration exercise that you can help them with. You won’t know unless you ask.


Consider the letter of reference that your advisor will write

An important consideration for your medium-term plan is that you will likely be asking your advisor to write a letter of reference for you. In the short-term you can find out from people who already work in your long-term career choice what the ideal reference letter consists of. Once you know what is needed, you can in the short-term begin to make sure that you have all of these elements in place. For example, your advisor can’t write a letter of reference that says you have great organisational skills unless you have helped them with organising something. If, like me, you have a bad memory for things that you have done, you will also need to write down these activities and examples of when you did them so that you can remind your advisor when the time comes for them to write a letter of reference.

Advisors are busy people, and they don’t always notice all of the different things that you are doing. So make sure that you remind them what you have achieved during your time with them, especially when it comes to writing that letter of reference. Don’t rely on them to remember!

Changing your long-term plans

Don’t worry about changing your long-term plans. Life often happens, and you may want or have to change your plans. In the short-term, changing long-term plans is easy. You should realise that the further you go down a particular career path, the more difficult it becomes to make long-term changes. However, if you do, then it is not impossible, and will need you to make some short-term plans in order to make those changes.

The other book has advice for getting a job inside academia, as it also does for leaving academia for a job outside (Measey, 2022).

Share your plans

Don’t forget to tell the people around you of your plans for the future. Remember that they may know about opportunities that they can only pass onto you if they know what your plans are. They may also be able to provide you with specific advice about exactly what experience you need.

Having a plan is probably one of the most valuable assets that you can hold throughout your PhD days. If you have read all of this and still don’t know what yours is, then I’d suggest that you start to think about this now, and don’t push it into the future when not having a plan is going to be increasingly problematic.

Further Reading:

This blog post is a new chapter is the book:

Measey J (2021) How to write a PhD in Biological Sciences: a guide for the uninitiated. CRC Press, Boca Raton.  ISBN: 9781032080208  https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003212560   www.howtowriteaphd.org     

If you want more chapters like this one, get in touch and let me know what it is that you are thinking of.

  Lab

Does aquatic performance = terrestrial performance?

15 December 2023

Laurie's work comes to fruition... again

It only seems a few weeks ago that Laurie was defending her thesis in Paris (see here), yet here comes a product of that exceptional work. By now we are all familiar with the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, and we know that it has to move overland between ponds in order to disperse (see Measey 2016). Otherwise, these frogs spend most of their time in water swimming around, finding food, mating and otherwise going about their lives. So when it comes to performance, we might expect that as they spend such a large portion of their time in water, they perform better there. In addition, their morphology suggests that these animals should be much better at performing in water.

Laurie measured the performance traits of African clawed frogs, using animals collected from the invasive population in France and those from iSimangaliso National Park in KZN. The results, shown in the figure below, are really clear. The frogs were found to perform equally well on land and in water. In fact, individuals that performed better on land also performed better in water. This suggests that there is no trade-off between some animals who do better in water, but worse on land.

Our findings did not meet our expectations, but what this shows us is that these animals do not have morphological specialisations that are exclusively for aquatic environments. Again this finding goes against the commonly held view that these are purely aquatic frogs, and instead shows that they are adapted well for moving on land.

This will not be the last we hear from Laurie or the products of her thesis.

Read more:

Araspin, L., J. Measey and A. Herrel (in press) Does aquatic performance predict terrestrial performance: a case study with an aquatic frog, Xenopus laevisJournal of Experimental Biology   jeb.246545. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.246545 pdf

Measey, J. (2016) Overland movement in African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis): a systematic systematic review. PeerJ   4:e2474  https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.2474

  Frogs  Lab  Xenopus

XTBG talk on rapid evolutionary change

28 November 2023

A talk at the amazing Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Few venues to give a talk rival visiting the spectacular Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (more commonly referred to as XTBG) research centre run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The location is within the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture in southern Yunnan Province near the border with Laos. The gardens are set on an island in a meandering river, and are host to more than 4000 species of plants, including tropical forest native to the area.

I provided a summary of the MeaseyLab work on rapid adaptation in Guttural Toads and African Clawed Frogs, which went down very well with many rapid-fire questions. Afterwards, we had an amazing meal and discussion with many researchers also working on complementary themes around rapid evolution. Thanks to my hosts Kyle Tomlinson and Ahimsa Special thanks to Yiran, Niña, Thilina and Ade for all their kindness.

It is always a pleasure to visit and meet all of the enthusiastic researchers from all over south-east Asia. There is an amazing mixture of research projects including invasive plants and animals. I’m really looking forward to my next visit.

   

Measey, J. (2023) What can biological invasions teach us about rapid evolutionary change? 28 November 2023. Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences


Laurie's PhD examination

16 November 2023

Laurie becomes Dr. Araspin

Those of you who follow this blog will be very familiar with Laurie Araspin as she has been the subject of lots of posts over the years (for example, see here, here and here). 

It was a rainy day in Paris and the gig didn't start well with all the normal IT problems associated with trying to marry a live event with an online audience, but Laurie braved it out and presented her thesis work to a packed auditorium. 

Finally, after the presentation was done, the jury deliberated and pronounced Laurie to be Dr. Araspin. And then the party began. 

The jury consisted of some familiar faces to MeaseyLab members past and present.

Bottom right, Carlos Navas (on screen from Sao Paulo or perhaps on sabbatical in the USA) is having his audio checked by Anthony Herrel and Laurie. Bottom left, Raoul Van Damme admires Laurie's Kamasutra des grenouilles. Top right, Jean Secondi poses with a friend he found at the party. Top left, all jury members have lunch before the presentation (Sandrine Meylan, Laurent Coen) and online joined by Hannes van Wyk from South Africa. 

It was also fabulous to meet Lauries family and friends who supported her throughout her academic journey. 

The examination of a PhD is the end of a long journey and also a time to reflect on a set of great work accomplished by an individual working within a team. Laurie well deserves her new title, and we look forward to seeing what she will do with it.

Read the thesis:

Araspin, L. (2023) Thermal adaptation in an invasive frog (Xenopus laevis): impact of temperature on locomotion and physiology. PhD thesis. MNHN and Stellenbosch University

  Frogs  Lab  Xenopus

A dearth of African amphibian experts

15 November 2023

Great coverage for MeaseyLab amphibian conservation work

In a great article on African conservation research, Engla Duvenage laments on the paucity of African amphibian workers, together with some highlights of real conservation research that is being conducted on the continent. 

Read the article here: 

Duvenage, E. (2023) Measuring threats to Africa’s amphibians. Nature Africa doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d44148-023-00316-8

  Frogs  Lab
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