Print This PostWhen we think about courage a scientist in the stereotypical white lab coat is probably not the first mental image that comes to mind. Yet slithering our way up the greasy pole of academia is built on many small, but crucial, courageous acts.
At AAIC 2 years ago I got chatting to one of my collaborators, who I hadn’t seen for a while. She is a Professor at another university and a rising star in dementia research. During our chat she told me “Lindsey, you have to get yourself out there more”. We continued talking for a while about how just doing good work and publishing it isn’t enough. Visibility is increasingly key in academia, although opinions vary wildly on whether this is a good measure of scientific excellence! Relative anonymity is for many people quite a comfortable place to reside in. For starters you don’t get trolled when you publish papers, but on the flipside neither do you get people complimenting you on your work.
My chat with this Professor, who is a kind and very genuine person, got me thinking about what I needed to change. Did I dare to step outside of my comfort zone? Was I brave enough to try? Could it backfire? Courage is of course very much a relative thing. For some people courage is simply getting out of bed each day, facing devastating diagnoses or sadly coping with living in a war zone. In comparison the courage that we need in academia seems so little, but yet it can be still so very hard to summon up.
So, how does being brave help us in our researcher journeys? In my view it is important in so many different ways and for researchers at all levels. For example, courage can be asking for feedback after a devastating funding rejection when you just dread what the reviewers are going to say about your lovingly crafted application. Likewise courage is even opening the email that arrives from a funder on a Friday afternoon, which could wreck your whole weekend. Courage is asking other scientists to have a look at grants that you are working on and hoping that they will be constructive as well as critical.
Courage is actually networking at conferences, rather than just talking to people that you already know. Who knows what a chat in the lunch queue with the person next to you could lead to? One of my most fruitful collaborations started as a chat about the different cakes on offer at a meeting. Having a network of other researchers that you know and like, at whatever level, is never going to harm your career.
Courage is asking for help when you’re stuck with code/experiments, feeling that there must be something wrong with you because you can’t do it yet and feeling hopeless about ever mastering it.
We all need to learn and I don’t know anyone who did a complex scientific procedure absolutely perfectly the first time that they tried it.
Courage is also putting your name forward for interesting committee positions, applying for the job for which your CV almost, but not quite perfectly, fits the person specification. It is getting involved in public engagement activities, even if you’ve never done it before. Courage is getting up in public, be it at conferences or public events, and talking about your work.
Courage can also be being open about when you can’t cope with your work/studies/something else and need time out. It is asking for the reasonable adjustments at work/university that you need to shine like the star that you really are, although in a better world you wouldn’t even need to ask… On a related note courage is, for some people, finding ways of coping with the sensory and emotional overload that conferences, so key to how science is disseminated, can cause so that they do not feel excluded.
Research isn’t just about results. It’s also about confidence, kindness and courage.
Courageousness is finding a mentoring relationship that gives you what you really need and not being scared to politely end one that isn’t working out. Courage for senior researchers is also being kind to and nurturing the ECRs in your team/department, in the full knowledge that they may eclipse you one day. Senior academics are also sometimes in a position where they can speak out about inequalities, in a way that can feel impossible for junior researchers. The panel discussion on inclusivity and research culture at the 2023 ARUK meeting was an example of how we can start to address this, but there is much to be done to ensure a level playing field for academic career progression.
Very topically for our field, given events of recent years, courage is admitting that your research hypothesis was wrong and following what your data actually showed, rather than torturing it to make it fit your theories. Gaia Brezzo succinctly discussed last year why lacking the courage to do this causes harm. Sadly the last year has also taught us that standing up for academic freedoms, which we once took for granted, has suddenly become an act requiring enormous courage.
These are just a few examples of the many small ways in which courage is important in our daily lives as dementia researchers. As my Scottish father tells me though “many a mickle makes a muckle” (translation: many small things add up to a lot) . So, over the last 2 years what have I done to challenge myself? Have I stayed in my cosy little bubble? Did my fear of failure prevent me from ever trying? That would certainly have been the easy, safe choice, particularly as a working parent with little free headspace.
Instead I have followed the advice of my collaborator and it has (mostly) turned out well. Being on a variety of really interesting committees has given me an insider view of how scientific conferences work, as well as massively improving my own abstract writing. Being on the same committees has also given me an enormously expanded professional network. This has taken away my fear of talking to senior academics. Having previously avoided it like the plague I’ve finally taken my first baby steps into the murky world of social media. I also went literally to the other side of the world for a research visit which was one of the best things that I’ve done in my whole career. I still don’t like flying though and one of my children is now determined to emigrate!
I think that of all the things that I’ve done recently though the one that would previously have frightened me the most was taking part in the final of a UK science communication competition to talk about my work (FameLab | Cheltenham Festivals). In primary school I fell off the stage dressed as a tree during the school pantomime. This was all the more embarrassing given that I was meant to be standing still for the whole time that I was on stage. Understandably this incident rather put me off anything involving stages for many years! For a long time I feared that talking about how dementia has devastated my family would be seen as unprofessional, even though it is absolutely key to my passion for dementia research. In the end I had a wonderful time and I’m so pleased that I was brave enough to take part.
In the interest of balance though, I feel that I should mention that courage is not necessarily always the answer and as a bare minimum an appreciation of the pros and cons of doing something is usually sensible. I broke my coccyx at the end of last year at an ice rink trying to do a spin that I have never done before. I couldn’t bend down to the floor for nearly a month. Today I was trying the same spin again. Was this reckless, stupid, determined, or perhaps brave? I would argue brave and really very fun now that I’ve almost mastered it, although I was wearing a pair of very unflattering padded shorts and I’ve been taught how to do it properly now.
Ultimately you have to be brave enough to try in order to succeed, whilst accepting that you may fail. As I once told a friend, who was struggling to decide whether he dared to try turning a friendship with a mutual friend into a romance: not making a decision is deciding to do nothing. Reader, she married him.
Dr Lindsey Sinclair
Author
Dr Lindsey Sinclair is an Honorary Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the University of Bristol and a Locum Consultant in Old Age Psychiatry. Her research explores the relationship between depression and dementia, combining lab work with epidemiology and genetics. Clinically, she works with older adults experiencing a wide range of mental health problems. Outside of work, she’s a keen baker and runner, and has a particular talent for creating ambitious birthday cakes.
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