The Early Career Blog

Jessica Hedge & Natasha Rhys Conferences, meetings, symposia, roundtables, debates... what was once a 'conference season' increasingly seems to run throughout the whole year. Many early career researchers (ECRs) have the opportunity to take part in meetings organised by professional or ‘learned’ societies, and some will be happy recipients of travel grants, discounted registration fees, or prizes for their presentations. But beyond these obvious benefits, what can ECRs gain from society membership? As postdocs who have valued support from learned societies at important junctures in our own careers, we’re keen to highlight some of the best, newest or most surprising opportunities for all ECRs. Professional societies are membership organisations that support, promote and represent a particular discipline, sector, profession or skill. They work to advance education within the field, cultivate public interest, advise the government, and influence policy. Societies also pr...

Dr Emily Troscianko  &  Dr Rachel Bray Occasionally life surprises us with an event so momentous that it seems to change everything – whether as painfully as bereavement or as beautifully as falling in love. But even events at this scale do not, in fact, change everything. Life has a habit of reverting to the easiest equilibrium: negative feedback  kicks in, and old habits creep back in, whether comfortingly or frustratingly. One thing this means is: don’t expect magic bullets. Even winning the lottery will not remove all your life’s problems (though it may remove some, and create others). The other thing it means is: it’s harder than you think to throw your life into disarray. Investigating, trying out, and even committing to a new career path is not all-or-nothing, nor all-at-once. Real change takes energy, and big turning points often come rather late in the process. Our recent post on Plan A and Plan B  suggested that it’s a mistake to imagine a discre...

Dr Emily Troscianko & Dr Rachel Bray ‘No career change materializes out of the blue. […] Since we are many selves, changing is not a process of swapping one identity for another but rather a transition process in which we reconfigure the full set of possibilities.’ (Ibarra, Working Identity, 2004, p. xi)  If you’ve begun to try any of the exercises we suggested in the previous post in this series on resilience, you’ll already understand that exploring your resilience goes right to the heart of who you are. There are several traps lurking in the realm of work and identity. The first is to believe that we should all know who we are (after all, surely we’ve been alive long enough to have found out?), and that doing things like researching new career possibilities means merely finding ways to put that peerless self-knowledge into practice. Another slightly subtler trap is to believe that there is a ‘real you’ submerged somewhere deep inside, to be uncovered through the hard d...