Should I do an iternship during my PhD?

Internships are a great way to figure out what you want to do with your life, if like me you have decided that academia might not be your thing. Indeed, even if you are not sure about academia, or have decided that academia is definitely your thing, you might still benefit from some insight into the world outside of the ivory tower.

In this post I'm going to concentrate on internship that a PhD student might look into, rather than an undergraduate student, as I believe that although they overlap there are, surprisingly, a lot of internships out there just for people who have completed or are completing a PhD.

What are Internships?
An internship is a little bit like the work experience you did back when you were in school, except for a longer time period. They can last from anywhere around 1 month to a year and can be fully paid, part paid (normally expenses are covered) or unfortunately unpaid. Unpaid internship have had bad rap recently, quite rightly so, as a lot of companies use them as a free workforce of young, enthusiastic people who are being exploited to do the work a paid employee should really be doing. Luckily, in my experience, this does not often happen in the world of science related internships. Most internships I have looked into are paid, or you are at least given some compensation for your time, like expenses (let me know if you think differently, or have found this not the case).

What type of internships are out there?
There are quite a lot of science related internships out there, from working for the summer in a lab, to working for a company like Rolls Royce or AstraZeneca. However these are often targeted towards undergraduates finishing their first degree. This is not to say that a PhD student couldn't do one of these internships - I have a friend who did an internship over the final summer of her PhD in an actuary firm, however as they are not specifically for PhD students I won't be going into them in detail here. But, let me know if you would like me to do a post on more general internships.

The internships that I am focusing on are quite often sponsored by a research council or scientific organisation, and are specifically tailored towards PhD students. They quite often allow you to pause, or take time out of your PhD in order to complete the internship, and they are marketed as giving you a glimpse into the world of science outside of academia so you can become a better, more informed, researcher.

Where can I find out about these internships?
The main ways I found out about different internships was from internal emails at my university. The University of Bristol is quite good about sending around different job and internship offers that get sent to the departments and doctoral training centres. One of my first pieces of advice would be sign up to your departmental, graduate and PhD mailing lists at your university. Most universities should have a centralised postgraduate training facility, I know that Bristol, Oxford and Imperial do, and all universities should have a career service, sign up to their emails too! However I realise that not all universities are very good at sending around opportunities when they come up. So you have to be proactive.

Here is a list of very useful websites, mailing lists and specific internships that I have put together for someone thinking about doing an internship during their PhD:

PSCI-COM mailing list:
Sign up to the PSCI-COM JISCMail mailing list (choose the digest option unless you want lots of emails in one day). It is the best thing since sliced bread! The mailing list regularly send around emails for job opportunities and internships. They won't necessarily be marketed as such, but this week there was an offer of unpaid medical and science writing experience for a new internship start-up with the potential for full time employment eventually. The mailing list regularly post volunteering opportunities and paid job offers, so check it out.

British Science Association Media Fellowship:
This happens every year, and up to 10 practicing scientists (PhD students do count!) get awarded a place (for 2-6 weeks) to be mentored by professional journalists on how to communicate with the media and engage the public. Now this could sound like it's only for people staying in academia, not true! If you enjoy these weeks it could open up hundreds of potential job and networking opportunities. Remember it's not what you know, but who you know, and on this fellowship you will be able to meet with journalists and science writers who are writing about science all day. Another useful internship in a similar vein is the Science Media Centre internship, where for 4 weeks you will get to do everything "from assistance with press briefings to providing support to the chief executive and helping out at events run by the SMC."

Sense About Science:
Is a charity I spoke about a few months back which aims to put science and evidence in the hands of the public, they run fantastic workshops that encourage young scientists to get their voices heard in the media and public debates about science. However they also have an internship program, unpaid, but they do give you expenses, which has glowing testimonials. The good thing about working for a small company or charity, like Sense about Science, is that you get to experience all parts of a business, from working in an office and doing admin, to meeting stakeholders, to holding events.

Internships at Research councils:
These are generally advertised on the research council's website and take place at their headquarters where you could do anything from public engagement, policy, project management or corporate strategy. Here are a few examples from BBSRC (bioscience), the institute of Physics (IoP), The Welcome Trust and the British Council. But have a look yourself, there are lots out there, just type in the name of the institute that interests you and the word 'internship' and something should come up.

POST fellowship:
This is the internship that I am currently doing, I'll write a POST (get it?) on this soon. POST stands for the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology and their job is to communicate science to MPs. This means it's a mixture of a science communication role and a science policy role, so you get to do a bit of both. It's very well recognised, you get to work in the house of commons and it's paid!

Editorial Internships:
There are a lot of these out there, from big scientific journals to medical writing. This post from Nature's blog summarises them all quite nicely, but I'll include some links as well. The new scientist had an internship role advertised in 2013, although this hasn't come up since (as far as I can tell) it's definitely worth emailing them and asking. The Welcome trust offers a science media studentship (slightly different as it's not an internship, more like a paid for degree). The economist has a yearly Richard Casement internship for a would be science internship in London.

This is not an exhaustive list, there are so many more internships for PhD students out there. However I consider these some of the best internships I looked at, most of them are paid or have expenses paid and they offer something that will look incredible on your CV and hopefully will help you decide what you want to do.

Where are the internships based?
The only thing about most of these internships and fellowships is that they are mostly based in London. This is something that isn't really being addressed right now. The only thing I think you can do if you can't move to London for three months (which I know most people cannot, think of the expense!) is to get in touch with local companies/societies/scientific institutions. For example most cities have a science museum (the one in Bristol is called @Bristol and does take interns occasionally). Ask your universities public engagement team for an internship over the summer, or a local company (again Bristol has the IoP journal based there).

The most important thing to do is research! You must look into all the options, think about what you want to get out of an internship, it's a great way to try out a career for a short period of time, while having the security of continuing your PhD afterwards. But it is a very big disruption for your PhD (as I'm finding out) so make sure that you know what you are letting yourself in for!

Dumb and Dumber

One of the hardest things I’m finding about my PhD is the constant feeling of stupidity overwhelming me at every turn. All the way through school and my undergraduate degree there was a huge importance placed on getting things right; getting the right answer to a question, understanding theory, reciting facts. The set of skills you worked so hard to acquire during school and your undergrad are almost entirely useless when doing a research degree, when something isn’t working you can’t just look the answer up in a text book.

This hit me the hardest recently when I asked the longest serving postdoc in my group, who to me is the fountain of all knowledge, to help me with a problem I was having. Her answer, that she didn’t know how to solve the problem, astounded me. I asked around the group, no one knew the answer. If this group of highly intelligent people, who had worked in this field for many more years than I had, didn’t know the answer what hope did I have at succeeding? I went home feeling really dejected, why the hell was I putting myself through this when someone who was far more experienced than me didn’t have the answer to one of my smaller research problems. Then I realised, that is the point of a research degree. No one knows the answer, it’s uncharted territory. I am working on a completely new research problem; it’s up to me to find the answer to my own question.

 It took me a while, but after I accepted that no one knew the answer it suddenly became a whole lot easier. A couple of days of wading through papers and trying different things yielded a promising result and I realised that I’m not stupid, but that feeling stupid had helped to motivate me to find the answer. Stupidity and ignorance are feelings that most of us will feel throughout our PhDs, initially I thought this was a bad thing, who wants to feel dumb all the time? But is feeling stupid really a bad thing? Maybe it’s the reason we strive harder to reach the next goal. The person that sums this up the best is Martin A. Schwartz who in 2008 wrote an essay in the Journal of Cell Science about “The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research”.

In his closing paragraph he reasons the importance of being productively stupid;

“Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.”

I don't completely agree with this statement. I know some people that bumble along getting it wrong time after time and are fine with that, but these for me tend to be the minority of PhD student. Most of the students I know are working massively hard, but still getting it wrong and feeling absolutely rubbish about it. 

I’m very lucky, having completed an undergraduate degree in engineering I have been schooled in creativity, problem solving and iterative understanding. Engineering takes known and clearly understood facts and applies them to a problem to solve it; this is essentially what we are doing in a scientific research degree. However the sheer amount of things that go wrong in science depresses me. When you have taken clearly understood facts, applied them to the problem in a meticulous and informed way and it has still not worked, that's when the feelings of ignorance and futility overwhelm me.

However I do have one story of where my potential ignorance helped me with a problem. In my final year project we had to design a simple, cheap water filter. I chose to use demin as a filter, simply because I did not know that other professional water filters existed.. In this case my ignorance paid off, I discovered a much cheaper filter material, and my design worked. But more often than not the experiments you design don’t work, and the feeling of ignorance and stupidity persists. But hard as it is, I am trying to embrace that feeling. I don’t know the answers to all my questions, and maybe never will, but I'm trying not to let it get me down. However I don't think I'm ever going to stop feeling the most stupid person in the room.

Making Sense of Science

As a PhD student I'm always worrying. I worry that I'm not doing enough work, that I should be getting in earlier, that I should be working "smarter", that my experiments aren't working, that I must be doing something wrong because they should be working by now..... you get the point.

Some time during my first year I thought to myself 'there must be other researchers out there who are worrying about the same things that I do'. Like all good researchers who don't know the answer to a question I turned to google to see if I was right, if there were other students out there who were worrying as much as I was about everything PhD related. Much to my relief I came across a whole host of blogs dedicated to people that felt exactly the same as I did! PhD students who weren't sure research was for them, students who loved researching but had an unshakeable feeling that they weren't good enough, students who were questioning why they were doing a PhD.

It was an amazing feeling, I wasn't alone. Other people were having the same problems as me, but even better, they had advice for how to deal with these problems. I found one blog dedicated to writing a thesis in three months, I found another on how to deal with a difficult supervisor (not that my supervisor is difficult I would like to point out!) and another on finding jobs outside research after your PhD has ended. I found more blogs then I could mention, written by struggling PhD students on their experiences in research and academia. These blogs all helped me to make more sense of my PhD. I could relate to what other people wrote and look up ways of coping with PhD stress and expectation. I started to realise that sometimes I enjoyed reading these blogs more than I enjoyed my PhD, but still I didn't nothing about these feelings, I just got on with my research while moaning to everyone around me who would listen.

After going through a particularly bad spell of results a few weeks ago and really questioning whether this was what I wanted to do with my life, a friend approached me and told me about a media course run by Sense about Science, a London based charity whose aim is to equip people to make sense of science and evidence. I have been on a few media courses before, one very enjoyable course run by Imperial, but this was different.

We got to quiz a panel made up of both researchers and journalists on their experiences with science and the media, including (to name a few) an assistant news editor at nature, an Infectious Disease Epidemiologist in the World Health Organisation and a freelance journalist who writes about the science behind the beauty industry. We were told not to be afraid of the media when it comes to our research, by doing a PhD we will automatically know more than most people about our fields and we shouldn't be afraid of using the media to promote our research. A valid point. I for one would worry that my opinion was not 'expert' enough. The panel also advised having three points and sticking to them - even if that's not what they have asked you, a good point for any form of communication really, I left wondering if that would work in a viva!

The journalists shared how they put a story together, including what they would need from scientists. For example they need someone who would be readily available to give a quote and that the quote would be easy to understand. Finally the day was rounded off with a Research Media Officer giving us some tips on how to get involved in science communication. One of the common themes of the day was to get involved and make your voice heard. We were told unequivocally to join Twitter and another piece of advice I really took to heart was to start a blog. I had toyed with the idea before but the Voice of Young Science media workshop really gave me the push I needed to get started - and here I am!

I hope to use this blog to explore the problems facing researchers and PhD students in academia. How can you get your voice heard? How can you motivate yourself when you research just isn't working? What if academia just isn't for you? I will attempt to answer one of these questions once a week, interspersed with interesting science and events I see happening around me. I loved the media course and want to use what I learnt to do something else that I love, talking to people about research. Hopefully this blog will start me on the right track.

 (Panelists at the Sense about Science media workshop.)

(Communicating science to a number of other participents and organisers.)