Troubleshooting Blog

Hi, and welcome to our new troubleshooting blog! This page will updated regularly with common issues that PhD students have encountered during their studies and advice on how these issues could be resolved.

Currently we are all in our first year of our PhDs so here are some of the problems that we have experienced with the peer advice that was given.

Post #1

Issue: “Supervisors consistently failing to reply to emails. This can include anything from trying to arrange a meeting or asking for feedback on work.

So the question is how to deal with a supervisor not pulling their weight?”

Solutions:

·         “my advice would be to bring it up in your next meeting, and if nothing improves maybe go to your second supervisor and discuss the issue with them or talk to your postgraduate advisor”

·         “I was once recommended to find out when your supervisor is most likely to reply. For example I had a supervisor in the past who only seemed to respond to emails if they were received late evening, so maybe ask them if there is a time in their day where they dedicate to responding to emails and try and contact them then :) Failing that, my supervisor sends me a copy of his weekly schedule so I know when I can find him at his office. Talking to them about it as suggested sounds like a good place to start!”

·         “I've always found that persistence works for me. It seems selfish and you don't want to feel like you're getting on their nerves but the message gets across that you are an important priority as a research student. This is helped if you have an office near to theirs where you can just pop your head in and drop a reminder. “

·         “On many occasions my professor has told me that he found my emails in the junk folder and therefore was not able to respond to my query on time. Maybe using a less formal way of communication (text) could be used to double check if they have received the email or not.”

·         “We have an annual review at MMU so if you have any issues such as that, then these can be addressed with another academic who is not involved at all with your PhD. Someone I know I had the same issue as yourself Joe with their supervisor and this was discussed at their review. The person who did the review then went and spoke to the supervisor and this definitely sharpened up their communication!”

Post #2

Issue:  “Hey guys, I'm having some issues with my literature reviews as I'm not sure how to narrow my searches down.... Any advice?.... Also how do you guys all keep up to date with your literature?”

Solutions:

• “Have you tried to search for your keywords in title only? Try putting your keywords into the search bar with [title] next to them. You could do the same with [abstracts]”
• “Keeping up to date you can set alerts to be sent to you when anything meeting your criteria pops up. For example on science direct you sign up to it personalisation and you can then define the journals, topic alerts and search alerts to be emailed to you when something new is published. Narrowing your searches tends to be more on the wording you use and making sure if you put and/or they are in capitals... That will only do so much though”
• “I use zetoc alert, it's very similar to science direct but I think it's been good for me so far!”
• “If you want to narrow down your searches on Web of Science you could try using 'adj2' to group words closer together. E.g. Instead of searching 'exercise' which is very broad, you could do 'exercise adj2 (training OR supervised OR maintenance)' which would search for them terms within 2 words of exercise. The number can be changed to suit accordingly. Hope this helps if you didn't know this already.”

You can ask for advice from other PhD students by posting on the DTA corner facebook page. All posts will remain in the closed group, and we will ask for your permission to post these on the blog anomalously prior to posting. We are currently working on getting an email address set up and a website forum made so please stay tuned for updates!

We hope that these posts may help both current and new PhD students in their future, remember no question is silly to ask! Chances are other people are going through the same thing!

Tasha

30.06.2016

How to get involved!

As researchers it is easy for us to become content to remain in our own niches, seeking information only relevant to our own projects or subject areas. Scientists from different disciplines do not always make a habit of interacting: attending each other's presentations or reading each other's papers. It’s not necessarily that we are disinterested in all other topics besides our own, our career choice suggests we must have inquisitive minds, however we get busy: lab work to complete; background reading to do; and internal reports or papers to write.

My department, like many others, runs a weekly seminar series during which internal, national and international speakers from all areas of bioscience and at any career stage are invited to present. The same diversity applies to the audience, so over the year provides a fertile platform for inter-discipline exchange and collaboration.

As DTA researchers we are fortunate to be part of another scientific community outside our own departments and covering a wide scope of study areas, allowing us to share ideas, something I believe we should embrace fully during the course of our study. Since one of the main aspects of DTA is science communication and networking, I invite you all to take the opportunity to speak to each other about your work. Discussing your work with a scientist in a different field can highlight aspects of your research you may not have previous considered: prompting new questions to answer; inspiring collaborations; and sharing techniques than can be adapted to fill a different need.

It requires a deep understanding of your work to explain it well and concisely to someone with little background knowledge in that area, and therefore, especially as new postgraduate students, it will be a great way to identify area you have a weaker understanding of or struggle to explain. So take every chance you have to present to others, even if only to your supervisor or small group of your colleagues and friends, it will enable you to increase confidence in presenting prior to attending a conference, and help improve and critic your own presentational skills. Alternatively, as a member of the audience it is possible to follow the example of other more experience presenters. All the more reason to get involved!

Systematic Review Elective

Systematic Review Elective- Lincoln University 2^nd-3^rd June 2016.

This elective appealed to me when I first read about it at the DTA Autumn School. I knew I planned to complete a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis as part of my PhD and had at that point very little experience or training on these methods. By the time the course came around I had actually completed the majority of the systematic review, and was preparing to start the meta-analysis. I did question the usefulness of the course for me personally, as a result of the timings, but as my PhD is not based on lab work, some of the other electives would not be relevant for my study area and so this one was the most relevant one available at the time.

I approached the elective with some scepticism, not sure of how useful it would be and wondering whether my time would be better spent carrying on with my review. Despite the course mainly outlining how to complete a systematic review from the very beginning, things like designing a research question, setting out search terms and similar (things I had already done), I found it a really useful experience in reflecting back on what I had done, and confirming some of the decisions I had made were appropriate ones. It also gave me some really good tips for writing up the review.

The Meta-analysis session was extremely useful for me, as I was preparing to conduct my own at that time. This was something completely new (and somewhat mystifying) to me, so the course made the purpose and process much clearer to me. I came away reassured that I needed to complete a meta-analysis, and much more confident in how I was going to go about it. It also gave me hands on experience in software that I needed to use for some elements of my analysis.

The main thing the course provided me with was some answers to questions that had been troubling me for some time. The course leaders were very patient with my numerous questions, and were able to assist with several queries which were really holding up my progress. This alone was more than worth attending the course for!

I think ideally this course would suit those at the beginning of their systematic review journey, with a research question or topic in mind. It was very interesting and informative, and I think if I had to do another review, I would be in a much more informed position, and much more confident about doing it (I would almost say I would look forward to doing another review, and that is certainly not something I thought I would ever hear myself say!)

Jo Parsons

Coventry University