How to become an expert advisor

One of the things that I get asked to talk to PhD students about is how to leverage their PhD beyond the academy on the basis that I have had a career as an expert advisor to European institutions. We all know the academic job market is thin and precarious, and it is necessary to think about where you might want to go beyond your PhD if the academy does not work out (or indeed you have already decided it is not) for you.

I recently had the opportunity to give a short interview on the wonderful podcast The PhD Life Raft to talk about this topic, so I thought an accompanying blog might help PhD students to think through this too. Many of you will disbelieve your own expertise, and many of you might think this cannot possibly be a career option for you, but hear me out! I had no connections. I was first in my family to go to University, I was from a working class background with the wrong accent. I did not in short look like the type of person a European institution might use as an expert advisor, so before you count yourself out, please take a minute to consider this as a possible opportunity for you.

Why become an expert advisor?

In or out of the academy, it is important to move your research into the real world where it can make some sort of difference - to influence how policy makers or industry acts, and if you remain in the academy, this is also good for things like proving the impact of your work or engagement with relevant stakeholders. If you are looking for an academic job, these industry/outside links are becoming prioritised as Universities seek to prove their worth to the ‘real’ world. It is a competitive advantage to have these links. Good old fashioned money is also a good reason - depending who you eventually work with, these companies can provide an excellent income stream for you personally. If for no other reason, cultivating these contacts is a good way to future proof your career - who knows where you will one day end up looking to work and building strong relationships over time with industry partners can only be a good thing.

What does expert consultancy look like?

This obviously depends on your subject area but usually you are holding an expert advisory role in one way or another, for example:

• Advising professional regulatory bodies

• Advising legislators, governments and international organizations

• Advising industry (private companies or individuals)

• TV / Radio – become a ’talking head’ for media

• TV / Radio – make research programs / content

When can / should you do this?

You can do this as soon as you have your PhD, but it is important to start making relationships as early as you can. I made my relationships whilst still doing my PhD because I went to the institutions in question to conduct research and talk to as many people as I could, but not to make connections; simply to gather the information I needed for my PhD. I had no agenda, and that is probably a good thing. It is important to think early and make a conscious decision that this is going to be part of your research career, and that it is an important part. I was only ever interested in getting my research into the institutions to convince them my approach was the right one and influence them to make decisions about policy and legal change. You must, in the early stages of any relationship formation, be generous with your time. It is part and parcel of the give and take.

Be flexible in what you consider your expertise

Sometimes, in our insecurity, we can draw our expertise quite narrowly, and usually, when industry approaches you for advice, that advice is often rather wide-ranging, coalescing around the kernel of your expertise but perhaps not only on that ONE thing you consider yourself to be an expert in. Here is where we need to demonstrate a bit of confidence in our research skills and know we can get to grips with lots of things in a relatively small space of time. You need to be flexible and a little bit brave.

How does it happen?

It happens though two things: establishing your expertise in ways that matter and building relationships with those you want to work with. Traditional academic publications are obviously one way to demonstrate your academic expertise, and they are the baseline, but not the only way. You need to reach the audience you want to work with. If you are working for an institution like I was, they are reading academic publications because they are staffed by researchers. But if you are working with industry, they are more likely to be reading practitioner led / industry led journals, so you need a good publication strategy to reach these audiences. This is a different kind of writing too, so this requires some learning and flexibility on your part. You can also showcase your expertise by building a convincing brand online (where you can also showcase your research) but can demonstrate your expertise in any number of formats.

In terms of building relationships, you can network through professional organisations, conferences and workshops (you can organise a workshop and invite these people to speak!). Make these opportunities happen for yourself - don’t be passive, hoping the right one will come along. Maintaining a public profile (webpage, Twitter, LinkedIn) is pretty important and following the industry people where they interact - on LinkedIn for example. Once you make contact through research activities, maintain these contacts, and be helpful when you can. Sometimes this does mean providing a little free advice now and again, but beware of exploitation and ‘exposure’ payments.

If you want to hear more about this, please check out The PhD Life Raft for this and lots of other PhD related advice!

How to deal with 'gaps' in the dissertation?

This blog is in response to a reader request on PhD writing, and is a summation of a number of requests I have along this theme.

‘Gaps’

Thesis writing is a genre that has many requirements and tropes in order to be recognised as a PhD and pass examination. Regardless of your type of PhD - professional doctorate, creative-led PhD, practice-led PhD, traditional ‘big book’ thesis or PhD by publication - they all have the same benchmark for passing and that is an original contribution to knowledge. That is it.

So when I am asked the question about having ‘gaps’ in a PhD, and how one might go about dealing with those gaps, I find myself pondering what kinds of gaps we are talking about and whether they are significant enough to mean you cannot reach the threshold of an original contribution to knowledge.

First things first: the good news

The best thing about doing a PhD is that for the one and only time in your life you get to set the question and decide what the right answer to that question is. This is marvellous. The question can be reformulated at any point before submission (and in some cases the day before submission) to reflect the actual answer you provided. It is a joyous thing - remember all those times lecturers graded your papers and said hey, this is a great answer to a different question, but this is not the question you were asked? Those days are behind you. Because you choose the question and the answer, and you can swap the question for one that fits the answer you have written. Hooray!

So when I see this query, and armed with the knowledge of retrofitting the question to suit the answer, I am wondering what kinds of gaps can present themselves, that cannot be remedied by a change in question?

There are gaps, and there are gaps

How do you define a ‘gap’? Is it that you just didn’t get as many data points as you might have liked in an ideal world, or is it like an asteroid has hit and all you have left are the edges?

So, you have no data? That is a chasm of a gap, but not if you changed tack and made the PhD theoretical in nature: crisis averted. Some more reading and a different methods chapter, but not the end of the world.

Did your data collection get skewered by a global pandemic (lovely in person things were no longer possible)? Well, either you pivot your method to a method that can be conducted online (surveys, questions, interviews and so on) or pivot to a different type of inquiry that is paper based. Supervisory input here is crucial.

If you are in science, and have less experiments/ samples than planned, your supervisor should have a plan for you - accessing the lab at different times and in different ways might make collection slower, but still doable. What if you can’t get the chemicals you need? You definitely need supervisory input here. Can you redefine your study, and do different kinds of experiments?

Archival trips no longer available? Work closely with the archive and librarians to see what can be achieved remotely. If your archeological dig was cancelled that is quite a big problem, but your supervisor should have a plan, including an interruption as a nuclear option, until things can be started up again.

I certainly foresee a lot of theoretical work coming out in the next couple of years due to Covid and yes, that is marvellous work too.

The PhD students’ gap

There is I think a fundamental misconception that plagues all PhD students - and that is the nature of research as a thing. Research is messy. It is unpredictable. It doesn’t come out like we thought it would. You ask a bunch of questions and expect answer A, B or C, and they all say no, it is X, Y and Z (real example from my own PhD). Arrrrghhhhhhhh, this is not what I had foreseen.

A PhD is an act of creation, and these rarely follow straight lines. You can do all the reading and planning imaginable, and even without a global pandemic, your research will not go as you planned it to. This is the gap in your knowledge about the nature of all research: it goes its own way. It is like riding one of those rodeo horses - you hang on for dear life and hope you can hang on long enough. If your supervisor seems a bit nonplussed by your dilemma, yet you are running around screaming in horror, this is because this is how all their research goes. Every. Single. Time. And they have forgotten it is your first time. So if they are a bit ‘meh - these things happen’, it is not that they don’t care, it is just another day in research paradise for them.

Research doesn’t go wrong - if we knew the answer to the question, why would we bother asking it in a PhD? By definition an original contribution to knowledge is a voyage of discovery, it is not a linear journey from A-Z.

Will the examiners cut you slack because of COVID: bad news AND GOOD NEWS

No. You might be able to get accommodations at the ‘doing’ phase - funding and departmental / University extensions on time have been forthcoming on the whole, but once you submit, you will be held to the very same standard as everyone else. Of course, you will (as you always would have anyway) define in the introduction what the project is and is not. What it does and doesn’t do, and why you chose one method and not another. For the first time, you have the easiest justification of all time: PANDEMIC. A short section, no? And not one the examiner can realistically argue with. Choice of method and its justification is the one place a pandemic helps you if this was the reason you had to go with one method over another.

The question will remain: is it an original contribution to knowledge, or not? This requires you to confront that difficult question - what is my original contribution? If I subtract X or Y from the execution of that contribution, does it still stand up to examination?

Engage with your supervisor about this specific question

Keeping your panic to a minimum is your responsibility, and lecturers are feeling very fried right now. Don’t imagine for a minute you are their top priority and they are holding all your PhD in their mind and can immediately see this might be an issue for you. This is YOUR PhD, so you need to take the initiative in bringing up your worries to their attention so that they can engage with you. However, they can and should help you rationally and without drama reframe your project and help you to understand whether this still hits the threshold of originality (and that the claim of originality is properly substantiated). This might well mean adjusting long held plans, and doing a lot more reading in a new area that you had not foreseen at the beginning.

Keep calm. All is not lost and you can still get your PhD. Remember, redefining your question is the biggest flexibility you have.

How is a PhD structured?

This is another blog in response to reader requests. If you have a request for a blog, please visit the Facebook page and write a request there.

What does a PhD thesis look like?

This is a question I find myself answering a lot. On social media, in direct emails to me, and from clients that I coach. Sometimes this comes in the guise of asking questions about editing, sometimes it is more direct.

As an academic coach, I am involved in coaching students from a wide array of fields: from various fields within social sciences and humanities, to STEM, to the creative arts. Coaching is not of course the same as supervision, although there is a massive overlap between the two when PhD supervision is done properly. Alas, it is sometimes a little lacking in various ways.

I obviously do not have an in-depth subject knowledge of all the students I coach/supervise: this is not what students really require, and once they have surpassed their supervisor’s own knowledge on their particular original contribution to knowledge (usually by the second year), it won’t be what they are getting from their supervisor either. What students do need however is writing advice, and this advice is rarely forthcoming from their own supervisors for a variety of reasons.

In my coaching practice, I ‘supervise’ traditional big book theses, PhD by publication theses, and artefact and exegesis or practice-led theses. Disciplines vary widely; from economics, to anthropology, from geography to digital communication, from politics to dance. Not to mention, of course, law theses (my own field). As such, I am probably one of a few academics that see a wide variety of shapes and sizes that a PhD might take. It is a privileged position to be in and I see such an array of amazingly brilliant work. Because I work across disciplines, I know there is no one-size fits all, that is for sure.

Start with the basics

I always make sure that students read multiple finished and recent PhDs in their department and if possible their sub-field. You can’t bake a cake, if you have never seen a cake, tasted a cake or even have a recipe for a cake. Often, this is what supervisors expect students to do - write a PhD, with no advice as to HOW (not what), never having seen one before. Inexperienced supervisors may have a very narrow view of what a PhD should look like (their own, for example, that was done 20 years ago), and may be nervous when a student strays from the path, or starts to question the advice being given about chapter structure and so on.

So, like most things, my advice is first do your research as to what a successful PhD looks like. Be aware though that the finished PhD that you are looking at doesn’t tell the story. It doesn’t tell you whether the student rescued their PhD through the viva, or whether they had major or minor corrections and so on. It might not be a perfect template. Doing interdisciplinary work is especially challenging as there will not be an exact fit between your project design and someone else’s. A clear introduction justifying structure and methods is key here, as well as smart decisions about the external examiner. But reading an already completed PhD is at least a place to start from.

What is the right size and shape?

There is no one answer here obviously, and much will depend on your discipline, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind. Try not to front load your PhD with too much ‘throat clearing’ material. So here I am talking about the methods and literature review chapters and if you do have a lot of this, make sure it is part of your novelty.

In some disciplines, the structure can be a bit like this. There might be an introduction chapter, a literature review, a contextual and/or background chapter, and then empirical chapters (and if practice led, then an artefact). This has a fairly long lead-in before the ‘meat’ of the PhD is arrived at, but if it is a PhD by publication you might need this long lead-in to tie together the individual publications that make the ‘meat’ of the PhD. In other disciplines (and depending on your puzzle and research design), you might condense your introduction, methods, and literature review all into one chapter, and get straight into the ‘meat’ immediately. Other disciplines prefer a solid introduction, literature review and methods chapters as separate entities. But do you have to do it like this every time? Well, that depends on where your novelty is best expressed, and this comes down to your research design.

how much of this material is novel and how much is derivative?

Badly written literature reviews are entirely derivative and can cost you minor or major corrections. Your literature review needs to do more than be a litany of x said this and y said that. That is a masters level synthesis of material, and is not a review. You have not done anything with it to qualify as a review. If this is where you construct your theoretical lens however, and you are explicit in that construction, then you can claim novelty here. Same with methods - is this a novel method you have invented? Or are you employing a bog standard method to something new or through a new lens? If it is bog standard, don’t spend precious word count on it other than explaining the basics and why you have chosen that method. Don’t bore your examiners with things that might go in the appendices. Tell them what they need to know to understand your original contribution.

The test of a PhD is: have you made an original contribution to knowledge?

This means derivative material should be kept to a minimum to convince the examiner of your originality. Of course, you build on the work of others and reference it accordingly. You have a literature review to map the field and show (a) you have mastery over it and (b) where your scholarship will fit in and fill a gap or move knowledge forward. But you have to do something with it. Not just recite it. Same with the method - do something, or be brief.

You don’t want your examiner to have read 40,000 words and have not encountered anything novel; they start to write notes saying: ‘I can’t see why this is original’ and once that idea is planted, it is hard to shift.

This is how PhDs fail. Original contribution to knowledge is the standard and that is the standard regardless of your discipline. You showcase this at every possible opportunity and in every chapter your write - that is the commonality of all good PhD theses, regardless of shape and size.

If you want to know more about macro (size and shape) editing, and micro (chapter, paragraph, sentence, word level and title) editing, check out these two online webinars in the Academic Coach shop.