Wonder if academia is the right for you? Want to set yourself free from academia and unhealthy practices? Learn from our guest, Dr Ires Ghielen!
Do you ever wonder if academia is the right place for you? Or whether you can ‘hack it’ in your research field? I think every researcher ask themselves such a question at some point…
This is a question that often pops up whenever you feel overwhelmed or stuck in some way. Maybe even trapped into the academic system. You feel like it is never good enough and there is an infinite amount of things to do.
I also experienced this, and it got me into a burn-out. After some rest and a lot of time to reflect, I started to practice science in a completely different way. I could handle negative feedback and took criticism NOT personally anymore, I communicated effectively with my supervisors, I was way more relaxed, and eventually I finished my PhD in 50% of the time by working SMARTER, not harder.
And here, I will share with you the 6 steps as to how I did that.
Table of Contents
Step 1: Get insight into the patterns and interactions
As we all know, the academic environment is extremely challenging. There is a lot of pressure (to publish), a lot of interest in play, and a crazy amount of competition. You only hear all the amazing achievements of everybody, not the struggles. And trust me, those struggles were definitely there, but researchers simply don’t want to ‘lose face’.
Supervisors and professors had to work insanely hard to achieve what they achieved, they encountered a whole lot of bumps along their way. So you can imagine, they want to defend what they’ve got. They have become an expert in their field; they DOMINATE their field. That is also probably what attracted you to him or her in the first place, right?
There are two ways for them to defend their position: strengthen it by achieving more (get more money, be a keynote speaker at conferences, publish high impact papers) and weaken others. The second one is of course the easiest way. Because when the other person is inferior to you, you are automatically in the dominant position. So for example, when you receive negative feedback, they put you in an inferior position because ‘they know better’. Also, micro-managing you and micro-aggressions towards you, are examples of this dynamic. And there are many more examples, it happens very subtle and basically every day.
Step 2: Communicate effectively with your supervisors
Once you have this insight, you can also see that it is almost never personal. They put you down (in more or less subtle ways) to maintain their dominant position, not to attack you as a person per se. And this helps you to see it from their point of view, but also to not take criticism personally.
And if you see this, you can use the dynamics to your advantage. If you have conflicts (b