Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Navigating the world of academia after your PhD can feel overwhelming, exciting, and a little bit secretive. Confessions of an Early Career Researcher is a candid, honest, and inspiring podcast for Early Career Researchers (ECRs) at every stage of their journey.
In each episode, host Dr Leonie Smith sits down with scholars at varying stages of their careers to share personal stories, practical insights, and the realities of building a life in (and sometimes beyond) academia.
From funding applications and precarious contracts, to imposter syndrome and mentorship, no topic is off limits. Tune in as we unpack your new academia survival guide – Confessions of an ECR is now available on all podcasting platforms.
Head to our podcast hub for more: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/audio-video/confessions-of-an-early-career-researcher
Find out more about the British Academy: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/
Join our Early Career Researcher Network: https://thebritishacademyecrn.com/
Subscribe to our email newsletter: https://email.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/p/6P7Q-5PO/newsletter
Welcome to Confessions of an early career researcher, the show where we deep dive into the journeys, challenges and successes of ECRs, whether you've just begun navigating the early stages of your research career or you're a seasoned ECR looking to upskill. This is the podcast for you. Join us as we speak with ECRs at varying stages of their careers to discuss their experiences and unpack their academia survival tips. I'm your host. Leonie Smith, a philosopher and lecturer at Lancaster University. In this episode, we're talking about academic grants.
So welcome to the podcast. Anna and Pavan. I thought it would be great to just start by asking you to introduce yourselves and your interest in the grants process and potentially about your experience. Pavan first maybe,
I'm Dr Pavan mano, I'm lecturing global cultures King's College London. I'm a cultural theorist. I work mainly in the humanities. I'm interested in nationalism and all of its sort of exclusions. My first book has just been published with Manchester union press. With grants and funding, I think I'm interested in how it can support the work that I do. You know, first and foremost, really, both in terms of the resources by way of money, but also in terms of time, protecting time to dedicate to research, absolutely.
A very common concern. I think that will be for many people listening. Anna, yes,
I'm Anna Vignoles. I'm actually an economist by background, but most of my career was spent working on the economics of education, looking at particularly inequalities in education outcomes. I've worked at the London School of Economics, UCL and Cambridge, but in 2021 I took up the directorship of the Leverhulme Trust, and the Leverhulme Trust, as many of you will know, tries to make your time available by giving you research grants. That's the aim, anyway, and my interest is, obviously, to make sure that we fund exciting people to do exciting things in as equitable way as possible.
Thank you both for that quick intro and Anna, did you say as well when we spoke before that you were mature student when you came back to research.
That's right. So yeah, so I did an undergraduate degree in economics and then went to work. I won't call it the outside world, but you know, you know what I mean, outside academia. So I worked in HR, actually, which was very interesting. It illuminated a lot for me, and particularly, I worked in a factory in South Shields, recruiting people, and realised very quickly that there was a massive problem with skills. And actually it was that that led me to want to study it more. And I went back and did a PhD, essentially in labour markets, but then specialised in education through my life. And yes, and I think there are many advantages for being a mature student, some disadvantages, you're living on a PhD stipend when you're older. But yeah, it was a good experience.
Yeah, I can empathise. I was also a mature student. It's great to hear the kind of variety already of different people's experiences. So thinking about academic grants, it's something that a lot of people who are listening will be very, sort of aware of, the need to get grants and so on. What has been your experience so far of applying for any kinds of grants? Pavan, have you applied for grants? Have you been successful? Have you had feedback?
Yeah. So I think it's been a mix of internal grants, so internal to institution that I'm working in, and then external grants, so places like the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust. I think there is a question of scale when it comes to what kind of grant you're applying for. And at this stage of my career, and the sort of projects I'm working on, it's mainly been small and medium grants. So from £1000 to £10-15,000, there are much bigger grants that I know colleagues work on. We're talking sort of £100,000 and above, £400,000 above. So I think one of the things I've been grappling with is getting to grips with what is appropriate to the project I'm working on, who I'm working with, who I want to potentially rope in and work with, and then the sort of resources that I need to be able to do that. I think up till now, the big project that I've had to resource has been my book project, and that's in the humanities. I think it tends to be single authored project. So I've been looking for grants. I spent a lot of time looking for funding pathways that free up my time. So before I got my job at King's, I was really competing for postdoctoral fellowships, and I managed to get a fellowship at UCL, the Sarah Parker Remond Centre, which gave me a year of protected time to work on my book, which is gold dust, I think, in this current climate, to be able to just work on your book. And that was really, really useful in being able to put together a proposal, a completed manuscript, and then subsequently with things like publication subventions and stuff, proofreading, that kind of stuff, I needed small pots of funding to get that over the line. Now, once that was out of the way at King's, I started to think a little bit about teaching and pedagogy, and for that, I worked with a colleague, and we developed a grant proposal thinking about an internal project that was appropriate to the strategic aims of the University online teaching. We put together a project to think about what that might mean pedagogically, bid for some money, really, to hire a research assistant to do some of the legwork for us that we could not do right because of teaching and admin. So I think those are the sort of the various types of grants I was finding.
Quite a wide range, even just thinking about that even, yeah, because I think when people think about research grants, you know, some of the obvious ones, I immediately think of at the British Academy early career fellowship grant, the Leverhulme early career grant. (And I had a Leverhulme scheme myself). But I think one of the things you've started to highlight there is that in the current landscape, actually, you might do a postdoc, or you might have a year where you get funding, but even as you continue through your career, applying for research grants is kind of a big part of that. Is that fair to say it's sort of continues?
Yeah, I mean, and also I think that the reality is that there are lots more of us, than there are grants and fellowships, and almost, I'm not sure the exact percentage, but I think it's safe to say that by definition, it's quite reasonable to assume that if you apply for something, that it's far more likely that you don't get it, that then you do get it right. And so there is an element of, I think, just sticking at it and applying and applying, which can kind of grind you down to a certain extent, but that is worth just highlighting.
I think I'd like to come back to that actually, in a bit the percentages and how do you keep going through all this kind of stuff?
So, Anna, we've sort of touched on various different grants there, you've obviously got lots of experience of applications that come through for some of these postdoc style fellowships for early career researchers and others, if you have, have you seen any changes over sort of the last decade or so in terms of what's coming through, the type of things people applying for, anything at all that's different?
Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I think we can safely say there's been a step change in the sort of quality of applications over time. Definitely upwards. I think back to when I was starting in my career as a postdoc, and the level of competition and what you were expected to have achieved by the time you got your first postdoc position. It's very different from today, and I'm stunned by the quality of the applications we get. I think there's another aspect to it, though, and you've touched on this Pavan, is that small grants can be incredibly useful, and different disciplines have different grant needs, and certainly at the Leverhulme Trust, we're very conscious of that, because what does that look like? It looks like much bigger projects sometimes in STEM because you've got a PhD student and a postdoc on that project, and, yeah, you're all working together. It might look like a fellowship, because once you're into a job, you need the time, but also it might just look like a small grant, because that's what you need to get some work done, or to finish a book, or whatever it is that you need. So one thing I would say is you're absolutely right to say that applying for grants is going to become routine and part of your norm if you're an academic, but also thinking quite hard about who you're applying for and why. You know, if you've got the right grant for your project, you're much more likely to succeed. Okay, though, of course, it is absolutely true, you're, on average, less likely to succeed than succeed, sadly. But we can talk about that. Yeah.
No, absolutely. So that thing you said there about applying for the right kind of grant, so it is a fact of the job situation right now. This is what you're going to be doing. You're going to be applying for grants. Of course, you're not going to get all the things that you apply for because the percentages. But presumably, the best way to maximize your chances of being successful is to be thinking about who you're applying to. What is it you're applying for? What advice would you give people who are trying to put together a proposal to get some funding?
I think that's actually where you start. You have to think about both the intentions of the funder and the particular call that you're applying to. There's no point in trying to crowbar your brilliant project, which might well be brilliant that doesn't actually fit with what the fund is trying to do. So if you take us just as an example, we're doing fundamental research. We're doing blue skies, right? We're doing risky, that kind of research. So if this is a follow-on project for something you've been working for a decade on, this is not necessarily going to be the right funder. If you're applying to UKRI, a lot of their work, they really like to see the potential impact. If you're doing a project that you just are really excited about the potential for that impact down the line, you know you might want to be looking at a different funder. So I think the first stage is to align your project with what the funders after. Of course, that's the first step. The second step is to write a really clear, intelligible application. And even there you go back to what does the funder do to assess the application, if it's all peer reviewed, like our stuff? Well, think about it. You're writing for other academics who are going to read the application, and you should write with their sort of inclinations in mind. And I don't know about you, but as academics, we always tend to dive straight into the methods, and we don't like over selling. We don't like being overly ambitious when you know it's not actually going to deliver them. Most academics don't like that. So you're writing for your fellow academics, so just have a think about that when you're actually putting pen to paper.
So it's really important, and it might sound obvious, but I think it is worth stressing. It's really important to look at, who is this funder? What is it they actually want to fund? And is that actually what you're trying to get funded? So you've obviously had success coming with sort of these smaller pots for things very specific. You said, a teaching grant, something else. So it sounds like you've kind of gone through that process of trying to find the right sort of pot of money for what you were after. Would you say, or were you just flinging out there, trying for everything? What was the process?
I think there is the element of it being a sort of numbers game. But I think you also, you do need to, what's the thing you got to buy a ticket to win the lottery, isn't it? You do need to, as Anna said, you know, put together the application for the right funder, and kind of hit the various things that funders ask for. I think it sometimes helps to be quite blunt about this, in the sense of looking at the guidelines that exist and using the same language that exists in these guidelines and just almost writing something that is in parallel to it, or at least showing how one's project matches up to these bits of criteria.
That's useful, actually, because I think you mentioned Anna the whole, we might shy away from selling ourselves, or shy away from doing this kind of thing, and it might feel a little bit artificial to be sort of pointing out exactly how you do meet the requirements. Would you say it is a good idea to just be that explicit and to make sure you're making it very clear? Yes, I do have an interdisciplinary project, for example, or whatever it is,
Absolutely and I mean, most funders have things that they really, really care about. Some funders, you're absolutely right Pavan, the best thing is simply to go through the criteria and say, this is how I hit it. If you're looking at a funder like us, we want a really good idea. But we also have a box on our forms that says, ‘Could you explain why the trust should fund this?’ Because we're, you know, a big, but nonetheless a small player in the research funding field. Why should we fund this, as opposed to another project? That's a serious question. And it's not about, well, it's brilliant, you know, obviously it's brilliant, but why us, and why not someone else, and just taking the time to think about that, and in our case, at least being quite transparent in what you're trying to get at, what you're trying to achieve. Why you think it's come to the Leverhulme. Actually, we respond really well to that, much more than we do to having stock answers. Shall we say?
Okay, so it is about not using buzzwords and stock answers then, and not trying to maybe over-egg it as well, maybe so not trying to just cram in the words that are of the moment. So interdisciplinarity, for example, has become a big thing in a lot of funding applications, but you shouldn't really be talking about that if it doesn't make sense, if your content doesn't match up to that as well.
Yeah. So there's a couple of points. I mean, I'd really like to make a point, if I may, about interdisciplinarity. Getting into disciplinary research funded is tricky, and I speak as someone who tried for many years and had many rejections along the way, and that's because you can end up with not really pleasing all of the disciplines, and then you send it out to peer review, and all the peer reviewers have a niggle or a problem, and it ends up not feeling like a fantastic proposal, even though, actually it's exactly what's needed in that space. So I think with interdisciplinarity, pick your funder carefully. Be explicit that it's interdisciplinary. Signal the balance. So you might have a bit of economics, but economics is not the core. And be really clear, because that will help the funder figure out which reviewers would be appropriate, and certainly in our case, if we get an interdisciplinary proposal that six reviewers absolutely love and the economist doesn't, you know, we can ignore and do ignore some reviews, not because they're not, you know, spot on in some respects, but because they've missed the bigger picture. Yeah, so that interdisciplinary piece is really important.
That's really helpful, actually, because I think maybe it's a slight divergence from where we were talking but this interdisciplinarity is one of the things that increasingly people talk about in funding. So having some insight into what to do with that is really useful. And so we've talked about these different scales of things it sounds like in terms of applying, then have a really great project, because the quality across the board, wherever you're applying is likely to be very high. Now presumably, get at least one other person to read it before you submit. Then look at what the funding body is actually all about and make sure that you're sort of hitting what it is that they're interested in, and then be really clear about how exactly you meet those requirements. Is that fair to say we're sort of in agreement that these are key?
Yes, the only thing I'd add to that is I'm going to give a plug for the research offices around the country. I would say ideally more than one person should read the proposal, certainly if it's a significant proposal, certainly if it's for a fellowship that's going to affect the next three years of your life. Yes, get other academics to read it, but often the research office will have a very good idea of the criteria that that particular funder is interested in. And generally, you know when you write something and it makes perfect sense to you, and it makes perfect sense to many people who are working in that very, very specific bit of the field, but the moment it goes outside, that it doesn't, and it's that sort of sense-check that you want that will massively improve a proposal, without changing the content necessarily, but just in how it's expressed.
So showing you all the things that you take for granted that actually resonates with me. I remember when I was applying for my Leverhulme fellowship and a British Academy Fellowship, I was using the word epistemology without thinking that this might not be the opening you want to go with. Maybe people don't all know what that is. It's something that philosophers often get tangled up in.
That's a really crucial point. The research offices in most universities, they're fantastic. And one of the things that ECRs, I think, have a problem with is, who do you send it to? Like you need people to be able to send it, to ask, right to ask for that help. And I think early on in your career, it is absolutely normal to have a relatively small network. So you don't have that many people to send it to, that don't have that many people who are senior to you to send it to? So good options, I think would be Viva examiners, for example, good first report of call to get some opinions. But the research offices can do a really good job of getting someone else who's more senior and also appropriate to the project to give some opinion on it. But I think there's also just a useful segue to just flag that, you know, the stuff around selling the project and highlighting how good it is; there is an element of racialisation and gender where certain groups of people are less likely to boast about how good the project is, right, and other groups of people, I think, are more likely to be quite comfortable with saying this is the best project that's existed since sliced bread. There are people who are really good at making that case, and others who are taught to be a bit more humble about it, often to one's own detriment. And I think that's worth acknowledging. It's something to unlearn as well. I think when it comes to certain genres.
That's absolutely right. I've seen that in the kind of research. And one of the things that I think can help with that is, yes, having experts like the research officers look at this, but also recognising it's not about bragging. It's about saying it will precisely do these things, and then having somebody else talk through with you, what would be the impact of that. Then what does that mean? Maybe, Anna, did you want to jump in? Yes.
I mean, it's almost the flip side of what I was saying earlier about academics. Instinctively, often don't like that overselling, but I think that's possibly because a lot of us have been thinking long and hard about how to strip out applications of the fluff and the and the sale to try and get to the heart of it precisely because of what you say, because it's a more equitable way of doing it, because you actually want to focus on the content. But what you're saying Pavan, about people putting themselves forward, is absolutely right, and one of the pieces of evidence for this is the British Academy has a small grant scheme, as you probably know by now on the podcast, and we fund it, or partly fund it, and they've trialled that as a randomised control trial. So in other words, you put your application in, if it meets a certain threshold, then the actual final decision is made on the basis of a randomised control trial. And it's really interesting what the effect of that has been in the first instance. Now it's not been fully evaluated, and that's coming later, but in the first instance, you've seen a big increase in the applications from groups that are generally underrepresented in academia, and I think that's the evidence for people being less willing to put themselves forward underestimating their quality and the strength of their research,
That's really interesting. So it's early days. We know that from the randomised trial approach, but it's showing an increase in percentages then of people from marginalized groups.
And we'll have to wait until it's fully evaluated to see the ultimate effect of it. But what you can say, even at this stage quite clearly, is that if you tell people that they have essentially as good a chance as any, people are more likely to put themselves forward. And I think that’s quite revealing.
It’s been running for a couple of years now. Yeah, so I think whatever preliminary findings, and I was at the ECR network event recently about the small grant scheme, and the British Academy representative was talking about it, there's good reason to extend the trial that's been running, because it has delivered, as Anna said, really good results.
It's really interesting to hear about that, because I think maybe a lot of people who are listening might be concerned. The idea that it's a random process or something like that, but actually, there could be real significant benefits to this.
There's an important point in that. So we receive, as the Trust I'm speaking about, we receive far more top-quality applications than we can fund. So the notion that it's not, to some extent, a little bit of luck in there isn't right? I mean, we do our best, and we obviously do extensive peer review, but you know, when faced with an array of projects, all of which could potentially be fundable with a limited budget, if you are the marginal one that falls off that list, that's getting close to saying you were just unlucky on the day. And I think normalising both the fact that you know the success rate, we try and keep the success rate at about one in five, which means four out of five will receive a rejection. So that's the starting point, but also to recognize that many, many of the ones that are receiving a rejection are very good ideas that in a different call or a different day, might be funded. So don't give up. Think about alternative ways of pursuing the research.
The British Academy does call it the partial randomised allocation, which is that all of these projects are evaluators. They're all peer reviewed, as far as I understand. They're all classified as fundable thresholds. They're all fundable. And then they sort of randomly allocated to the amount of money that they have. So it isn't the case that they're just throwing to the wind.
Yeah, highlighting, yeah. Absolutely everything meets the threshold first, and then there's this process.
So this kind of leads to the thing. I wanted to come back to, this dealing with the rejection side of it, because what you've just said there, Anna as well, is, I think, really critical. Because one of the things when you apply for funding is sometimes you can't get a great deal of feedback on the application. So we know, if you apply to one of the bigger schemes, there's a lot of applications, and it will often say we can't give you more feedback. But if you, for example, get told you made it to a shortlist or something like that, that could be a really good indicator that actually there's nothing wrong with your proposal. Just keep trying. Is that fair to say?
Yes, I think the thing about rejection is also it is so central to academic life. I mean, journal rejections, grant rejections, these are normal and they're not about you, or at least that's how I stayed sane during the period where I got a lot of rejections. It's about your proposal on the day or your journal article for that particular journal, it's not about a rejection of you. But of course, that's really easy to say, and really hard when you're right in the middle of it to actually feel and I think that's one of the areas where having networks and being able to talk to each other, and you know, just be honest about how it feels when you get a rejection, because it's almost as though you don't want to admit that it can be hurtful. Yeah, but if you're all having them, everyone gets back up and carry on. And that's the way it works.
Really important point you said there that it's not rejection of you, and I think this is where grants, everything that we go through, it's not rejection of you, it's you weren't successful with this application for this particular piece of work or research grant proposal, whatever it is. And we do have another episode coming up on networks as well. So we'll talk a bit more about the value of that in helping to make you resilient against this. Pavan, have you ever not been successful?
No, no, absolutely. I think that the networks thing is a really important point. One of the things I found when I started from masters and then into a PhD, and subsequently, I think it's really important to find your people in wherever you're working. I work in cultural studies, and that's a weird discipline, because it doesn't really exist as a discipline anymore. You know, like it's kind of disappeared, but people have kind of sought refuge in people are still real. Yeah, they still exist, but they sought refuge in a Literature Department, mostly sometimes sociology. But I intellectually, I've had to sort of do a bit of work to find these people in the literature department, because I don't really work with kind of Shakespeare stuff, so I've had to do that. But I think also socially, it is important to find your people and who you can go to and say that it feels really, really bad. Now, three things I applied for this term I didn't get a single one of them. However, I also think really, practically, really important to have friends outside of academia, outside of university. It’s really easy to get swept up in the idea that everything that happens at work is all important, and that the only thing that matters is whether you're successful in a funding application or whether a journal accepts your work and stuff. I think a little bit of distance is quite useful, and it's quite hard to do as an early career researcher, because you often have to work a lot more, whether to get a fixed term contract or a permanent job. You're doing a lot more. You're working a lengthy period of time.
I think that's right, and so we'll come back to that in our other podcast episodes. We have a couple on these things. It's really great to hear. This is actually part of this kind of strategy for dealing with failure just full stop is other human beings can be helpful here. This is worth saying. When you've been unsuccessful in any particular experience, what have you done with that proposal that's been rejected? Did you throw it in the bin? Did you try. Somewhere else. Can you remember?
Yeah, so I mentioned earlier, one of the projects I've got going on now is teaching education project, pedagogic project, and it's funded by something at King's called the college teaching fund. This is something that's we only got funded on the third try, right? So it failed twice, and together with my colleague, we, I think we just resubmitted it. I don't even know if we edited it very much. I think we resubmitted it as it may be, with a couple of tweaks, but very little extra work.
It was a good proposal that it just didn't work in a certain pot of money, that there was available. It was kind of annoying. I think we were kind of annoyed.
So maybe that's a healthy response to being sad. Just be a bit annoyed and just throw it somewhere else.
But the people reviewing these things are academics. You know, we've all been in the various stages of acceptance, rejection, reviewing other people's things.
I'm smiling because I had lots of rejections in my life over grants and papers and goodness knows what, but two major grant rejections that sort of stand out in my mind. And that's because, of course, it was sort of six, eight months of work putting together a big, big, multi million-pound application, and yes, my conclusion was they were wrong. So, I mean, that's the other thing, is that when you're getting rejections and it's you, you're sort of, you feel a bit alone, because it's your proposal and you will as you go on, and you then start writing other people into your grants, it feels different, and you feel more responsibility for other people. So not getting a grant can feel really quite upsetting, to say the least. But ultimately, it's the same practice of just saying, you know, it wasn't the right time and the right day, and trying to move on from that.
So ultimately, the rejection is not of you. If there is any feedback, obviously presumably we should look at it and consider it; quite often there isn't. The proposal might be good, keep going. And actually, it's interesting. You spoke about involving other people. You can feel that kind of guilt of responsibility, I think if you've got other people involved, but equally, maybe there's a part, and I'm thinking about your teaching, application, things I've done where having someone else involved means that you have got someone else to go: ‘It's just daft, isn't it?’ So maybe the swings and roundabouts to doing this.
But also with feedback, I think it's worth being a little sceptical about how much of the feedback you take on board. It's useful to have a different perspective. But I think it's also fine to be like I think everything works in this project. There's not really anything I particularly want to tweak and you put it up again. I mean, one has to be judicious with these things. But also, I don't think we should turn the reviewer into a sacred figure.
There's presumably, there's a sense in which you might develop that judgment over time to sort of sense whether that is something I want to change or maybe I just didn't go to the right people.
It raises the question about reviewers, and certainly we've worked quite hard to think about, how do you get a broader set of people, more diverse, but from different angles, different perspectives. But ultimately, you are asking people in the field who know quite a bit about the field or the method or something, to make a judgment, and you're right, they won't always be right in your view. And I'm sure also some of the more sort of risky out-there, kind of research is more likely to get rejected by a field. And it's a really hard line, especially when you're starting in your career, to work out whether or not, am I being completely innovative here, or is it, you know, actually, that I've got it slightly wrong. And going back to conversation about interdisciplinary, I think a lot of research that is applying some innovative method or innovative thinking to a field in a new way, and particularly if it's coming from another disciplinary perspective, that's where you really get, you know what, actually, this idea is sound the reviewer just didn't like it because it's not the way it's been done. And you move on and try and figure out otherwise.
So, consider who's reviewing this and what kind of feedback this is, what direction it's coming from as well. That's helpful as well. Okay, so we've got application out there. We've got the kind of what happens when you reject it. Don't take it personally. Keep going, keep trying, because it is something we're going to be doing through our careers. If you could look back at all of your experiences, of applications, of reviewing and all the rest of it, and think of one bit of advice you'd really like to give the people listening. What would that be? What would be the main thing you'd like to stress to them?
I think ultimately, when you're thinking about putting together a proposal, you have to start with the idea, and you have to start with what it is that you actually want to research, and then look for a funder to enable that to happen, and then go and sense check what you're doing and how you've done it with a whole bunch of people. If you follow those three steps, you are much more likely to succeed. And I think that that is something that you can get very lost in the detail of the proposal and whether you've dotted the I's and crossed the T's, but you do need to take that step back and just think, okay, is it all clear? Can I put what I want to do in a paragraph really clearly, and someone's going to think that's a good idea, because if I can't do that, it's really unlikely you're going to get it through the peer review process.
Have the idea, find the funder, and then get it sense checked, and listen to what the research offices in particular are saying to you, because they have a lot of experience.
And they're fantastic at reading from a non-technical perspective, but they've read an awful lot of academic research, right? So your paragraph, honestly, when I started some of my paragraphs, probably didn't really convey what it was that the research was trying to do. And you learn as you go, the importance of being able to summarize and to put things in plain language away from the jargon. And what is it you're actually trying to do here. Why is it important?
Yeah, I think Anna, given the really practical advice, so I think I'll say something more affective, right? And I think what I found is that people tend to be really generous with their time and their energy. And I think it can feel weird asking for help, but I think it is important to let oneself be helped by people who are further along in their careers, and that might be within your department, might be people that you tangentially know. But I think the thing that has characterised my career is just the generosity, the unreasonable generosity, really, of colleagues who are willing to help and willing to read and willing to give comments and feedback. And I think often it can feel intimidating as an early career researcher, but it is important to put oneself in a position where you can be helped, and then, you know, pay it forward whenever you get an opportunity to but yeah.
So despite our potentially natural introversion within academia, remember that if they asked you, you would probably help them.
Remember that at the end of it all, you're quite right. I think about the generosity of people, and that generosity, of course, also looks like the 1000s of pieces of peer review that funders across the UK rely on. And those peer review are generally provided, you know, with no remuneration, sometimes no recognition, and they're taking their time to assess. And I think that sometimes helps. When you get some peer review that might be sharp, you can put yourself and say that, you know, there's a lot of time being given.
That is helpful. Yeah, basically, there's a whole bunch of people all trying to find and fund really good ideas with the money that's available. So everyone play their part. Keep trying, keep asking for help and offer help when, when the opportunity comes up.
Well, thank you very much. I think we'll wrap it up there for today. Thank you to Anna. Thank you to Pavan.
Thanks very much. It was great.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Confessions of an Early Career Researcher, I've been your host, Leonie Smith. This podcast was brought to you by the British Academy in collaboration with the Leverhulme Trust, produced by Content is Queen. Music sourced by Epidemic Sound.