Learning to Juggle: reflections of an international PGR and Intern

By Gabriela Gerganova, Researcher Development Intern for Research Staff events, and PGR in MVLS.

I joined the Research Culture and Researcher Development (RC&RD) team just over three months ago and in that time, I have gained insights about continuous professional development from a completely new perspective.

At the start of the final year of my PhD in Cardiovascular Sciences I badly broke my leg. This forced me to take months off from lab work to recover. By the following summer, I had almost exhausted my PhD stipend and I was about to enter a thesis pending year within 6 months. This substantiated an urgency to seek out additional employment during an already heavy loaded period.

During my PhD, I have tried to engage with and make the most of the development opportunities offered to postgraduate researchers (PGRs) like participating in competitions such as the Three Minute Thesis, which I first heard about while interning at a European Commission’s research for policy making centre. I went on to represent PhD students within my Institute, helped organise symposia for fellow PGRs, and volunteered at the Pint of Science Festival.

When I saw my current internship advertised on the UofG Careers hub, I thought of all my public engagement and science communication experience and how well a fit that made me for this post. I was initially apprehensive of the workload and the nature of the work –facilitating events for staff instead of for students, but soon realised how much I stood to gain from the experience both for the remainder of my time as a PGR and in shaping my outlook on career narratives, leadership and supporting others.

Finding Balance

As my fellow interns Karen Gordon and Rachel Eager reflected recently, the duality of our roles as both PGRs and members of staff expose us to so many more opportunities than just being either or, but with the additional responsibilities and new challenges. Indeed, juggling many hours of outstanding experimental work with the demands of prompt communication and facilitation of events for my internship role is inevitably, hard work, but has taught me to be extremely efficient with my time. This would not have been possible without the support of my managers, who understand the particularities of both my roles and are willing to accommodate flexibility for me that I would have struggled to attain in a part-time role outside the University. These experiences have equipped me with better ways of communicating workload, and progress, and as a result I have improved the way I communicate my needs to my PhD supervisor. As our colleague Dr Rachel Chin explained, a wide-ranging joint academic and professional career, holds cross-linking benefits, and I am also finding this to be true.

What helps me to balance this juggling act? My main coping mechanisms are exercise, being outdoors whenever possible and catching up with friends over croissants and coffee. It may seem at first glance to be counter-intuitive to add more activities into a packed schedule. Admittedly, I often feel conflicted about a justification for a two-hour bike ride on the weekend instead of catching up on literature and data analysis for my PhD. Yet I find the opportunity to de-stress, clear my mind, and burn off the adrenaline of the working week, helpful in sustaining my heavy workload. I am forever grateful to my dear friend and colleague Dr Erin Higgins who gifted me a quote I can recall when those thoughts catch up with me; “Exercise to you, is like hands are to a juggler. You can give them ever more balls to juggle, it gets progressively harder, but you manage. You cut the hands off and suddenly you can’t juggle anything at all.”

New environment, new perspective

Since I began my role in August, I have worked to significantly upskill myself on commonly used online platforms and software, for which I have had less necessity during my PhD, but that I have since integrated into my PhD workflow to increase my productivity. As a result of acquiring these skills, I am more confident communicating with colleagues and research staff.

More, joining the professional services towards the end of my PhD, I have broadened my knowledge on the array of provision available to research staff and of which I may soon be a beneficiary, should my career path take me there. I am now looking to pair up with a mentor for my thesis writing through the Thesis Mentoring programme and have been finding the November WriteFest sessions incredibly useful in protecting some time for structured writing. I have been supporting the facilitation of hybrid monthly Research Staff Assembly, that aims to build a community and foster collegiality for researchers across the university. This way of thinking has encouraged me to apply for funding to attend a conference as a means to grow my network and find new avenues for professional development.

My internship has shown me new ways of taking ownership for work, in an entirely different capacity to my familiar experiences in collecting, analysing, and describing data, but by taking a lead on services for staff. I lead on and coordinate Coffee Connect, helping a pool of over 130 Research Staff to make new connections regularly, through a short monthly catch up. I was entrusted to lead the communication for this from the start and to shape upcoming iterations of the programme.

Beyond having a positive impact on my current work situation, the role has given me a new perspective on career narratives. It has demonstrated to me that research culture is the fabric of research integrity, that without respect for people’s individual developmental needs we won’t get the research output we expect. Although I am not currently in a position to lead a team, I am not blind to the prospect that this may be part of my job description in the not-so-distant future, and I am only hoping that the superb leadership within the Research Culture and Researcher Development Team has inevitably rubbed off on me. To lead with compassion in a collegiate atmosphere is what I would like to model my own future team on.