By Dr Elaine Gourlay, Research Culture Specialist (Communities & Collegiality)
This year, I’ve been offered a fantastic opportunity for my development – the chance to complete a university course (part time) to gain a qualification in Coaching and Mentoring, that is relevant to my current role and my future career development. Of course, I jumped at the chance to do this. I consider myself a lifelong learner, or as my family describe me – an eternal student.
Although I’ve not undertaken any formal qualification in over a decade, I didn’t expect this course to feel like a return to education, after all, I’ve learned new things, developed skills, and I currently work in a university setting, but I couldn’t have been more wrong!
Let me set one thing straight first of all – I am really enjoying my university course. I have a cohort of classmates, a tutor I meet with regularly, and I go along to my tutorials eager to learn new things, develop my practice and engage in an interesting discussion on a topic for which I seem to have endless interest. I am loving it! But facing the deadline for my first assignment brought mental and emotional challenges I was not expecting.
The impostor and the empath
Two years ago, I changed career. It’s been a rollercoaster two years adapting to the change, and I see the opportunity to gain a formal qualification that relates to my new area of work as a way to demonstrate my capabilities and gain credibility in my new career.
What I didn’t expect was the emotional challenge that came with writing an assignment in this subject area. Even though I’ve worked in the field for two years, the idea of writing something for a grade was so daunting – the last time I had to do something like this it was for my PhD ten years ago. I did not feel prepared, knowledgeable or authoritative in my writing voice.
Of course, while experiencing all of this, I couldn’t help but think about Researchers and Research Professionals at UofG who I work with in my role in the Research Culture & Researcher Development Team; the PGR thesis writers out there, their mentors, our Research Professional community who may be writing for different purposes, individuals who have returned to research or who have changed careers to become researchers (our Late Career-Early Career Researchers, LC-ECRs at UofG), and those who are going through steep learning curves or new career experiences.
It has been a transformative and empathy-building experience to have lived what those in our Research Ecosystem experience, which I thought I understood until now. I’ve been a researcher, I’ve completed a PhD, I’ve worked in professional environments, applied for grants (both successfully and unsuccessfully), and experienced many more challenges and points of development throughout my career, but this opportunity has given me the chance to experience what it’s like to return to education after a long break, to feel like a novice despite being more than a decade into your career and to juggle studying alongside full-time work, whilst trying to maintain a healthy balance with life.
Studying while working moves the boundaries
I knew when I began my university course that it would require me to be working on my assignments in my own time, I had agreed with my manager that attending tutorials and practice development could be undertaken within my normal working hours, but that my homework was just that, and it seemed fair enough to me. After all, this qualification is for my own career development as well as development in my current role.
What I hadn’t considered though was just how intense writing would be. I work hard to maintain quite a good work-life balance, and studying in my own time seemed to fit well (there was little to no impact when I decided to dedicate my Sunday afternoons to doing some coursework and reading), but writing was a whole different challenge! Why? Because writing is a complex set of skills, which one must bring together to research, reflect, analyse, critique, and craft a piece of writing.
I found it hard to switch between roles of the worker and the learner, it took time to get into the right mindset for writing, and at first, I tried to do this sitting at my same desk from which I work from home, long into the evenings, which obviously impacted my productivity.
The purpose of the writing impacts your writing mindset
I know I write, and I write regularly. I write reports, blogs (like this one), action plans, communications and adverts, and many more pieces, but these tend to be based on data generated, projects completed, or programme planning. They are for specific purposes, but they are centred on communicating information, progress or ideas related to my work. However, constructing answers to specific questions, on a distinct topic, with a defined marking scheme and with a strict wordcount completely changed my relationship with writing this assignment.
Reflecting on the reasons behind this relationship change has been interesting to me, on the one hand I think it’s the fact that when you’re writing for an assignment the prospect of being judged is really at the forefront of your mind – you’re literally writing for a grade! And writing within quite strict bounds to address marking criteria goes a long way towards quashing my creativity. As a self-confessed rule follower (and trying to become prouder of this as I would much prefer to be able to say that I like to rebel), I take a marking scheme as gospel, and it took a long time for me bring my own opinions and my authentic voice through in my writing.
Self-evaluation: the road to authenticity
The qualification I am currently undertaking is to develop my skills in coaching and mentoring, a landscape that holds reflective learning and self-evaluation at its core. While I already know I am a reflective learner, the meta-act of reflecting as you develop your skills to support others to reflect, is a more of an uncomfortable journey than I had expected. I am experimenting with my practice, pushing the bounds of what I’ve experienced before, and evaluating my choices and their impact on myself and others. From my previous career as a scientist, experimentation and attention to microscopic detail are familiar to me, but this is different.
Our resident mentoring expert, Kay Guccione put it better than I probably could myself: “Taking yourself to the edge of your comfort, fraying your edges to knit on new rows, unpicking your own thoughts — that’s difficult, transformative learning”.
I am not sure I fully anticipated the impact of putting myself under the microscope and was prepared for the emotional experience and level of vulnerability that would be a key part of my development. However, it’s a crucial for me to develop my practice with authenticity, empathy and understanding.
Through this journey (and it ain’t over yet), I am refreshing my understanding of the challenges faced by many in our Research Ecosystem and learned more about myself along the way. Not least to say that it doesn’t matter how far you’ve come since you were last in formal education, learning and developing is hard and the path for development winds onwards in front of us, throughout our career.
*knitting is a skill that I have yet to develop in my learning journey!
The Auditorium: a research culture and researcher development blog 