The UQ Psyc Blog - A Day in the Life of Psychology@UQ

Velcome again, Meester Bond. . .

2011-12-20T13:24:00.007+10:00

Not really. Hi all, and welcome back to the Psych Blog!

Having finished number crunching, I have immediately proceeded to launch myself into testing for Experiment 3. Discouragingly, most of the first-year students in summer semester have not been properly imbued with the fear of not getting their research credit, and thus aren't signing up in droves to my wonderfully exciting and mind-expanding pre-experiment 3 experiment (read: surveys).

Hence, I've had time to take stock in between testing sessions and have a wee bit of R&R. Which it seems I needed rather badly. I liken the process to exercising to the point where you no longer realise that you're exhausted, and the moment you stop your body ceases to be a body and becomes some form of semi-rigid amoeba. Who then oozes onto the nearest couch/bed and proceeds to become immobile for the next little while. The important thing here is that your thinking organ needs time to rest too, even if you don't think you need it. Leaping from one task to the next at lightspeed may work for some, but I suspect such people are in the minority.

In my case, I've simply taken a few shorter days and have let myself sleep in. It's one thing to relax, it's another entirely to stop working, after all! A few rather amusing souls suggested that the Psych Christmas Party would be a wonderful way to relax, to which I silently laughed. Social occasions are even more exhausting than your standard statistics analysis, as far as I'm concerned. Fun, but exhausting.

Interestingly, I suspect I've also become a workaholic in the past few weeks; in the past I would get home and eagerly leap to my computer and access whatever computer game/screen-based insanity that had captured my interest. Nowadays though, I just get bored. I come into uni most weekends, not because I have crazy amounts of work to do but because I'm simply bored. Of course, it could also be that I've gone mad. The fact that I started listening to Kelly Clarkson's 'Since U Been Gone' and actually liking it may attest to this possibility. I may lose the respect of friends and colleagues for admitting that, however.

I shall return after Christmas (of which I hope you have a merry one, naturally), where I shall continue to babble about life in PhD-land!

Onwards, PhD!

2011-12-06T16:03:00.004+10:00

Welcome again ladies and gentlemen to this blog!

You may have noticed the blogs have been coming fortnightly rather than weekly. This is mainly because I've had a fair chunk of work to do and writing a blog at the end of a day is slightly less appealing than going home, having a hot strong cup of tea and a dose of Gaming Therapy. Hence, fortnightly posts. Hope you don't mind too much :)

So, what's been happening? More of the stats stuff that I mentioned in my last blogpost. In fact, that's pretty much been my life for the past little while. Alas this isn't entirely the fun stuff, this is the rather painful monotonous stuff. It's taken me what feels like an age; it's one of those tasks that you just know will take forever the first time you do it, but when you do it for the second/third/etc time you'll kick yourself that it ever took any time at all, first time round.

As always, there are silver linings, some thinner than others. I have discovered a new genre of music that I rather like, I have listened to a number of podcasts, not to mention the truly heroic speed with which I seem to type and the skills in SPSS and Excel that I had to teach myself while doing these tasks.

So really, the stuff I learned is the prize of these tasks. I can do some pretty fancy shenanigans in SPSS and Excel now; I have slowly honed my work ethic for long tiring tasks, and so forth. And really, these things are just as the (perhaps more vaunted) skills such as concise writing, public speaking skills and so forth that a PhD requires on the surface. I have no doubt that they'll be of use for a long time to come.

See you next fortnight!

And multiple analyses later. . .

2011-11-22T15:03:00.003+10:00

When the Matrix becomes real, I will find the SPSS program within its intricate pathways. I will then proceed to initiate mortal combat with this program; not that crappy real-life Dragon Ball Z nonsense from Matrix 3, but the good ole' fashioned fisticuffs from the first movie. Overcoats, sunglasses, hilarious numbers of guns, the works.

And I shall dance upon it's pixelated corpse with giddy abandon.

Now, this might seem a bit strong, and indeed it is. I have been doing outlier data cleaning for 3 data sets for the past few days, and the problem is that in the literature that we're working off, everybody has their own method of dealing with outliers. Some researchers ignore them entirely, others delete them, others replace them with a 2.5 standard deviation cutoff. Even worse, some determine outliers within-participants, within-conditions or sometimes both. Owing to the high likelihood that a fellow psycholinguist will review our paper come submission, we decided it was a good idea to cover all the bases in case they ask why we didn't manage outliers in (x) fashion.

Cue 13 different outlier cleaning processes, over 3 data sets. Every possible relevant permutation of the process to be performed on each dataset.

Predictably, I have reached the point where I no longer believe that I and my beloved Apple Mac are separate beings. I think we've become some sort of Deus Ex Machina, albeit in the narrow field of number crunching. I think it simply is aware of my intentions and reacts accordingly; I could probably use two chopsticks instead of a mouse and keyboard and still create the desired SPSS commands. I may eventually nickname it 'Skynet' and welcome the end of humanity.

I am of course inflating the issue for the sake of comedy and a good read. The work is not hard, nor is it particularly urgent. I've set myself a deadline for the end of the week, mainly in order to give myself a semblance of motivation beyond that transmitted through caffeine-based products. It is a reminder that not all work in a PhD is gloriously interesting, mind-expanding stuff. Occasionally you do have to engage in exercises of pure tedium with the promise of a reward at the end, which in my case is a conference I hope to go to next year overseas, as well as the publication that will come out of this work.

My new master/Sith Lord/computer program calls to me to resume crafting the syntax that will deal with analysis no. 3. If anyone hears 'EXTERMINATE' or sounds of death rays coming from my office, worry not - it's all been ethically approved. See you next week!

-Harrison

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And so here we are again!

2011-11-15T12:58:00.002+10:00

It has been a relatively sedate fortnight since my last post; some data analysis has been done, some writing done, and I have re-developed a few hobbies outside university life that might indeed result in me seeing the light of day this decade, and may even result in physical exercise. Yep, those are airborne animals of the porcine genus you're seeing, and that is indeed the yelping of frost-bitten devils you're hearing. All against the glorious backdrop of a cyan-coloured moon.

The data for my second experiment has not turned out to be all it can be, unfortunately; our main hypothesis wasn't entirely supported. Luckily, Experiment 2 is essentially a supplemental to Experiment 1, so it can still be used albeit in a reduced form. Painful, but such is life in academia, and frankly if odd data is the worst of my troubles I am going quite well.

So now we're on to Experiment 3, which can hopefully be completed within a month or two, provided the Summer Semester victims *ahem* participants are obliging with their volunteering for testing. I will spare you the precise aims of this 3-experiment project for the next blog, as I'm still wrapping my head around all the wee bits and pieces that go into the evidence that I'm working with.

Handily, the first part of experiment 3 is on its way to completion; the online surveys I posted a few weeks back were Part 1 of this endeavour, and many obliging souls have submitted to the psycho-linguistic probings within. Once the data is compiled and subjected to the various statistical tortures I will turn to performing the main gristle of the experiment, which is the final experiment of my first project.

All this is in aim of getting a paper out ASAP so I have something material for confirmation, as said event is beginning to loom like a disapproving bouncer in an ill-fitting suit. And ye, verily is the metaphorical pepper spray being reached for.

Waxing lyrical aside, that's all for today and the next post shall regale you with the theories behind Lexical Selection, Picture-Word Interference and so forth (shorter version: The field I'm sticking my neck into). Hope this is a good read, and see you next time!

-Harrison&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;F

A good life, this one.

2011-11-01T12:43:00.000+10:00

Well, the semester is over, as is both my marking and testing.

In the academic parlance, I am well and truly buggered.

This will probably be a shorter post than my usual verbose linguistic gushings, as I am frankly very tired. All in all, I have had one hell of a fun semester. I have had my first tutoring experience; terrifying, but it's the first time I've ever really given a formal education, and it's quite the fun thing to do. Actually engaging with students who trust you to provide accurate information is one seriously motivating experience.

I've also managed to run two experiments, one of which was only partly successful (see my lengthy whinge/blog posts prior to this), and have learned valuable lessons about time management, data analysis and maintaining a level head when pressured. Not to mention that working too hard really does catch up to you. So in short, I shall provide an end-of-semester surmise: PhD life really rocks. In the whole time I've been a PhD candidate (since March 1st), I've enjoyed almost every day of it. Not bad for work satisfaction, methinks.

As of writing this I'm planning to go home rather early and sleep for quite possibly 24 hours straight, so I shall leave things here. I hope that life treats you all well, and I shall return next week with yet PhD life goodies!

-Harrison&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;F

Marking Malaise

2011-10-25T12:44:00.003+10:00

I've become quite unfamiliar with the concept of natural light over the past week or so. While I desperately attempt to maintain the illusion that I am as devastatingly attractive as ever, I have a strong suspicion that I have become some kind of Gollum-like creature of slightly more palatable personality.

There are two reasons for this. The first, as documented last week, is the requirement of testing new participants. This is becoming tricky, as first-years are almost finished their term and thus are in short supply. Luckily, there are other means of gathering participants, and so work continues apace in this regard. Alas, at the current juncture there is little else to report, as all I can do is wait for participants to sign up. Although, I have recently launched a pair of surveys that are a precursor to my third experiment; shameless of me, but if you could take one (and only one) of them, I would be most grateful :)

https://experiment.psy.uq.edu.au/word-pairs/
OR
https://experiment.psy.uq.edu.au/images/

The second reason is marking. The second round of assignments has struck and we the tutors have responded, and responded with vigor. That is, we have complained, vacillated and generally procrastinated for quite some time before hooking into the marking. What followed was many days of my good self sitting at my computer, listening to a combination of trance music and symphonic heavy metal while peering myopically at the latest lab report to batter itself against the crumbling edifice of my sanity and work ethic. This process continues, and probably will for a few days yet.

I won't say marking is fun. It's a challenge, as marking isn't necessarily easy due mostly to my lack of experience. I also tend to take longer than is necessary as I give a lot of feedback. Mostly I take such time because I remember receiving feedback on assignments which didn't always help, and I wasn't the best undergrad in the first place. Of course on top of that you do actually have to fail people. I'll avoid blithering on about that because this post is already sounding something like a whinge.

Let's tag marking as 'an experience', in the full knowledge that sooner or later, a proper emotional tag will become available to describe what sort of experience it is. Although for the record, it's a nice feeling to occasionally tunnel-vision to the extent where the outside world becomes less than a passing thought for hours on end.

And now, as lovely as writing this blog is, I must return to said marking with all haste, as the deadline looms (as only deadlines can). Next week, I shall hopefully return with more news of my experiments and experiences! Until then, may your learning never cease.

-Harrison

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It's only funny when it happens to someone else.

2011-10-18T15:02:00.005+10:00

Welcome once again to the fetid den of iniquity that is my blog-post, dear readers. As I mentioned last week, I have been conducting analyses on my second experiment, and progress could be called 'rocky'.

Well, if last week was rocky, it is now firmly ensconced in the Himalayas. Initially, I had performed an analysis of my data while eliminating outliers above and below certain thresholds across all participants and conditions. Statistical significance was achieved after this cleaning was done. However, based on previous research we also deleted outliers based on standard deviations of each participant. Statistical significance vanished.

Now, understand that before all this, I had forgotten to perform some of the most basic and elementary forms of data cleaning known to psychology before doing an analysis. I was feeling like a bit of a fool.

It transpired that certain participants had data that did not make the slightest bit of sense; reaction times that were unfeasible, etc, and were placing rather large spanners in the works of the data. Being the overenthusiastic (and also perhaps cerebrally-challenged) lad that I was, I had not noticed this. My supervisor did, and drew it to my attention. Having received this information, I proceeded to pummel my own head into nearby solid objects located in my office. To forget to deal with outliers, AND to forget to observe individual means (a lesson I was taught in no uncertain terms by my Honours supervisor) is an impressive brain failure, I thought. As a quick aside, I am my own worst critic when it comes to my career. These days, I am unforgiving (perhaps to a fault) when it comes to mistakes such as the aforementioned.

Generally I avoid directly giving advice in this blog, as I prefer people to take whatever insight they wish from the posts (e.g. "why are they allowing this coffee-addicted nutcase into the sunlight?"). However, I will say this; it's not in your interest to be an unforgiving disciplinarian when you make mistakes. The PhD learning curve is a steep one, and if you continue in academia it apparently doesn't shallow out that often. Mentally injuring yourself simply hamstrings your ability to learn from your mistakes. It's also why your supervisor is there; they're good at this stuff. My supervisor has been in academia for almost two decades. I have been a PhD student for 8 months. When I took the data to him, he saw the problem after a few minutes of perusal and basic analysis. Go figure.

The outcome of all this is that I must return to testing, both replacing the faulty data (and finding out how it happened) and expanding the sample size. The rest of the week is filled with testing schedules and importing the new data. Lessons have been learned, shoulders squared, heads un-pummeled and egos deflated (at least a little . . . :D), and the science goes on! See you next week, when hopefully I have new results to speak of!

-Harrison

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Houston, we have a problem.

2011-10-11T12:09:00.004+10:00

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;FKeen observers may have noticed that last Friday, a gigantic letter 'F' materialised over the SBS building, accompanied by flocks of birds leaving trees, spontaneous gonging of church bells, and shattered windows throughout the UQ campus.

This was because my data analysis had not gone as planned.

Subsequent to unleashing the linguistic beast that was my stream of profanity (read: giant man tantrum), I girded myself and got back to work. It's tempting at times like this to emotionally flagellate yourself for not seeing the issue beforehand, for feeling like a fool etc etc. It is important to remember that a PhD student is the merest babe in the academic world, superior only to the academic zygote that is an Honours student, and you will make mistakes on occasion.

So let's talk a bit about precisely what happened.

My experiments at present are purely behavioural, and utilise a MatLab program to present stimulus. The program records reaction times and outputs that to two separate files, one of which is nicely formatted to be imported into Excel and SPSS. This particular file did not write properly for some reason, and I realised I would have to go through each file individually and import the data trial by trial. That's 360 trials per participant, for 20 participants.

It was at this moment I felt a bizarre and yet entirely understandable urge to strap my beloved Apple computer to the front of some archaic cannon, and then fire said cannon at the laptop utilised in the experiment. This did not occur; I suspect the Psych department frowns upon wanton destruction that is not ethically approved. The lesson here is to test the hell out of any program that is so central to your experiment, and to ensure that it works EXACTLY as needed before you hurl participants at it.

The silver lining is that despite having to spend many hours at my computer manually importing data (a task to melt the brain of the most devoted of nerds), I also managed to catch up on listening to about 4 different podcasts, as well as several hours of my favourite music. So it's not all bad. Once the red mist had cleared, I realised that I should see the whole episode not as an illustration of my own foolishness, but as an experience for future experiments. I also learned that under no circumstances do you go to Merlos and request 'a coffee so strong you could waterproof an ocean liner with it'. They take that seriously. You will electrocute small insects if you drink it, and your brain will fizzle into some kind of homogenous neural goo.

As of writing this, I am at the SPSS analysis stage of this experiment, and the subject of next week's blog will be the results of this analysis, and what it means for my PhD. As always, I hope I have presented a good/informative read, and I shall see you all next week!

-Harrison

Data analysis and life

2011-10-03T10:50:00.012+10:00

And ye, verily did the hordes of students return to the hallowed grounds of UQ, and mightily did we curse as lines at the Refectory and Merlos did lengthen accordingly.

This week, I find myself preparing for data analysis, and thus I shall write about it as well.

There are many different words and phrases for data analysis in the sciences. For instance: 'A love affair with statistics packages', 'Listening to music while attempting to break your keyboard', or more simply 'being a COLOSSAL nerd'. Any and all of the above are appropriate. The funny thing about it is that should you have any passion for science, you'll find yourself strangely immersed in not only entering the data, but then running each successive analysis, reviewing the results, interpreting said results and so forth.

It can feel like an anticlimax; you've worked and experimented (for weeks, months or perhaps even years) and now you have this great pile of data that you have to compile and work into something understandable. Not for yourself, as you should hopefully know already what you're doing. But going from having that data to creating a story that is understandable and interesting to other people is a skill, and the entire process is both a privilege and a pleasure. That's not to say it's not stressful and difficult as hell, as it certainly can be. Sometimes things won't go according to plan and you will wish to create a fist-sized and -shaped hole in your computer screen and the wall behind it (much to the shock of the inhabitants of the next room). You will almost certainly have a few late nights in the office. In spite of (and perhaps because of) this, it's totally worth it.

I personally doubt that many of us do this because it's a challenge. I certainly don't. It is absolutely a challenge, and I am expected to run experiments, to publish, etc. But as one of the senior academics said earlier this year, academia is/should be as much a vocation as anything else. So I do it because I love it, and the aforementioned necessities just serve as to legitimise the whole affair as a job.

Interestingly, people look at me funny from time to time and say 'but PhD's make no money' or even more amusingly 'that sounds so boring!'. Regarding money, it's cliche but I'd vastly prefer to do a job I enjoy rather than one that paid well, assuming I had to choose. I once tried working in an office job that paid well. I lasted 4 weeks before my brain melted out one ear from boredom. As for a PhD being boring, each to their own.

I have gone from talking about data analysis to a discussion of my perspectives on PhD's. Rather amusing shift, but I hope it proves enjoyable/interesting/informative nonetheless. I am off to finalise an Ethics proposal, so I shall see you all next week!

-Harrison

Secrets of Highly Successful PhD Students

2011-09-30T10:04:00.004+10:00

Last week was Graduate Student Week here at UQ. Across the week the UQ graduate school organized a number of presentations, workshops, and panel discussions to help UQ RHD students make the most of their time as a research student. As an aspiring graduate student, I decided to attend a workshop titled 'The Seven Secrets of Highly Successful PhD Student'.

Running the session was Maria Gardiner maximizing performance in high achieving groups like PhD students and academics. She presented hints and tips, based on research, which can help PhD students work productively during their candidature and finish on time.

It seems I am not the only one keen to unlock the secrets of a successful PhD. Earlier this year secret number 1 – The Care and Maintenance of your Adviser was published in the journal Nature. That’s right, although we may at times think it is our supervisor’s responsibility to guide their student, it is just as much a student’s responsibility to ensure that they are well guided through their PhD.

So how do we go about getting the most out of our student-supervisor relationship? Here are some tips/ideas that were presented in the workshop and also in the article. 1. Ask for help - We often think that we are high in the priorities of our supervisors and that they know when we need help. Supervisors think that when their student needs help they will come and ask. Therefore, if you need help, you need to go and ask. If you are waiting for your supervisor to read your mind you could be waiting a very long while.

2. Meet regularly - The very most important factor that predicts timely completion of a PhD is regular meetings. This should be one-on-one time set aside to talk with your supervisor about matters relating to your current research. Regular meetings should not be avoided … even if you feel like you haven’t gotten anywhere since last meeting. This may be a sign that you need some direction to get back on track. We all know our supervisors are super busy people but given the value of meeting regularly, it is something all research students should attempt to attain/maintain.

3. Get as much as you can out of your supervisor meetings - To get the most out of meetings, make an agenda. This will ensure that you cover all of the things that you planned to cover and that you don’t get side-tracked (and if you do it will help you get back on the point). A bit before the meeting (a day or 2 before) make a list of points that you want to cover in the meeting and e-mail them over to your supervisor. You can also print out a copy for you and a copy for your supervisor and hand it to them at the start of the meeting. This will provide a framework for the meeting and help the meeting stay on track, stop you forgetting things you meant to ask and stop you from deciding not to ask things that you really need to know because you might ‘feel silly’ asking.

4. Be on the same page as your supervisor - After meetings you should e-mail your supervisor with a few dot points of what you are going to do (and maybe what they are going to do) now based on the outcomes of your meeting. They should be specific e.g. "I will write method section of paper X". So that you and your supervisor can see you are both on the same page (and so they can gently direct you back on track if you were misguided). Writing down the outcomes of each meeting and what needs to be done also makes you feel accountable for the jobs you have to do before your next meeting.

So go forth and take responsibility for getting the help you need from your supervisor.

Kearns, H. & Gardiner, M. (2011). The care and maintenance of your adviser. Nature, 469, 570.

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Congrats Matthew B Thompson

2011-09-29T22:40:00.000+10:00

So I just saw this on Facebook:

My translation of this is that my good friend, colleague and collaborator, regular UQ Psyc Blog blogger, and illusionist, Matthew Thompson has just won the Australasian Three Minute Thesis Competition. I know this has required a huge effort on Matt's behalf for more reasons than are obvious, so it's a huge credit to him, and also his main advisor Jason Tangen.

Well done, Matt, we're lucky to have you around!

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Thinking about talking

2011-09-26T14:26:00.007+10:00

It is the holidays, apparently. For many postgrads this reads as 'work time where one does not teach'. For a PhD student, the concept of holidays is largely a self-directed process. It is perfectly legitimate to wake at 11am on a Monday and simply declare 'to hell with my work today' and spend the entire day in one's pyjamas . . . possibly writing a blog post or two (Note: I didn't actually do this, but the idea is a logical one).

Of course, provided your work ethic is not a withered broken husk that feeds upon guilt and shame (not to get too self-referential or anything) then you probably will come and work. For myself, this means experiments. Speaking of experiments, I mentioned that I would be doing so this blog around, and thus I shall avoid linguistically opening fire on the injustice of working during the holidays, and proceed with something more interesting. Potentially more dry, but just as interesting. At least, as far as I'm concerned it is, and I'm the important one in this relationship :)

The basic experimental design I use at the moment is called the Picture-Word Interference Paradigm, or PWI. Very simply, it is the presentation of a picture, with a word. The task is to identify the picture as quickly as possible. It's my kind of thing; gloriously simple and yet, when properly manipulated, can give you a true world of information to sink one's metaphorical chompers into.

We're using this design to work out how people select words to put into speech. True to form in the sciences, this is not nearly as simple as it sounds. It turns out there's quite a few stages in the speech process. You have a semantic/conceptual stage, where concepts are abstract representations without words or meaning attached (There is research to suggest that concepts are actually complex sensory representations). You then have a lexical stage, where the concept is attached to a kind of grammatical code, called a lemma. Then it gets actual sounds attached to it at the phonological stage, at which point we think it gets forwarded to motor areas to be turned into processes for your vocal cords etc. to deal with. And of course all this happens after your low-level visual processes have gone through and dealt with the basic properties of what you perceive.

Essentially the PWI throws a cognitive spanner in the works; by varying the relationship between the picture and word (sometimes the word is related to the picture, sometimes not), we can determine the process/structure by which we select words and meanings. Happily, in recent years there have been a few papers that generated an almighty stink amongst the researchers of speech production and thus new research is most welcome to try and resolve matters to some extent, which is what I'm aiming to do.

Speaking of which, my work ethic awakens with a roar and a snarl, and so I should get back into it. See you next week!

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The journey begins. . .

2011-09-20T14:41:00.008+10:00

Hello! My name is Harrison Vieth, and I’m a PhD candidate in Psychology. I study language production, specifically the nature of lexical access. While my ego requests, nay demands that I continue with an exposition about how wonderfully accomplished and amazing I am (feel free to insert sniggers as you see fit) what I shall instead write of is a general account of an ordinary day in the PhD life.

Having awoken to discover that I’d had roughly 4 hours of sleep, (due in part to not being able to sleep, but also due to an obsession with a certain video game or two) the immediate concern is the acquisition of coffee. If you saw some disheveled, semi-zombified homunculus of a 20-something year-old shambling about the SBS building or at Merlos last Thursday, that was almost certainly me. As you might be able to tell, I love coffee to an amount that many regard as being slightly concerning if not at a clinical significance just yet.

At the moment, I have several deadlines to meet. The first and most powerful is a marking deadline. I tutor a second-year course, and the first set of assignments has returned and thus we tutors must nose-to-the-grindstone and mark. For the more painfully capable tutors *coughNoniecough* this is the course of a weekend's work. For those of us far less practiced, it takes a week or so, especially given I have a near OCD-like tendency to go back and check things. Over, and over. . . .and over again. While I am told this is a normal symptom of New Tutor Syndrome, it's still painful. Still, the pleasure one gets from tutoring outweighs this, for the most part, save when one must resist the consequent urge to take some kind of non-lethal firearm to my next tutorial in order to more forcefully educate the philistine undergrads in my care of the finer points of concision and clear writing. Of course, I wrote some shockers in my undergrad career and thus my rampant hypocrisy remains checked for the foreseeable future.

I'm also designing my third experiment, still in its infancy as a result of tutor deadlines looming. The nature of the behavioural experiments I run (to be the subject of the next blog post) requires a great deal of fine-tuning the stimulus, and thus this week and the following week will be finalising that. While it does sound like most of what I do involves sitting in front of a computer screen, it's just as tiring in many ways as any other activity, and also just as fulfilling.

Alas, the candle burns down and I must return to my marking, but fear not (if you were afeared in the first place), I shall almost certainly write again in the near future about any number of things, including experimental testing, data analysis, and the various legal proceedings involved in rationalizing a marking-based psychotic breakdown.

-Harrison

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PhD Tips and Tricks (or learning from others' experience)

2011-09-07T14:14:00.012+10:00

The first day of Spring just passed us by, meaning a number of post-grads have recently notched up their first semester and a bit of PhD life. As with any other new undertaking a lot of lessons have been learned by the fledgling PhDs. The student-led Social Lab Group decided to create somewhat of a repository for recently enrolled PhDs, comprising both the lessons we learnt and some useful tips for surviving your first semester.

I'll preface the list by saying the tips seem to fall into two (maybe one) broad categories; 1) DO THESE THINGS ESPECIALLY IF THEY SCARE YOU, and 2) USE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY TO TRICK YOURSELF INTO BEING PRODUCTIVE.

Conduct your first study as soon as possible, and definitely before you feel ready.
Make yourself accountable by creating small goals and deadlines and announcing them to your advisor or scheduling meetings on their due date. It's not your advisor's responsibility to harass you about this, but simply telling them of what you plan to accomplish by X date or Y meeting can be a good motivator.
If you're looking to wrap up a meeting, taking a moment to summarise the key points out loud is both an effective hint and it makes you look totally engaged and on top of things.
Visit the journal websites to sign up to their free email notifications for new issues.
When reading a newly released journal article that appears to have completely and perfectly investigated your PhD topic, you should print it out and get out your angry highlighter and big red pen and lay into it. Identifying what the authors in their incomparable stupidity have failed to look at, control for, or explain is not only very therapeutic, but will help you realise that a) you still have a contribution to make, and b) people care about the topic you're researching!
Get in as much writing practice as you can. If you don't have any data of your own to write up, your advisor will definitely have some data somewhere (e.g., old honours student data) that they would be happy for you to cut your teeth on. The best of this is that your lack of emotional investment in the dataset will make the inevitable and crushing rejection substantially less crushing.
Look for potential paper collaborations as a 3rd or later author. Providing comments - even doing substantial editing - on a draft initially written by someone else is by far less exhausting than starting from a blank page.
Encourage, accept and laugh (as applicable) at criticism you receive. If someone is giving you honest and constructive criticism, that means they care enough about your work (yay!) and want to help you improve it (double-yay!). By seeking out criticism you are seeking out opportunities to improve your work and your understanding.
It is important to note that as a PhD student you are in research training, and are not expected to have all the answers. You are in research training, and not expected to have all the answers. You are not the exception to this expectation.
Tutoring is great for you. It allows you to develop presentation experience, deal with left-field questions, work on explanations for that much-venerated "intelligent but non-specialist audience", hone your time management skills, and pays well. You should do it at least once during your PhD, the earlier the better.
Force yourself to present wherever possible. Say "yes" to things like lab group, 3 minute thesis, RHD-Day, and conferences. When someone asks you "what do you do", use that opportunity to hone your 30-second version (and your self-control when they follow up with "so why does that matter?").
Attend conferences, summer schools, small group meetings (mini-conferences), seminars, lab groups and coffee dates wherever possible. The importance of your peers' and colleagues' contributions to your work, whether formally or informally, cannot be overstated. They can ask uncomfortable questions, point out flaws, grant blinding insight, listen to you whinge, and order another bottle of wine. How invaluable!

So, on behalf of the students from the Social Lab Group, I hope you can take something away from this post that helps you at some point during your candidature.

Feel free to add any of your own tips and tricks in the comments :)

Morgan

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Not tricks, Michael, illusions.

2011-07-08T08:11:00.010+10:00

I have to share this amazing visual illusion with you.

Sean Murphy, an honours student in our lab, was playing around with some faces for an experiment. He aligned the faces at the eyes and then started flicking through them. He was shocked by the ugly faces staring back at him.

We called it the Flashed Face Distortion Effect. But we don’t yet know what causes it.

The effect might have something to do with relative encoding. That is, forcing people to encode each face in light of the others. By eye-aligning the faces, it becomes much easier to compare their shape and the relative location of their features, so the differences between them become more evident. And it’s most certainly related to work on adaptation, and the face distortion after effect specifically.

You can read more about it here and request a copy of the paper here. I hope you find the effect as jaw-dropping as I do!

Matt
mbthompson.com

Tangen, J. M., Murphy, S., & Thompson, M. B. (2011). Flashed face distortion effect: Grotesque faces from relative spaces. Perception advance online publication, doi:10.1068/p6968

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Taking responsibility for your professional development

2011-06-28T19:04:00.001+10:00

“The price of greatness is responsibility”

- Winston Churchill

As PhD students our primary focus often tends to be on final products and bottom lines. We ruminate about what the thesis will be like, how to get more publications, and other external indicators of quality. In this pursuit of end goals, it can be easy to lose sight of other important factors in our education, like professional development. By professional development I mean things that don’t necessarily contribute to the final product of the thesis or a particular publication, but that contribute overall to making us better researchers. Like the famous quote goes: it’s the journey, not the destination that’s important.

There are many ways to develop as a researcher. It may involve learning new statistical or methodological skills, or attending workshops, conferences and summer schools (which I’ve posted about previously). Whatever the form of professional development, I believe the key is that students take responsibility for their own development trajectory. While a lucky few people may benefit from a supervisor who goes out of their way to mentor, guide, and shape them as a member of the research community, not everyone can expect such treatment. Ultimately, it’s up to each of us individually to take advantage of development opportunities where they exist and create them for ourselves where they don’t.

At UQ we’re very lucky to have an environment that supports professional development. Weekly seminars for RHD (Research Higher Degree) students are run on topics as varied as advancing statistical know-how to time management and achieving work-life balance. We also have an annual RHD day that celebrates the research of postgraduate students and offers an opportunity to present in front of a friendly audience.

But there are also countless opportunities for professional development outside your research institution. Attendance at conferences is an absolute must. Not only do you get great ideas from hearing others talk, there are often round-table discussions or pre-conferences dedicated to key professional development topics. Consider travel in and of itself as a professional development opportunity. There is something about seeing the processes of different labs that broadens your research perspective. Not to mention the opportunity to discuss your research with people who know nothing about it.

Oftentimes professional development requires stepping outside your comfort zone. It involves putting yourself in a position of admitting that you don’t know everything. Developing often means talking to and asking advice from people who scare you a little. Don’t forget that the benefits of professional development – that make you a better, more connected and impactful researcher – will ultimately far outweigh the temporary discomfort of putting yourself out there. The key thing to remember is that only you are truly responsible for your professional development. It’s through this responsibility that we can each achieve our own modest form of greatness.

F “The price of greatness is responsibility” - Winston Churchill <o:p> </o:p> As PhD students our primary focus often tends to be on final products and bottom lines. We ruminate about what the thesis will be like, how to get more publications, and other external indicators of quality. In this pursuit of end goals, it can be easy to lose sight of other important factors in our education, like professional development. By professional development I mean things that don’t necessarily contribute to the final product of the thesis or a particular publication, but that contribute overall to making us better researchers. Like the famous quote goes: it’s the journey, not the destination that’s important. <o:p> </o:p> There are many ways to develop as a researcher. It may involve learning new statistical or methodological skills, or attending workshops, conferences and summer schools (which I’ve posted about previously). Whatever the form of professional development, I believe the key is that students take responsibility for their own development trajectory. While a lucky few people may benefit from a supervisor who goes out of their way to mentor, guide, and shape them as a member of the research community, not everyone can expect such treatment. Ultimately, it’s up to each of us individually to take advantage of development opportunities where they exist and create them for ourselves where they don’t. <o:p> </o:p> At UQ we’re very lucky to have an environment that supports professional development. Weekly seminars for RHD (Research Higher Degree) students are run on topics as varied as advancing statistical know-how to time management and achieving work-life balance. We also have an annual RHD day that celebrates the research of postgraduate students and offers an opportunity to present in front of a friendly audience. <o:p> </o:p> But there are also countless opportunities for professional development outside your research institution. Attendance at conferences is an absolute must. Not only do you get great ideas from hearing others talk, there are often round-table discussions or pre-conferences dedicated to key professional development topics. Consider travel in and of itself as a professional development opportunity. There is something about seeing the processes of different labs that broadens your research perspective. Not to mention the opportunity to discuss your research with people who know nothing about it. <o:p> </o:p> Oftentimes professional development requires stepping outside your comfort zone. It involves putting yourself in a position of admitting that you don’t know everything. Developing often means talking to and asking advice from people who scare you a little. Don’t forget that the benefits of professional development – that make you a better, more connected and impactful researcher – will ultimately far outweigh the temporary discomfort of putting yourself out there. The key thing to remember is that only you are truly responsible for your professional development. It’s through this responsibility that we can each achieve our own modest form of greatness.   “The price of greatness is responsibility” - Winston Churchill <o:p> </o:p> As PhD students our primary focus often tends to be on final products and bottom lines. We ruminate about what the thesis will be like, how to get more publications, and other external indicators of quality. In this pursuit of end goals, it can be easy to lose sight of other important factors in our education, like professional development. By professional development I mean things that don’t necessarily contribute to the final product of the thesis or a particular publication, but that contribute overall to making us better researchers. Like the famous quote goes: it’s the journey, not the destination that’s important. <o:p> </o:p> There are many ways to develop as a researcher. It may involve learning new statistical or methodological skills, or attending workshops, conferences and summer schools (which I’ve posted about previously). Whatever the form of professional development, I believe the key is that students take responsibility for their own development trajectory. While a lucky few people may benefit from a supervisor who goes out of their way to mentor, guide, and shape them as a member of the research community, not everyone can expect such treatment. Ultimately, it’s up to each of us individually to take advantage of development opportunities where they exist and create them for ourselves where they don’t. <o:p> </o:p> At UQ we’re very lucky to have an environment that supports professional development. Weekly seminars for RHD (Research Higher Degree) students are run on topics as varied as advancing statistical know-how to time management and achieving work-life balance. We also have an annual RHD day that celebrates the research of postgraduate students and offers an opportunity to present in front of a friendly audience. <o:p> </o:p> But there are also countless opportunities for professional development outside your research institution. Attendance at conferences is an absolute must. Not only do you get great ideas from hearing others talk, there are often round-table discussions or pre-conferences dedicated to key professional development topics. Consider travel in and of itself as a professional development opportunity. There is something about seeing the processes of different labs that broadens your research perspective. Not to mention the opportunity to discuss your research with people who know nothing about it. <o:p> </o:p> Oftentimes professional development requires stepping outside your comfort zone. It involves putting yourself in a position of admitting that you don’t know everything. Developing often means talking to and asking advice from people who scare you a little. Don’t forget that the benefits of professional development – that make you a better, more connected and impactful researcher – will ultimately far outweigh the temporary discomfort of putting yourself out there. The key thing to remember is that only you are truly responsible for your professional development. It’s through this responsibility that we can each achieve our own modest form of greatness.

Healthy Skepticism

2011-06-16T23:02:00.003+10:00

In my last post I told you about some of my research on crime-scene fingerprint identification. Turns out that it’s actually a human, not a computer, who decides whether a crime-scene print matches a suspect or not. To make a decision, examiners place prints side-by-side, visually inspect them, and declare that the prints match or not, based on their training and experience.

The problem is that, even though fingerprints have been used in criminal courts for more than 100 years, no properly controlled experiments on fingerprint examiners' accuracy in identifying perpetrators had been conducted. Some experts have even claimed to be infallible, but mistakes made to date have resulted in innocent people being wrongly accused.

We wanted to find out whether these experts were any more accurate than the average person, and to get an idea of how many criminals are being wrongly set free and how many innocents are being wrongly convicted. Well, it took two years of planning and a visit to every major state police department in Australia, but we finally managed to conduct the critical experiment.

We gave 37 qualified fingerprint experts and 37 UQ students pairs of fingerprints to examine and decide whether a simulated crime-scene print matched a potential suspect or not. Some of the print pairs belonged to the "criminal" while others were highly similar but actually belonged to an "innocent" person.

The experts correctly matched just over 92 percent of the prints to the criminal. But, they mistakenly matched 0.68 percent of the prints to the innocent person. That they made so few errors means pretty impressive human performance, in my opinion.

We concluded that qualified court-practicing fingerprint experts are exceedingly accurate compared to novices, but are not infallible. Our experts tended to err on the side of caution by making errors that would free the guilty rather than convict the innocent. Even so, they made the kind of error that may lead to false convictions.

So, was my initial skepticism unwarranted?

Well, I think healthy skepticism is the cornerstone of science and rational enquiry. Fingerprint examiners make important decisions that can put lives and livelihoods at risk and the burden of proof is on the profession to demonstrate the scientific validity and reliability of its claims. We’ve worked closely with examiners, who were were eager to demonstrate their abilities, and we’ve shown that expertise with prints provides a real benefit.

Even though this one experiment consumed my existence for two years, it was totally worth it!

Matt
mbthompson.com

Tangen, J. M., Thompson, M. B., & McCarthy D. J. (2011). Identifying Fingerprint Expertise. Psychological Science. [PDF] [Press Release]

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Finding the One

2011-06-14T15:27:00.004+10:00

Popular culture instils in us the belief that for everybody there is someone out there for them. That perfect person. That one in a million. It is a romantic notion and if we succeed in finding that ‘perfect one’ we are offered the promise of endless happiness and fulfilment. Unfortunately finding ‘the one’ is not easy. It can be a path of uncertainly, the right way to go is often obscured and wise men agree that we must be patient in our pursuit. In some ways this reflects how I feel about my quest for the perfect PhD topic.

I never had my heart set on any particular occupation. As I went through high school I felt with each passing year that my interests were becoming more focused, but selecting which course to study at uni was a long and difficult process. I finally decided to study psychology and that decision kept me focused and busy until last year when I realised that I would again be faced with another of those momentous life altering decisions. What now?

So I applied for graduate jobs and contemplated whether or not I should do a masters where I could put the thing things I had learned to good use by helping people in the ‘real world’. I even considered going abroad, but something about the buzz you get from conducting research, finding out things that no one before you has ever known and coming to understand what it is to be human kept me here at uni working in research.

So now that research has taken my fancy, it seems that the natural next step is to do a PhD. By many accounts, however, it seems that the world of academia is ultra competitive and cut throat and as a PhD student you only a few short years to stand out above a field of already tall poppies. It is also a long time and a lot of work to spend on something that you don’t love.

With this in mind, I want to find my one in a million - my perfect topic. Just like the path to true love, the path to the perfect PhD topic remains uncertain. In some ways I know that I may never find ‘the one’ and that I may grow to love another nice topic (but a girl can still dream can’t she?). Even though the perfect topic remains elusive, the quest through the maze has lead me to explore new ideas, try new techniques and meet new people and for now that isn’t so bad.

- Belinda

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Psychology: More than just listening!

2011-06-09T10:10:00.000+10:00

The first part of my post today is about understanding what psychology is. Psychology is the study of mind and behaviour, and I think many people (including myself) often forget the variety of ways in which this field can be studied.

Most people I meet outside of psychology a) think I mean clinical psychology when I say I study psychology b) don’t know you can do research in psychology and c) assume by research I mean give people surveys about their feelings.

Most students who I meet in psychology either aren’t interested in or don’t know about research. Generally they get into a bachelor of psychology to become a clinical psychologist. I can’t blame them for this, as I had no idea what a degree in psychology might lead to when I started. It was only in 3rd and 4th year that I began to understand a little about psychology research, and how fascinating it could be.

So most people don’t really understand how varied ‘psychology’ can be. However, even those who realise this tend to be interested in one area, and dismissive of others. They don’t realise how related these areas can be, and suffer from the opposite problem – they understand how varied psychology is, to the point of thinking of each area as a separate entity!

There are a lot of different people who end up studying ‘psychology’, and many of those aren’t happy with all the ‘sciencey-stuff’ they have to learn on the way to becoming a practitioner. Or in my case, unhappy with all the ‘people-stuff’ learnt on the way to studying brains. But each part of psychology can help inform others, and generally you can find a way that it applies to the area you’re most interested in. For example, child psychologists need to understand how adults work to see where the child would normally be heading. Organisational psychologists benefit from the latest research in how our attention works in particular settings. Clinical psychologists should be aware of the latest brain imaging studies regarding their patient’s conditions. And what is the use of doing all this theoretical and technical brain research if not to inform practical work? Neuropsychologists need to be aware of current practice to ensure their work is covering the important issues.

It really excites me when I find a student who is interested in research. It even excites me when I find a student who has HEARD that you can do research in psychology! And I think this side of psychology should be more publicised, with all the amazing and varied things that it can offer. Psychology isn’t just for people who want to help others, it’s for those interested in how people work, respond, feel, think, move, and react (and I’m yet to meet someone not interested in at least one of these aspects of humans). It ranges from how children’s sense of self develops, why crowds react in anger, how gamers' skills transfer, where in the brain emotions are processed, to when vision and auditory signals interact.

If you’re interested in learning how people work, consider taking a look at psychology, but don’t rule it all out if you don’t like the first thing you see, because there is so much on offer!

Nonie

 F

The results are in, and I got nothing!

2011-06-07T15:13:00.003+10:00

Many moons ago, eager to impress and to rise above the clatter of all the other undergrads, I started looking for RA work. I kept my expectations low. I expected that as an untrained, unqualified undergrad I'd be doing menial grunt work. I was not disappointed. I spent three weeks coding videos for specific behaviours of couples arguing in the lab. It was depressing. I walked away feeling like a bad boyfriend, but relieved that everyone fights about the same thing - money, sex and alcohol.

Despite my inauspicious introduction to the world of experimental psychology I knew what I wanted to do. Not too long later I was asked by the professor running the study if I wanted to take the lead on a bigger, more involved study.

He (and his colleague) hypothesized that a thing called Executive Function would beneficially assist men in impressing women. Executive Function, essentially, is your ability to inhibit certain behaviours. It's a very high level cognitive capacity, and relates to all kinds of things, like delayed gratification and being a successful social agent. However, Executive Function (or 'Ego Depletion') is a finite resource. A classic study involving this phenomena involved putting participants in a waiting room with fresh baked chocolate chip cookies (or a bowl of radishes) and permitting them to either a) eat some, or b) not eat any. Afterwards, participants from both conditions were asked to persist on some impossible problem solving task. Those who were tempted but barred from eating the warm, fresh cookies persisted for far less time than those who were allowed to eat the cookies, or those who were allowed (or not allowed) to eat the unappealing radishes.

Executive Function is more than just not eating a cookie, though. It's you inhibiting the urge to punch your boss when he screws you over, it's inhibiting sexual desire and action in inappropriate circumstances or with inappropriate people (i.e. situations with dire consequences), and the list goes on. The question is why, if we have such a capacity, is it finite?

Some evidence has been produced that demonstrated that two participants (one white, one black) in an American University, when asked to speak on race relations, had a more beneficial, enjoyable and positive experience when depleted than when undepleted (i.e. in command of their full executive faculties).

From an evolutionary perspective, though, this is fairly banal. What if Executive Function - when depleted - allows people to form more favourable social impressions ... on the opposite sex! There must be a reason it's finite, and it may be to facilitate a mating advantage. If, when depleted, we make better impressions, then we may earn ourselves an increased chance at the procreative act*.

So we took a number of participants, depleted half, and stuck them in a room with a pretty girl and a hidden camera. The girl was a confederate, and was in on the trick, but was blind to condition of each participant. They then engaged in a 10-minute unstructured conversation, after which time both parties went away and answered a survey about the experience.

What did we find? Well... nothing. Not a damn thing. No meaningful p-values at all... except one. Which showed that our manipulation did the opposite of what we intended.

So the study was a bust. My first study, was a bust. In fact, it was backwards. I was nervous - as a first time undergrad - walking into the professor's office knowing that there was nothing in the data. Was it me? Did I plan it wrong? Did I confound the study somehow? Did I miss something critical, something that would have turned the whole thing around?

Probably not. We probably used the wrong kind of depletion. For instance, warm cookies makes you persist less in impossible problems, but would it cause you to be unable to inhibit saying certain things.... Thus, it may follow that the updating task we used (an n-back task [download it here]) depleted the wrong thing. It may not stop you being a cagey conversation partner, but may make you a crappier black-jack player (a task which involves counting cards, working on and updating probabilities, and taking measureable risks).

Despite being nervous the Prof just said 'Such is research...' and that was that. It wasn't me, it was the nature of the beast. Now, as an undergrad, I have a much better idea of what I'm getting in to. When I do honours next year, and when I finally hit the PhD, I have a slightly improved idea of what to expect. Though I didn't get any decent p-values, I did get a far better idea of what it's like to be a researcher and academic... and a stronger, more clear idea about what I want to do, and how I want to go about it.

*Seriously... ever met a girlfriend/boyfriend when under the influence of alcohol?

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Posted by Rohan Kapitany, regular blogger at Labspaces.net on the blog Psycasm

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Apfelbaum EP, & Sommers SR (2009). Liberating effects of losing executive control. Psychological science, 20 (2), 139-43 PMID: 19170942 Muraven M, & Baumeister RF (2000). Self-regulation and depletion of limited resources: does self-control resemble a muscle? Psychological bulletin, 126 (2), 247-59 PMID: 10748642

Muraven M, & Baumeister RF (2000). Self-regulation and depletion of limited resources: does self-control resemble a muscle? Psychological bulletin, 126 (2), 247-59 PMID: 10748642

I feel your pain!

2011-04-15T14:28:00.004+10:00

I am writing this post to all international students who arrived alone in Australia for the first time and from totally different cultures and languages!

After Noni's post about her experience on first year of PhD, I eventfully decided to write the post I was thinking a while ago. "My first year of PhD", however my experience is a bit different. I think I did a very brave decision to come to Australia and do a PhD! And I just realize it now that after one year I can sit down and look back and observe myself struggling with all different sort of learning during the first year. I might even say, Last year for me was like the early months of a child in exploring the new world. Before coming here, I thought it's all about being a good student, which I always have been at least one step in front of all my peers. So I was not worried. My concerns began when I entered Brisbane and I met some young girls in college! I simply couldn't understand their speaking! I think language was the most problem I had during the first months. Before, I always thought my English is very good, well, in comparison to all other people in my country, that's right, but coming to Australia was absolutely a different experience. Specially because in my country the level of language you are speaking shows who you are, and I have spent years on improving my own language, and now, I see myself even some how poorer than a 10 years old in language.

So anyway, the first problem was loosing my confident on language. But this is just beginning of the story. I am coming from a totally different culture. After coming out of language shock and being able to have a look around, I found myself experiencing so many cultural differences. Even though in my culture I was a very independent person, I found it a bit hard to cope with the western view about friendship and communication.

Apart from all these, I needed to cope with new life style, new food, new ways of having fun!

I think the idea of "international student" is not only about being student, but about another life. You are like a 10 years old, who have a couple of months to fill the gap between 10 to 20.
I can imagine it still should be harder for undergraduate students who are coming from totally different cultures and languages. I don't know how many of these students we have at the school of psychology but I feel your pain! Being far from family for the first time, paying money to university probably through your parents and expectations of doing very well in exams, and having exams in another language. And these are beside all the things I said before. I can just say, well done! What ever you did so far, have been great! And you are so brave! I was living alone for ten years and I found it so hard to cope with the loneliness I encountered here, so I can imagine how hard it should be for a 19 years old. Now when I see international students in my classes I just feel like, how brave they are!

I know some coping skills (that I actually didn't use myself, as I was expecting myself to be far more stronger than that in the nearly third decade of my life) but I might write about it another time. Feel free to come and see me, if you wish! :)

Ameneh

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Inspiration vs. motivation

2011-03-16T14:36:00.005+10:00

I have survived one whole year as PhD student! It has been a crazy year of ups and downs, and I have learnt a lot about what doing a PhD really involves. I still have my confirmation to look forward to, however looking back at the past year I’d like to share one or two things I’ve learnt.

Firstly, to not compare where I am to where others are. It can be hard seeing what stages your friends are in their research. When they’re ahead, it looks scary hard, or they’re so advanced that you think you’ll never get there. If they’re just starting, they have so much potential! Each of our journeys are different (I enjoy stating the obvious), so we shouldn’t look to others for where our paths will take us.

We all start and finish in different places!

One of the most important things I’ve learnt, in my opinion, involves motivation and inspiration. Inspiration comes and goes, and we need to use whatever motivation we can find to ensure that when we lack inspiration, our work doesn’t come to a standstill. This means it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing the work for the “right” reason or the “wrong”, as long as it gets done!

My first blog post was about how difficult the decision to stay in my PhD was. I wasn’t able to find the motivation to continue working. However, once inspiration hit, I was full of ideas and enthusiasm! Throughout this past year, while inspiration has come and gone, I’ve had to find the motivation to come into work even when all I wanted to do is find a rich guy to marry so I'd never have to think again.

It’s on these latter days that doing work is hard. We’ve all experienced it – that feeling that you’re not getting anywhere, that everything you do it pointless, and you’ll never be as good as others. Some days you’re just not going to feel inspired, and you need to find other reasons to continue work. There are days when I have to remind myself that life as a researcher means flexible work hours and paid trips overseas!

It’s ok for these motivations to be whatever they have to be to keep you working. The end product is often rewarding in itself – a PhD! Or a published article, or successful experiment. However it takes time to get there, and you need something to keep you going in the meantime. If you can remember that you’re working to win a Nobel prize, great! But if you need to motivate yourself to finish an article with a chocolate reward, or plan a celebratory dinner to motivate yourself to finish writing up that paper, that’s fine too. It’s even ok agree to give a presentation or work late to try and impress someone (whether it be your supervisors, or that hottie down the hall).

The important thing to remember is that once you’ve decided you want to finish this PhD (or degree, assignment, experiment, or any other goal), it doesn’t matter what the motivation is to get through the tough parts, as long as it keeps you working in between those magical days of inspiration!

One you’ve decided you’re going to finish this thing, if you can’t find the “right” motivation, look for the wrong one!

Nonie

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Cognition in the Wild

2011-03-15T22:28:00.000+10:00

My posts usually attempt to impart some kind of pseudo-wisdom to unwitting students thinking of doing a PhD. Now I just want to tell you about a freakin’ awesome time I had.

I do basic cognitive psychology research in a lab on human identification of complex visual patterns. But I also try to make it so my findings can be applied in the wild. It turns out that fingerprints are a kind of complex visual pattern and, contrary to what you see on CSI, it’s a human fingerprint expert who decides whether a crime-scene print belongs to a suspect or not.

But, despite its 100 year history, there have been no properly controlled experiments on the identification accuracy of fingerprint examiners. They have even claimed to be infallible, but mistakes made to date have resulted in innocent people being wrongly accused. So, in my PhD, I’m trying to determine how accurate fingerprint examiners are and explore the psychology that affects matching accuracy.

Off the back of this, I was invited by some lawyers to a workshop to help figure out what forensic examiners should be claiming in court and even how best to present their claims to the jury. It was all expenses paid with fine wine, food and my own beach view room in Sydney. I was the only kid in the group and felt privileged to be there.

As Katie said last week, it’s hard to say no (even when you probably should be focusing on your research). But in this case, I just couldn’t resist ;-)

My Sydney view. Lawyers sure know how to spend their money.

Matt Thompson
mbthompson.com
(Post title stolen from Ed Hutchins)

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Biting off more than you can chew: How not to, and how to cope when you do

2011-03-10T13:49:00.001+10:00

I have been grinding my teeth in my sleep. A bit of an over-share, I know, but it’s relevant to this post. You see, the reason I’m stressed and ruining years of orthodontic work is the eight studies I need to run this semester. I will preface my post by pointing out that this is definitely not the norm in psychology – I don’t want to scare off any potential postgraduates, nor make new ones wonder what they have gotten themselves in for.

Here’s the way things often go during a PhD. You begin a young ingénue determined to run the perfect first study. After realizing that this is an impossible dream you settle for running the best study you can design. Data arrives. You excitedly write your first paper. Meanwhile, you begin running a second study to build on your findings. You remember your Honours research and set about writing it up for publication. You meet a new collaborator and design a study together. Your reviews come back for the first article you submitted – the editor has asked for new data. Your second study gave you completely different results to the ones expected. Now you have two new papers to write (both needing additional data), one to revise, and one currently under review. Wait, don’t you still have most of your proposed project to run? Repeat, ad nauseam.

Certainly there are different conventions in different areas of psychology and with different supervisors, so this may not be representative of everyone’s experience. It has been my experience, however. Hence, my desire to run eight studies in 12 weeks and subsequently poor dental state. If you would prefer to avoid this experience, I would recommend becoming familiar with saying ‘no’. You may need to say ‘no’ to potential collaborators who see an overlap with your work. You may also need to say ‘no’ to your supervisor if they recommend running an unnecessary study. You may even need to say ‘no’ to yourself, to stop exploring that new and interesting topic that has caught your fancy. I would definitely not recommend turning down every opportunity that comes your way during the PhD, but be judicious in the choices you make. Remember also that what might seem like a manageable number of projects at the start of your PhD can balloon out into a teeth-grinding fiasco by the end.

How I plan to cope with my behemoth study load this semester is with lots of forward planning and lots of external support. Firstly, I am making sure that I am only running studies that are absolutely crucial to finishing developed projects–no new topics, no matter how interesting. I am prioritizing those associated with my PhD and those that will be packaged into papers that need to be resubmitted to journals by a certain date. Secondly, I have made sure that my supervisor is on board. She is assisting me by hiring RAs to help with data collection and data entry. Without her support I couldn’t hope to accomplish all that I aim to this semester. With it I am hoping that data collection will be completely finalized for my PhD by June, leaving me a breezy six months to write my thesis and get the contents published.

For people just starting the PhD process I’ll give you this advice: don’t bite of more than you can chew. For those who already have, I recommend getting a good dentist.

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To a PhD and beyond

2011-03-09T09:56:00.024+10:00

Recently I attended a session on post-doctorial positions which prompted me to give some thought to my career options once (if) I finish my PhD. For those like myself who are interested in research and aspire to forge a career in academia the obvious and arguably necessary next step is a post-doctorate position. A post-doctorate position is exactly as it sounds. It is a position for those who have completed a doctorate and it is often used as a stepping stone into a fulltime academic position. In fact as I understand it, a post-doctorate is becoming a necessary position to fulfil in order to progress along the academic career path. The trouble is there is an oversupply of PhD students in the system and as a result the competition for securing a post-doctorate is fierce, very fierce.

Although I already had some appreciation for how just fierce this completion is, I would be lying if I said that walking out of the information session I didn’t feel a little anxious and unsettled. The CV’s of UQ post-doctorate and ARC post-doctorate recipients were intimidating. Far beyond what I can imagine, at this point in time, achieving over the next couple of years. There are of course other avenues to securing a post-doctorate position, namely academics recruiting you using grant funding. This I am led to believe is the more common method of securing a post-doctorate position though be aware, the competition for these positions would seem to drop off only marginally if at all. On top of this I came across the following article published in Nature by Jennifer Rohn which paints a pretty grim picture for aspiring researchers.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110302/full/471007a.html

All of this together, I can’t help but let my mind wonder to a number of my friends who many years ago completed 3-4 year business degrees and are now reaping the financial benefits.

So have I made a huge tiny mistake? Well time will tell I guess. Perhaps I am naive but for now I am comforted by the fact that I can honestly say I love what I do and that I wouldn’t trade it for close to anything. I chose this path because I am driven by curiosity to no other end than to finding answers to my questions and right now I am being funded to do so! That I think, as well as being infinitely cool, is a privileged position to be in and I intend to make the most of it as this opportunity may not arise again. (Warning! Cognitive dissonance detected)

May your curiosity drive you to success.

James

"In Pavlov We Trust"

2011-03-03T11:21:00.013+10:00

One new year, two new presidents and a HUGE range of social events, information sessions and good old support! But first, the story so far...

...The year was 2009, I began psychology inundated with preconceptions about clinical psychology – being a first year, and a naive one at that, I didn’t realise the full extent of where my degree could take me. All I knew was that I wanted to do something that directly related to the brain and helping people.

Interested in clinical neuropsychology, I began looking for a club that could connect me to people with similar interests. Luckily for me, orientation week was right around the corner! As market day finally arrived, I scouted the stalls for anything that resembled psychology; the Psychology Students’ Association seemed to be just that.

After joining I realised that the club was really a non-entity. There was barely a mention of the society and nobody really knew why it was there and what it did. For whatever reason, the PSA had fallen into disrepair and was barely surviving - which is through no fault of the previous PSA committee; it’s just that the enthusiasm from students wasn’t there. The next year appeared to be a catalyst for the PSA, with Zan and the other exec. putting in much effort to return the association to its former glory!

BUT! That was then and this is now. Voted in as president, I paired up with Ben Cochrane (Co-president), Maria Lee and Jocelyn Chak (Co-Secretaries), and Richard Bunker (Treasurer) to create a new face for the PSA. After supplying psychology merchandise and re-vamping the entire image, we collaborated and reached a decision as to what we will do for 2011.

The first thing will be to hold a “Back to School” themed trivia and band night where students can interact and socialise with each other. Continuing down the same road, more social events will be held, as will information sessions (PhD Roundtables, Honours information sessions, Masters Roundtables and more), general meetings and at the end of the year a psychology ball.

We really want this to be the BEST year ever for the PSA, so if you are interested at all, please feel free to contact us either by: email psacommittee@psy.uq.edu.au or via our social networking page and we will set you up with membership, merchandise or tickets to any of our events!
Rob (co-president)

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Learning for the first time all over again

2011-03-01T17:08:00.001+10:00

A new year has started. This means two things for PhD students - we again have to fight for car parks, and we have a new batch of first year students that “volunteer” to participate in our experiments.

I’ve been looking forward to this fresh batch of participants because I have a fresh batch of experiments I want to collect data for. The problem that I faced today, however, is that for the past few months of uni holidays I’ve only been testing a handful of my friends in my experiments. My friends participate in a lot of my experiments so I don’t need to spend too much time explaining the tasks... After testing the first few fresh students, I quickly found out how much I take my friends’ participation experience for granted.

For some of the participants who showed up for my experiment today, this may have only been their second day at university ever. Wow. I can’t even remember my first week of uni - I can’t imagine how I would have dealt with having to participate in an experiment that challenges my basic perceptual abilities...

And I realised that for someone who has never thought about cognitive psychology (and I can admit that’s probably 95% of everyone), participating in one of my experiments is probably outright weird. I ask my participants to rest their chin in a chin rest and to rest their head against a headrest that mostly immobilises head movements. Oh, and I turn off the lights so participants are in darkness. I then tell them to stare at flickering images on a computer monitor for about 30 minutes, pressing one of two buttons over and over again. I’m halfway through my PhD and even I find this completely abstract.

But I rediscovered one of the joys I take in testing completely naive participants - working out how to explain my seemingly abstract concepts in a way that any person can understand. This is a huge challenge for anyone doing research. You can’t use any lingo or jargon, you can’t talk about other researchers, and you can’t talk about statistics. Most importantly, being able to communicate clearly to an average Joe or Jane requires that you know exactly what you are doing and why.

I think it’s important for our participants to get something out of their participation, even if it’s just a basic understanding of a methodology. So with the new uni students who are learning how to do experiments for the first time, I am re-learning how to test new students!

Hopefully my participants don't end up feeling like Little Albert:

-Will

www.willjharrison.com

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2010 wrap up!

2011-01-05T18:23:00.001+10:00

The first post of 2010 summarised the UQ Psyc Blog’s first 6 weeks. I thought I’d start this year with another summary of the past year from January 1 to December 31, 2010. Our blog certainly has grown:

Instead of our original 5 writers, we now have 17 PhD students, postdocs, and academic staff writing stories on a regular basis. We’ve had over 3000 people view our site 9300 times!

The vast majority of views come from Brisbane, but as you can see in the following map, people from all over Australia now read the UQ Psyc Blog:

Last year only a handful of other countries had read the blog, but this year, a list with countries that haven’t read the blog would be shorter than countries that have. We’ve had hundreds of views from the US, and quite a few from Canada, and check out some of these other countries (10 points if you can spot the 1 view from Estonia!):

Stef Becker’s post “Reply to the Zero Sum Game: Should PhD students tutor?” got the most views while single-post-blogger Felicity had the second most with her post Purpose of the lanyard. Maybe her popularity will help me convince her to write another post! On average, people spent the most time reading Stef’s post - (4 mins 47 seconds compared to the blog average of 1 min 30 seconds).

About 35% of people who came to our website came via one of our self-promotions on Facebook, and it was good to see that 1742 visits (19%) were from people who bookmarked our site, or new the address from memory! We also got a plug from the official School of Psychology website, which drew in almost 1500 views! And I exposed myself in a video.

Thanks to the contributors who provided the regular, interesting content. Thanks to all our readers for, well, reading. 2011 will hopefully see the continuation of regular posts about some of the behind the scenes stuff of research, and a few more posts from overseas conferences - I alone have at least two planned this year.

As always, feedback is welcome, and if you have any suggestions, comments, or want to contribute to the blog, please write to me at the email address below.

-Will
www.willjharrison.com

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Psychology Christmas party!

2010-12-16T14:47:00.000+10:00

As psychologists, it's usually our patients who get to put their feet up (haha get it?), but last Friday night was this year’s end of year celebration for Psychology. This year has been very busy and productive for me, so I thought it was my personal responsibility to celebrate hard. We all headed to the Toowong Rowing Club and got our drink on...

Mark, me and James getting stuck into our first drinks.

Silly party-hat shannanigans with mystery person! Actually, it's not that much of a mystery - I just couldn't get a hold of this person to ask if I could use a photo where you could actually see her face!

Mark and James often take photos together, so I asked them to take some snaps of the party with my iPhone. What I didn't realise is that they were walking around pretending to take photos of people, but were actually using the phone's front camera to take photos of themselves! Hilarious guys...

Emma and Blake. Not sure if Blake knew how hard it was to take him seriously with that hat/jacket combo...

Blake and me after realising our entry fee only got us two free drinks!

All in all, it was a pretty fun party and a great way to celebrate a big year. If the UQ Psyc Blog ever gets a budget of more than $0/year, I'll be sure to host a party for all our readers!

-Will
www.willjharrison.com

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Excuses excuses...

2010-12-07T16:03:00.002+10:00

Well the UQ Psyc Blog is back after a brief hiatus. Life has been busy for all the bloggers - conferences, holidays, confirmation seminars, assignment and exam marking, and data collection are just some of the excuses I won’t use to justify why there hasn’t been a new post in a while. What I will use, is this (be sure to watch in full 720p):

That’s a “teaser” video for James and my experience at Psychonomics, a cognitive psychology conference held in St Louis, Missouri, USA. I presented a poster about my work on OKN, and James presented a poster about his work on how unexpected visual events catch our attention.

While we obviously had a lot of fun, a conference is by no means a holiday - if you get a chance to go to a conference, you are there representing yourself professionally, your supervisors and their reputation, and your university. So even though the 30 hour trip to St Louis left James and I a little jet lagged, we couldn’t use that as an excuse when talking about our research, and especially not when talking to the big names in our area.

A definite highlight of conferences is getting to meet people you've only really read or heard about. In my case, this happened during a dinner we had with our supervisors and their colleagues. We got to meet Chip Folk, who, if you search for his article “Involuntary covert orienting is contingent on attentional control settings”, you’ll see has been cited over 700 times (and that's just for one paper co-authored by Roger, our supervisor). We also got to meet Shu-Chieh Wu who still works at NASA where she met Roger, and is another of Roger’s co-authors.

From left: Chip, me, James, Shu-Chieh, Stef, Roger.

Conferences are a lot of fun, but they're also a lot of work. I'm certainly not complaining - in fact I've just submitted an abstract to attend another conference in 6 months!

Stay tuned for regular UQ Psyc Blog updates (again)!

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Come hear the UQ Psyc Bloggers talk about our research!

2010-11-03T18:25:00.000+10:00

Did you know PhD students contribute to about 50% of all the research published in the School of Psychology?

This Friday, 5 November, the School of Psychology is holding the inaugural Research Higher Degrees Day. 16 students from very different areas in psychology will be talking about all the cool things they've discovered during their PhD research.

Contributors to this very blog will be well represented on the day. Here is a list of our resident bloggers' presentation times and titles:

10:20 - 10:40am Rachel McDonald "Conflicting norms: Do multiple groups matter?"
11:20 - 11:30am Katie Greenaway "Of aggression, desire for money, and belief in psychic octopi: The strange and sundry effects of lacking control"
1:50 - 2:10pm Will Harrison "OKN suppression, perceptual mislocalisations, the universe, and you"
2:10 - 2:30pm Joyce Vromen "Does the spider always win the fight for attention? Top-down modulation in fear-relevant Interference"
3:30 - 3:50pm Matt Thompson "The psychology of crime-scene fingerprint identification"
4:10 - 4:30pm Nonie Finlayson "Attention! And the depths we go to capture it"

You can download the full program (which includes abstracts of each presentation) by clicking here. All Presentations will be in room S304 (Level 3 of Social Sciences Building, #24).

I'll leave you with the first slide of my presentation which will hopefully be indicative of the style of presentation I'll give, as well as arouse your interest in the subject of my presentation!

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A reply to a reply to the zero sum game: Should PhD students tutor?

2010-11-02T16:21:00.004+10:00

A couple of people have asked me what I thought about Stefanie's comments about tutoring.

I think she makes a good argument for the benefits of having a strong publication record. She is correct in saying that it is very difficult to get short-listed for a job without a strong track record. And I would certainly agree with her central premise that any time spent away from publishing might not be helping you get a job, but only if you are aiming to create your own job through applying for a competitive postdoc or if you are applying for a research only position.

Given, however, that the majority of positions that are advertised are teaching and research oriented positions, then I would argue that tutoring and perhaps teaching a course or two can be valuable experiences during your PhD. I have been on several selection panels for teaching and research positions, and candidates who have had amazing publication track records have not been short-listed, or not been successful at interview because they were not able to demonstrate an ability to teach the required courses.

It is also worth keeping in mind that if you are looking at jobs within Australia, there are many more positions outside of the GO8 universities than there are within the group of top tier universities. Most of our graduates aspire to work at research intensive institutions, however by not looking for opportunities more widely, graduates may miss out on some interesting and enriching jobs. Many of the lower ranked universities now have extensive research aspirations, however when recruiting new teaching and research staff, especially for entry-level positions, they place a strong emphasis on demonstrated teaching ability.

Graduates may be reluctant to apply for these positions due to a fear of having a high teaching load, however, with some planning and negotiation, it is possible to strike a balance between teaching and research. One of the great benefits of working at universities with a different culture is that recent graduates are given a great opportunity to grow both personally and professionally.

There are two other benefits of teaching that I think can sometimes be overlooked. First of all is that I don't think you truly come to grips with a research area until you have to stand up and explain it to a room full of people. It is a great way to learn more about areas of psychology that may be related to your research. Many of my research ideas have come from having to teach courses in psychology and law and social cognition. The regularity of teaching also trains you to become more disciplined in how you research topics, as you have to manage your time carefully.

The second benefit, as I see it, is that teaching gives you a chance to actually talk to students. It is by spending time with students and engaging them in the areas of research that you are an expert in that you interest them in psychology, and perhaps even your area of specialisation. I know that I would not have been successful in recruiting some of my early students if I hadn't done some teaching at the end of my PhD.

Now, all this is not to say that research is not important, quite the opposite. You have to strike a careful balance between publishing and teaching, and so my point is that you should do both. It is very easy to think that teaching is not important or valued, even after you get a teaching and research position. I think this is partly due to the mixed messages academics sometimes receive. Universities don't run as a monolithic organisation (despite how it seems), and the research goals and teaching goals are managed by somewhat separate parts of the university. Not only that, external pressures operate on these two goals at different times.

There has been a lot of noise lately in Australia about the ERA, which is the research quality assessment framework by which universities will be compared. This has generated a lot of focus on research productivity. There are however, major changes coming in how universities are evaluated and compared in terms of their teaching quality, and so we should all expect there to be a greater focus on this shortly. Not only that, but there is a growing awareness that teaching quality impacts directly on student outcomes such as attrition (which is a very expensive problem for universities), as well as demand for courses. And let's be completely honest here, it is through undergraduate students wanting to take our courses that we can afford to spend time on research.

So in sum, you should think about teaching and research as being inter-twined rather than separable. Doing each of them well enhances your ability to do the other. Excellent research attracts students, both at the individual and institutional level. Excellent teaching attracts research students at both levels as well.

(I wrote this at the start of UQ's Teaching and Learning Week, during which it was announced that UQ had won the maximum number of national teaching awards possible…)

Dr Blake McKimmie

Note: While I am the Deputy Head of School (Teaching and Learning), these comments reflect my own personal views on the matter!

Enriching the PhD experience

2010-10-26T08:08:00.021+10:00

After several years of hard work, I have just been awarded my PhD and look forward to “walking the stage” in December. My research topic was patient monitoring in anaesthesia with head-mounted displays – one that turned out to be fascinating, challenging, and amazingly rewarding.

When I first started, however, I had thought that the process would be relatively unexciting – enrol, work on your own for a few years, submit, and graduate – but soon discovered that Australian programs are actually remarkably flexible. In fact, your advisers and the university are often willing to help you “enrich” your education.

Enrichment involves participating in activities that, while not strictly necessary for completing your PhD, provide complementary educational experiences that help you become a better scientist. These activities include the summer schools, theses-by-publication, and science communication activities recently described on this blog, plus many more.

If you’re a big picture type of person who likes to take on challenges, then you’ll probably enjoy working on interdisciplinary research projects. For my thesis, I brought a background in software engineering to a team of psychologists, doctors, nurses, and biomedical engineers, and investigated fundamental problems (such as inattentional blindness with HMDs) in the exciting and dynamic environment of operating rooms.

Collaborations are the foundation of academic research; take a look at any journal article and you’ll probably find several co-authors. You can work with your fellow students on side projects (in addition to your PhD), and even expand your professional networks through collaborations. Hosting academic visitors in your lab and going on academic tours is a great way to find future collaborations and job opportunities. The global academic “family” that develops throughout your career is one of the greatest perks of academia.

Other opportunities for travel include internships and fellowships. Internships give you the opportunity to apply the research skills that you learn during the PhD to practical problems in industry. Research fellowships, on the other hand, let you collaborate with internationally renowned researchers and may be part of prestigious scholarship programs such as the Rhodes and Fulbright.

The gap between the academic and corporate worlds can be dramatic at times, but research commercialisation bridges that gap for the benefit of both. Your hard work and expertise helps the wider community, while industry provides funding and support to enhance or continue your research. It also happens to be a great way to supplement your scholarship and travel funds.

Beyond work-related activities, the flexibility of PhD programs also lets you cultivate hobbies that might otherwise be impractical or too expensive if you work in a typical corporate environment. I enjoyed surfing California’s world-class waves during an internship and went snowboarding in the 500+ inches of annual snowfall while on a fellowship in Utah… almost for free!

Enrichment activities are a great way to learn new skills, build up your CV, and enjoy the PhD journey. While there are many potential opportunities available for every student, you’ll have to take the initiative to find the right ones for you.

Dave Liu

PS: I’ll be giving a more detailed talk to HFES-UQ members about my own enrichment experiences in the near future. If you’re a prospective or current PhD student and would be interested in attending, feel free to contact me at naskies@acm.org

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The final stages: An account of thesis submission and review

2010-10-22T07:37:00.002+10:00

My PhD thesis was compiled one rushed November. I plonked together some papers with a linking page between each and wrote my introduction and discussion sections. “Don’t spend too long on it – only three people are ever going to read it”, intoned my advisor. “Keep it simple, don’t waffle on. Your papers are what count.”

Waffle I did. This was my Magnum Opus, was it not? As far as theses go it was still on the short side, but not as succinct as it could have been.

It was submitted in December. I knew it wasn’t the most carefully pruned piece of writing in history, but I was proud of my achievements. Now a move overseas. The thesis was gratefully out of mind.

It took until the end of May to receive my reviews. One assessor liked it, thought it could have been more fleshed-out, but was happy with it overall. The other assessor, a preeminent scientist in my field (assessed 50 theses, supervised 23)… hated it. Dismay. Some choice quotes from the review include:

“It wanders, it addresses important points then slides into other things. It’s a mess.”

“In conclusion, the thesis is poorly organized and self-contradictory.”

Ouch.

Perhaps arrogantly, this was not what I had been expecting. The positives noted were for “a substantial body of innovative experiments… that lead to provocative results”. However, upon reading the assessor’s comments, it became clear that his reading was… less than complete. He pointed out that I had not done an important control experiment, rendering some of my main conclusions invalid. However, I had indeed done this very experiment. More broadly, it seemed like this assessor had missed the central point of what I was trying to say. He saw contradictions where I did not, and seemed to miss paragraphs of my discussion where (I feel) his concerns were addressed.

The lesson I’ve learned from all this is that, just as for journal articles, it is important for a thesis to be clear and concise. Don’t feel that your introduction and general discussion must provide some great new insight, or be an epic work of deep scholarship. Summarising what you did and saying what you think it means is sufficient (even if this feels on the short side).

It also helps to consider who your markers will be, and what academic system the likely markers work in. One of my assessors (the first) was Australian – hence the feeling towards a longer thesis and “more evidence of traditional scholarship”. The second assessor worked in the US. I am told that my 103-page thesis (including preambles, but with 26 of those pages formatted as two-column journal articles) is a little on the long side for a US audience – perhaps this is why it was only skimmed?

That said, don’t worry too much about the actual thesis write-up: if the chapters are all manuscripts (hopefully submitted / accepted), you can’t go far wrong. It’s worth noting here that even though the second reviewer believed I’d missed a crucial control experiment, his recommendation was still “pass with minor revisions”. At the end of the day, my thesis passed, and three people have read it (well, some at least). Focus on turning out a couple of manuscripts during your candidature and the actual thesis becomes a formality.

Tom Wallis

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Reply to the Zero Sum Game: Should PhD students tutor?

2010-10-19T13:28:00.002+10:00

This post was written by Stefanie Becker.

In a recent blog (Zero Sum Game) James asked whether it’s a good idea to tutor during your PhD. Let’s assume that you need to earn some money: Is tutoring the best option? Tutoring is highly paid, and you’ll gain some teaching experience, so you may think that tutoring is the thing to do, especially if you want to apply for a university job later.

Weeell, I must say I disagree: Actually, in my view, tutoring is advisable if you’re NOT striving for a university job. However, if you want to take on a job that promotes your university career, the smartest thing is to get the money in by being a research assistant (RA), and in particular, an RA to a productive researcher. The reason is that the researcher may include you as co-author on his papers if you're doing a good job. And, let's not be mistaken about that, PAPERS ARE EVERYTHING.

If you want to stay at a university, you'll need a strong publication record. Even when you want to be a lecturer, there will be many applications for each lecturer position, and the applicant with the most publications will get the job. Of course, there is some weighting, with first-author publications being rated much higher than co-author publications, publications in peer-reviewed journals being regarded more highly than book chapters, etc., and there will be considerations about the field in which you've published, and possibly, the methods you've used in the past, etc., but the most decisive selection criterion for a university job is "number of publications".

Teaching experience may matter at some later stage in the decision processes of universities, but long long long before that, the university will ask (1) whether you are able to produce high-quality research on your own (hint: always publishing with the same senior person may work against you), (2) whether you are able to attract funding, (3) whether your expertise matches with the department, (4) whether you are easy to work with, and only THEN may somebody ask, "Oh and by the way, what courses have you taught in the past?" General teaching experience may not even count for much, but experience with a specific course may get you some points -- but note that it is VERY improbable that this will make a difference in the selection process, because usually, the differences in the other, more decisive, criteria will already determine the rank of each applicant. If you do need teaching experience, it’s likely that experience from teaching one course or being tutor once is sufficient to fulfill the criteria – so you just need to tutor for a single semester.

If you want to teach (for reasons outlined in the full essay), then my advice would be: Start tutoring when you've got your publication record up to where you want it to be. Warning: If you want to go to Harvard, you should go for 7 or even 8 publications and no less than 4 first-author papers; if you’re targeting one of the top-universities in Australia, you may get in there with significantly less, but to be on the safe side, go for at least 5 publications (3 of which should be first-author publications). You may always get in with less, but if you want to make sure... Well, the competition is fierce and growing fiercer every year. As impossible as the numbers above may sound, the people you’re going to compete with have these numbers of publications, or even more. Check out other PhD students in your field of work! I am always amazed at the achievement levels of current PhD students, and I am always happy that I am not competing with the "new generation", but with a slightly lazier bunch. :-)

On the other hand, there is really no reason to cling to universities or research institutions. Your PhD certificate is like a magic door opener to positions that you have never even dreamed of. With a PhD in Psychology, you are eligible for several high positions in well-known and prestigious organizations and companies. You can be a project manager at Siemens and earn in excess of $90,000 per year instead of the $60,000 the university will pay you. You could be working in quality management and control, consulting, or have a high position in administration; you could be an editor or freelancing journalist for a scientific or not-so-scientific journal -- the possibilities are endless.

So, the good news is: Once you've got your PhD, you've proven yourself to be suitable for almost any job that requires brains. The skills you have acquired during your PhD – making yourself familiar with a new research field and its methods, making logical inferences, deriving or making predictions, testing of a hypothesis, taking a critical stance towards the work of peers and your own, writing research reports, working in a team, dividing tasks among multiple people, and so on and so forth – all these are typical managerial tasks and skills, which are required at various different stages in all large organizations. And, non-university employers will NOT base their decisions about employing you on your publication record. So, if you can conceive of a life outside university, there is no reason to avoid tutoring during your PhD -- unless it keeps you from working in the company or environment you're interested in.

If you can’t imagine doing anything else but hanging around university: Check out some cool companies, write them an email and tell them that you’re going to have a PhD in 2 years, and you’d like to do some voluntary work at a companies’ robotic department, or developing sky cars and jet-packs... because you know? with the PhD, the sky is no limit! ;-)

--Stef

Editor's note: Are you a postgrad or academic? What do you think about Stef's post? If you'd like to write a reply, please contact Will Harrison.

A zero-sum game?

2010-09-23T16:18:00.010+10:00

A few weeks ago I received an email from a colleague in the late hours of the night regarding a manuscript I am working on. Attached was a paper recently published by researchers overseas investigating an effect very similar to that which I am attempting to publish. Although my immediate reaction was one of panic I thought it best to neglect the paper at least until the following morning as I saw no point in jeopardising a night’s sleep. Alas the damage had been done and after a restless hour or so in bed it became evident that sleep was a remote possibility. I reluctantly began reading the paper.

Long story short, having read the paper I’m optimistic that my work still has something to offer and will hopefully still be published. However a visit to the researcher’s website invoked a second wave of anxiety. This particular researcher, who is now a postdoctoral fellow, had four first author publications and eleven publications in total prior to completing their PHD.

This is not a discussion of quantity versus quality; I just wanted to raise the perhaps bleeding obvious point that as PHD students who aspire to forge a career in research, we are inevitably competing against other PHD students for career opportunities. Thus the bar is determined by the hours put in and quality of work produced by the post-grad researchers in our respective fields.

As a relatively new PHD student this is something I’d, until recently, neglected to think about. I’ve been travelling along optimistic (naively?) that as long as I conduct good science and work hard the publications will come and opportunities will arise. Ultimately though, as hard as I may work, if those around me are working harder then I’m in trouble.

Having discussed this with my supervisors they are strongly of the opinion that 99.9% of my resources should be devoted to publishing papers and that time spent away from this endeavour carries with it a cost. Initially I scoffed at the idea that the little time I spend away from my research is detrimental. The more I think about it though the more I’m beginning to questioning whether I’ve struck the right balance between PHD work and additional work such as tutoring and RA-ing. I’m even questioning whether I should be writing this blog given this could be 400 words towards my manuscript...

The reality is that time is a precious commodity in this business and it would seem that to succeed it must be treated as such. So how do you strike the right balance in what in many ways seems to be a zero-sum game?

Thoughts?

James Retell

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Your life in Three Minutes

2010-09-16T17:59:00.001+10:00

If you had to tell a complete stranger a summary of your life in just three minutes, what would you say? That’s what the Three Minute Thesis Competition is about... sort of.

This year, resident UQ Psyc blogger Will Harrison is in the UQ finals of the Three Minute Thesis Competition and has to summarise his PhD research in three minutes. Will has to explain the topic of his research, why it’s important and why his results are so special. And if he takes even one second longer than three minutes, he’ll be disqualified.

The main challenge of the competition is for the PhD student to explain their research so anyone can understand it. This means not using any technical language, such as referring to specific parts of the brain—the general public simply don’t know what the ‘parietal cortex’ is.

Although it only takes three minutes, Will has put a lot of time and effort into preparing his presentation—as I’m sure the other seven competitors have—and the stakes are high. The UQ winner gets a $5,000 travel grant and goes on to compete against the winners from universities across Australia and New Zealand.

If you want to come along and here about some of the amazing research going on at UQ (or just to support Will), the finals are being held next Monday 20 September at 3.30pm in the UQ Centre. For more info about the finals and to register your attendance follow this link: http://www.uq.edu.au/grad-school/three-minute-thesis

Here Will’s summary:

“Have you ever failed to find something even though it was right in front of you? To “see” something we are looking for we need to do more than just “look” for it - not only do we need to move our eyes around, but we also need to move our attention to notice the things that are important to us. My aim is to understand how our brains coordinate eye movements with shifts of attention to accomplish simple tasks like playing sports or crossing a road. My findings tell us why we sometimes fail to see something right in front of us and may help us to understand medical conditions in which vision and attention are compromised following a stroke.”

Hope to see you there!
Matt Thompson

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School’s in for summer: The joys of summer schools in psychology

2010-09-14T00:40:00.005+10:00

Other entries on this blog have mentioned the chance for travel as a major perk of the PhD lifestyle. Speaking as someone who is currently halfway through a six-week trip to Europe, I wholeheartedly agree. So far the highlight of my trip has been the summer school organised by the European Association for Social Psychology. This summer school, like others, offered the opportunity to delve into a research topic over an intensive two-week period. Oh, and did I mention that it took place on a Greek island?

I’ll give a bit of background for readers who are unfamiliar with the concept of a summer school. Many psychological associations hold these events for postgraduate students every few years. They can last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks and are designed to bring postgraduate students together to explore a particular research topic and collaborate with likeminded researchers.

The typical format is of three to five topic “streams” with an internationally renowned expert (or two) acting as workshop coordinator. Students work on a broad research theme (e.g., intergroup emotions) in workshops and often break into smaller workgroups within the workshop to develop research projects. Many students go on to run and publish the studies they design at summer schools.

Summer schools are a different from conferences. First, they are designed specifically for postgraduates. Second, they give the opportunity to learn intensively about a specific research topic for an extended period. Third, they often involve more raucous partying than conferences, because postgrads can be sure that their supervisor isn’t watching.

I really enjoyed my recent summer school experience. Not only did I get to explore a new research area with top-notch experts to guide me, I also have a research project ready to run with international collaborators. Summer schools give people the intellectual freedom to move beyond the narrow research project that makes up a PhD. We tend to get so bogged down in our own little research topic that it will be a breath of fresh air to work on a completely unrelated project for a while.

In addition to more practical outcomes, I have developed professional relationships and collaborations that will continue throughout my career. It was also bloody good fun and is probably the only time in my career that I will attend a research meeting in my swimsuit.

I think that experiences at international summer schools are particularly important for Australian PhD students. We are so isolated from the rest of the world, it is important for us to develop reputations and professional relationships overseas. I would urge all postgraduate students, particularly those who have just started their PhDs, to attend a summer school in your research field. I can’t guarantee it will be held on a Greek island, but at least you will get the chance to travel!

For interested parties, UQ will be hosting the Australasian Summer School in Social Psychology in 2012.

It's who you know

2010-09-07T09:35:00.002+10:00

Research is about who you know. I’m not suggesting that if you know a journal editor, your article will get published without the hard yards. What you know is still important.

I’m saying that, as research is all about sharing ideas, it stands to reason that the more people you know, the bigger variety of ideas you’re exposed to. If you know intelligent or creative people, you’re going to be involved in smarter or more novel ideas. Other PhD students are great for bouncing ideas around, and also help you learn about other fields. Your advisors not only give you access to extensive knowledge about their field; they have a lot of experience with theories and ideas.

The people you know also affect the people you have access to. If your advisor has international collaborators, you have access to a broad and prestigious range of people in your field. If you’re part of a lab group, there are all the students and researchers involved. Attending school events expands your horizons to different fields and specialties, opening opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations.

Furthermore, the people you know can change how you keep up to date with research and news. If you don’t know anyone, new ideas and information are limited to your own imagination and what you read about in text books. On the other hand, you could read certain blogs because your friends do, attend particular conferences with your advisors, or even participate in competitions your co-workers get involved it, all of which exposes you to different people, research, and ideas. The people you meet might collaborate with you in new ways, expose you to better job opportunities, and expand your knowledge field.

It is important to take advantage of the opportunities presented. The people you know could be your future advisors, employers, collaborators, a great source of new research or ideas, or just a friend to keep you sane during PhD!

Being somewhat of an introvert, I often find it difficult to take my own advice, but when I eventually emerge from my lab, the benefits always outweigh the outside light burning my eyes. In my field (cognitive psychology) I have a huge access list. Not only friends and advisors with seemingly unlimited pools of knowledge and international colleagues, but also a large and active school of psychology, collections of psychology blogs through friends, up-to-date journal subscriptions through my university, state-of-the-art 3D vision lab, and vision mailing lists. I still need to put in the hours, but by taking advantage of all of this, the work I do has a much greater impact on my future.

Now, I apologise, as this somewhat ruins the stereotype some people have that academics are socially inept: most wouldn’t have a job if this were the case! We’re not socially awkward, you just don’t understand us ;)

Nonie

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Advisor, not “supervisor”

2010-08-31T16:03:00.005+10:00

I want this blog entry to be a reminder to those who are already doing a PhD, and a point of consideration for those who are planning on starting a PhD. I want to clarify a misuse of terminology that I think every PhD student has probably made at one point or another, or, like me, far more often. PhD students don’t have “supervisors”, we have “advisors” -- the distinction between these two words is very important.

When I first started my PhD, I soon realised I could run pretty much any experiment I wanted (like this one) with minimal involvement from my advisors. In fact, a lot of students find it quite (frustratingly?) simple to go weeks at a time without even speaking to their advisors.

Sometimes going long periods without seeing the people you work with isn’t a good thing, but, advisors aren’t “supervisors” who stand over your shoulder checking your every step. PhD students need moderated independence from their advisors so we can learn how to stand on our own feet, work through some problems on our own, and learn from our own mistakes.

For me, the flip side to having independence from my advisors is knowing when to go to them for help, to clarify my thoughts, to ask “dumb” questions, or just to tell them I’ve got the shits with an experiment. Remember, PhD advisors are experts in their fields, and they’re probably familiar with a lot of the problems students encounter on their PhD Journey.

I encourage everyone to remember that the role of a PhD advisor is to give advice, not to supervise. If you’re already a PhD student, ask your advisors questions about things you’re not sure of and how best to plan for the road ahead. If you’re thinking of doing a PhD, find an advisor who you will feel comfortable going to for advice.

Personally, I like to try new things and test what I’m capable of doing on my own, but if there’s something I need advice on, I ask my advisors.

-Will
www.willjharrison.com

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The quest for a 'useful' PhD topic

2010-08-27T09:57:00.008+10:00

One of the first challenges a PhD student faces, is coming up with a PhD topic. This may not sound particularly challenging, but keep in mind that you will largely be dedicating the next three years of your life to this topic. When first setting out on my quest to find a PhD topic, I went well packed with my supervisors' support, a healthy dose of enthusiasm, as well as a list of requirements that my potential topic would have to meet. In short, the list I had created looked something like:

The first four points, from the beginning, provided some guidance in my search for a topic. However, the fifth point initially seemed to hinder my progress more than that it helped. I should have foreseen this, of course, when changing it from is useful for society to is 'useful' for society. Assuming that I am not citing somebody else's work, quotation marks in my writing usually indicate that it is unclear, even to myself, what I am trying to say.

Even though I didn't know what I meant exactly with the fifth point, I did know what I didn't mean. I didn't start my quest looking for a PhD topic that would revolutionise society [I'd probably never have finished in that case]. Neither was I looking for a topic that would make the world knock on my door in awe to find out about my research [idem ditto].

Though, had I known then what I know now, I clearly would have chosen chocolate as my topic.

Instead of exhausting myself trying to find a PhD topic, I saved a small amount of energy to ponder on the mysterious meaning of 'useful' for society. For many psychologists 'useful' may mean contributing to improving treatments for people suffering from debilitating mental disorders. But did it mean that to me too? No, I was quit sure that wasn’t the 'useful' I was looking for. Instead I expected that mystery would be more likely to be unraveled if I focused on everyday behaviour in everyday people.

After a couple of days largely applying Unconscious Thought Theory I agreed with myself that what useful means to me is that my research should have some value outside the lab. No matter how small. To keep myself motivated over the next few years, my research has to centre around a topic that could potentially be interesting for everyday people and their everyday behaviours.

In the end, the fifth point on my list proved a critical factor in deciding on my PhD topic. While I started out looking at how a specific type of emotional stimuli influences attention, the first, fourth, and fifth points on my list have lead me to wonder how attention is influenced by emotions themselves.

Though I cannot rule out that one day I may fall victim to media temptation, abandon the above topic and dedicate my life to finding out how attention is influenced by white chocolate.

- Joyce

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Atypical day in the life...

2010-08-20T11:23:00.004+10:00

Despite this blog being called ‘a day in the life of a psychologist', and Will pretending that he spends his days driving around Brisbane and on skiing holidays, there hasn’t been a description of what us PhD students do all day. This is not only because there are so many wildly different areas of research, but also because our work and personal lives vary so much.

For example:

People have many different jobs. These may include (on top of being a PhD student):
Tutoring, research assistant work, programming, part time checkout chick, research guinea pig, babysitting, bee keeping (you never know...)

Our work can also vary greatly depending of the stage of the experiment or study.
We could be frantically researching to ensure our brilliant idea hasn't been done yet, or stuck in the lab trying to figure out where our programming went wrong. We could be wading through data and statistics, or writing an article that is going to make us famous.

Schedules vary depending on the size of your social circle!
There are the coffees and lunches, and then the journal clubs, meetings, presentations and seminars. If you're really nice, or just can't think of an appropriate excuse in time, half of your life is spent doing friend's experiments for them!

I would like to share one such day. This was my Thursday:

Arriving at uni at 8:30 (damn car parks filling up so quickly), the first half hour was spent catching up on emails and facebook (this is the last I mention this, although you can be sure it occurs regularly throughout the day of a student).
9-10am: Analysing data and doing statistics for my first completed experiment (yay!)
10-11am: Writing an outline for presenting these results to my supervisors.
11-2pm: Testing participants. As this primarily consists of watching first year psychology students press buttons, this also allowed me time to practice a speech, grab lunch, and start programming a new experiment.
2-3pm: Finished programming the experiment, and then decided it was terrible.
3-5pm: Analysing the latest experiment (those were the last participants needed!), and adding these results to my presentation outline.

At 5pm was the three-minute thesis competition. I do not like public speaking, however being a researcher requires presenting your research, so I entered this to get feedback for future reference. I will leave the details of this competition to Will Harrison, and offer my congratulations for his winning it! For those interested, the SBS finals for this take place on the 1st Sept, come along and support psychology!

Keep in mind that my day is in no way indicative of how others spend their time. For example, while I tend to stick to the hours of 8:30 to 5, many of my colleagues stay after hours and weekends. I prefer to keep my weekends free for things like drinking, sleep, trips to Melbourne, and bacon.

Nonie

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Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog?? Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Retreat!

2010-08-12T15:14:00.002+10:00

Last week, Katie gave us some tips on how to write a lot. Her best bit of advice was to allocate an hour, lock yourself away, and write. Although sometimes—especially with the constant interruptions and the regular chime of email notifications—an hour just isn’t enough.

Each year, academic staff receive strategic funds to spend on improving their research or teaching. Rather than being selfish and getting an iPad, my supervisor treated Wen and I to a writing retreat week on Stradbroke Island. Although there was lots food and even more red wine,

it was largely a serious affair. We rented a beautiful house near the beach and severed our internet connections...

We put on our pajamas, brewed some coffee,

and wrote...

And wrote...

And wrote. Until Wen’s pet parrot could no longer bear the boredom and proceeded to chew everything in sight.

The lab writing retreat was a great experience and we each achieved a lot. So if you have writing to do (and who doesn't), I suggest putting yourself in a situation conducive to writing—whether it's escaping to an island for a week, or just unplugging the net for a couple of hours ;-)

Matt Thompson

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The Code for Success

2010-08-10T15:44:00.011+10:00

Three weeks ago I set myself the goal of learning how to program experiments and run data analyses using MATLAB. Up until now I've been working with a program called Presentation Neuro-Behavioural Systems which uses a language loosely based on C and Basic. Although the capabilities of Presentation meet my programming needs at the present, a number of my colleagues currently work with or are switching to MATLAB and I feel I should follow suit. On top of this MATLAB is just a far more powerful software package than Presentation, capable of performing complex data analyses that presentation can not.

So how much progress have I made over the last three weeks? Conceptually very little sadly, though I have manage to successfully write my first MATLAB based program which displays a series of Harry Potter images. It's always a bonus when you can mix work with pleasure :)

Learning a new programming language is tough and it doesn't come naturally, at least not to me. I find programming is very much a love hate relationship, especially when you're starting out. I seem to spend a lot of time cursing profusely at the computer and flailing my arms around, frustrated that MatLab won't display or do what I want it to.

In fact I find it much like trying to learn a musical instrument. You know the sound you want to produce, it's all there in your head, yet when you try to play it it just sounds like white noise. The same goes when I'm learning to program. I know exactly what I want my experiment to look like and I just wish I knew all the MatLab commands to make it happen instantly. Instead my efforts are met with countless errors telling me that my script reads like nonsense.

Perseverance is the key though because the upside is worth it. Finally getting a line of code to work or even better an entire program is incredibly satisfying! It's like a shot of adrenaline and when it happens make sure you've got a beer on hand cause you're going to want to ride the high...seriously. Victories can be short lived so make them count.

So if you’re considering research in the field of psychology, particularly cognitive psychology, it can be extremely beneficial if you have some programming ability. Possessing even just basic programming skills affords you the freedom to tweak and optimise your experimental parameters and conditions such that you maximise your chances of finding the effects you're after. And we all know how fickle some of our effects can be sometimes.

Going into honours I'd had zero experience programming and my supervisor told me I'd have to learn a programming language in order to program my experiment. Suffice to say I felt like I was up sh*t creek without paddle. It was hard work and a lot of hours at the computer for not much immediate reward. It certainly paid off in the long run though and I'm very thankful I was forced to learn it. So my advice for any prospective honours or post-grad students, if you get the opportunity to dabble in some programming, jump at it. Being able to program has certainly opened up a lot of opportunities in research for me.

Happy programming

James

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How to write a middling to fair amount

2010-08-05T08:27:00.005+10:00

It’s the bane of every PhD student’s existence: writing. You’ve conducted the research, analysed the data, made sense of it all…and then you have to put metaphorical pen to paper. What was so clear in your head all of a sudden seems clunky and rambling when it’s written down. That witty title you thought of a week ago is trite when you’ve read it fifteen times in a row. So you agonize over sending the draft to your supervisor and end up missing the deadline. Again.

Unfortunately, this is a normal experience for a lot of students. People often have angst over writing – is it good enough, does it make sense, if they read it will people finally recognise me for the fraud I am? The natural response when people feel like this is to avoid writing all together. This is not a functional response.

So the trick to reducing angst about writing is to do it. A lot. In his book How to Write a Lot, Paul Silvia offers this advice: write every day. Not only should you write everyday, you should jealously guard your writing time and lock yourself away like a hermit to do it. This might seem a bit excessive and impractical for those of us who share an office with other postgrads. So what is another option?

Peer pressure, pure and simple. Have other people pressure you into writing when all you want to go is put it off and collect more data. Silvia recommends starting a writing group for people who need social support (or pressure) to meet their writing goals. In a writing group, you publicly announce your writing goals then own up the following week if you haven’t achieved them.

I can speak as someone who is a member of a postgraduate writing group that this system doesn’t always work so well. Being friends with the people who are supposed to berate you for not meeting your goals can make it hard to get critical feedback on your progress. We have recently found a way around this problem, however: money.

We each put $20 into the pot at the start of semester. Then we commit to a group goal – we will each write at least 500 words a week every week. That includes weeks that we are testing, marking, and on holiday. If at the end of semester we have made the target number of words, we have a rocking party with pizza and beer. If we don’t make the target, we donate the money to something we all agree is heinous and should never be funded, like the Society for Drowning Kittens for Fun.

I’ll keep you guys updated on our progress. For now, think about starting your own writing group and get creative with ways to stay on track with your writing. Silvia’s philosophy is that it doesn’t matter what you write about, so long as you are writing every day. Try writing a blog entry for the UQ Psyc Blog. This one is 513 words – that’s my target met for the week!

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Lums and posters

2010-07-30T10:40:00.016+10:00

As part of University-wide centenary celebrations, our school recently held an open day to catch up with our psych alumni (or ‘lums’, as termed by our head of school).

Head of School, Prof. Bill von Hippel welcomes our 'lums'.

The day started with a few short presentations about cutting edge research in the school. Prof. Kim Halford showed us evidence for the efficacy of his couples-based intervention, used to help deal with stressful events. Next, Prof. Jason Mattingley spoke about the emergence of cognitive neuroscience as a discipline and how neuropsychological conditions, such as synaesthesia, can inform us about how the brain works. Prof. Virginia Slaughter told us about her work on theory of mind and how it helps us understand autism. Finally Prof. Jolanda Jetten told us that having multiple social identities, as opposed to one, increases our quality of life in many ways.

Each of the profs giving their presentation.

There was also a poster session where a bunch of students, including Will, Matt, Wen, and I, got to show off our research to the lums (James could have presented his EPC poster but he lost it somewhere). Since I hadn't made a poster before, I saw this as a golden opportunity to get in some poster practice prior to the conference in October.

A bunch of ladies engrossed by my poster.

Here you can see Will digressing from his poster and educating the crowd with an impromptu lesson in eye-poking.

Will demonstrating the ‘two-pronged’ approach on a volunteer audience member.

Afterwards we had a small ceremony to congratulate our lums on their successes since leaving the school. Each had an opportunity to speak about their experiences here at UQ and it was great to hear what the school was like before I was born (did you know that McElwain was a real person and it’s pronounced MAC-Elwain?!) The lums spoke about how some things have changed (everyone used to be clinical, now there’s an even spread across all disciplines) and how some things are still the same (the tearoom still hosts lively lunchtime discussion).

Anyway, it was great to meet some of our lums, especially when we blew their minds with our research!

Thanks to Matt for most of the pictures :)

- Morgan

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Double black semester

2010-07-27T15:02:00.000+10:00

Doing a PhD is like any other job where you’re entitled to take about four weeks holiday per year. Unlike fellow blogger Matt who sometimes spends his holiday rubbing shoulders with legends of psychology, I chose to spend my last holiday in beautiful Queenstown, New Zealand. I just got back from nothing but 10 days of snowboarding, hot chocolates, amazing restaurant meals, and wine tours.

Taking a break at Coronet Peak, NZ.

But for it to have been so much fun, this holiday actually took quite a lot of psychological preparation for me - normally when I go on holidays I fill my spare time with bits and pieces of work that I need to catch up on, reading journal articles in my spare time, and replying to emails of students’ questions.

The truth is, three years is not a long time to do a PhD (in the US as a comparison, a PhD program usually takes about seven years), so I had quite a bit of anxiety about losing almost two weeks of time that I could be getting a lot of work done. But what’s the point of going on a holiday if it’s just going to stress you out? That would be ironical.

I decided that I wasn’t going to look at any data, I wasn’t going to write a word of a manuscript, I wasn’t going to program, and I’d only reply to emails if it seemed urgent.

And it almost worked - I didn’t stress out about what I needed to get done, and I didn’t stress out about not doing any work for such a long period of time. I say it “almost” worked because I couldn’t help myself but to think about all the cool experiments that could be done involving snowboarding, but that just made me enjoy myself more.

For example, I’d like to know if beginner snowboarders’ estimates of the angle of a steep slope are less accurate than professionals’ estimates. I think beginners would overestimate the steepness of a slope, especially if they were standing up the top! Hopefully one day I can get funding to test this out.

So I’m back into things this week, madly scrambling to get an eye tracker working at QBI, learning a new programming language and getting an experiment running by next week, and preparing for tutoring for a subject I’ve never tutored before. It’s only week one, and this is already what my calendar looks like:

-Will
www.willjharrison.com

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog?? Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

PhD GOOOOAAALLLLLL!!!

2010-07-13T16:24:00.014+10:00

Earlier this year I told my boss that I wanted to start a PhD after I return from a conference in October. It would really be the perfect time to st
art. See, I’ve promised my girlfriend we’ll go to Brazil for the 2014 Soccer World Cup. The 2010 World Cup has just finished, meaning if I start after the conference in October, then it gives me just over 3.5 years to finish a PhD (and learn Portuguese) before holidaying it up in Brazil after I submit my thesis.

James recently began his PhD and it took him about two months, from starting his application to getting the acceptance email, to become an enrolled Ph
D student. Even though there was a hiccup with his application I think the transition from impostor to PhD student was pretty quick and seamless for James. Since his topic and supervisors progressed naturally from his work as a research assistant, James didn’t need to spend time coming up with a new topic or getting chummy with an academic he hardly knew (although you could argue that was what he did throughout his time as an RA).

Unlike James (and others), I don’t have my heart set on a particular topic or supervisor, I just want to do a PhD! By all rights that should make my decision much easier but it hasn’t. People have offered me advice about picking topics or supervisors. Some say to ignore the topic for now and to just think about the supervisor that I want to work with. On the other hand, some have said that the supervisor doesn’t really matter, it’s t
he topic that counts. It’s safe to say I’m still feeling pretty confused...

I get back from the conference in three months. If it took James two months to get accepted, then I’ve got a month to find a supervisor and a topic before I submit my application!! Stay tuned!

If you are a veteran PhD student please feel free to leave advice in the comments section :)

(See you in Brasil!)

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Three months down (and how many to go?)

2010-07-01T15:55:00.004+10:00

I started a PhD in March of this year, and I would like to share the experience of my first three months.

People react to my new ‘profession’ in academia in difference ways. Some are impressed (“Wow, you’re doing a PhD?!”), some are disdainful (“You’re still at uni?”), some are horrified (“Academia? But they make no money!”), and others, my favourite, are interested (they let me harp on about my research). It appears that people have different ideas about what a PhD involves, and it turns out I didn’t really know either.

I had vague notions of conferences in exotic locations, flexible work days, doing exciting research, and other glamorous activities. Those first three months certainly brought me back to earth.

My 1st week was full of excitement. I was ready to get to that ground breaking research with my new office, new computer, two knowledgeable supervisors and that mysterious flexible timetable. My war hardened friends told me I’d get over it soon enough and they were only too right.

By the 2nd week I was considerably subdued, having difficulty coming up with that perfect topic, and wondering what I was supposed to do with all this free time. The 3rd and 4th weeks are hardly worth mentioning, other than to say I was beginning to wonder what I had got myself into. All that friendly advice that finding a topic takes time wasn’t helping to fill my empty days.

Finally, week 5, and I thought I had found a topic I could get excited about! Unfortunately, through a complicated process involving excessive reading and supervisor meetings, I was shot down. This left me feeling very lost and confused, and over the next few weeks, I seriously began to consider if I should be doing a PhD. Was I really cut out for a life of research, with a constant uphill battle for ideas, grants, positions, time, and failed experiments? All around me were people at various stages of their research careers, excited to be coming in on weekends and so passionate about the research they were doing. What was I doing wrong?

My turning point was when I sat my supervisor (Phil Grove) down and told him all my worries. For any prospective PhD enthusiasts – listen when people say your supervisor is there to help!! He dismissed my feelings of unworthiness and told me that it takes time.

This wasn’t a revelation, but for some reason, this time it sank in. I realised a PhD isn’t supposed to be easy! It may seem silly, but it took me three months to realise that academia is just like any other job, with its good and bad days. You need to be passionate about research, but ultimately the key factor is persistence. It isn’t something to be impressed or horrified by, but if you must – be both! Academia is just a bunch of crazies who are really passionate about research, working really hard and having a lot of fun.

In case you’re wondering, I’m now happily ensconced in my lab, working on an experiment for my very own topic, very happy that I persisted.

Nonie

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Overdue

2010-06-29T15:59:00.008+10:00

For the past eight months I’ve been hanging around the School of Psychology pretending to be a PhD student. Last year I worked as a research assistant for one of the academics in the department but since October last year when my role in that position ended I’ve had no official affiliation with university or the school.

Despite this, I continued to show up every day and pretty much perform the activities of the average PhD student. Such activities included conducting my own research, attending weekly lab meetings, attending weekly seminars and reading groups and tutoring. I even attended a conference in Melbourne where I presented research. I have a suspicion that a number of people in the department were under the impression I was doing a PhD. I felt a bit like Frank Abagnale Jr. only without a Hollywood blockbuster based around my life (the analogy is a stretch I admit but I struggled for another and I like the sound if it).

Anyway the Jig is up. After a drawn out application process and a minor hiccup with the processing of my application I am now officially enrolled in a PhD in the School of Psychology. Not a great deal has changed although I’m now being paid to be here which is great and I feel as though I now have a purpose to be here. With financial benefits comes responsibility though and my supervisors were quick to inform me that they now have real authority over me and as Matt points out I’m still just a lowly ‘Provisional PhD Candidate ‘. I’m not an actual PhD Candidate until I have been ‘confirmed’.

So what’s really changed? Well I’m now being paid to be here but apparently I’m still a no body and now people can tell me what to do. I can't help but wonder whether all I've done is sold my freedom :P ?

To be serious for one moment though, its incredibly exciting to be a new member of the UQ and Psychology research community :).

James Retell

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Confirmed!

2010-06-22T11:50:00.000+10:00

I'm finally a real person. Last post I told you about the PhD confirmation process and how daunting the prospect was. After I submitted my conf doc I went to work on the conf talk.

It's a 40 minute presentation with 20 minutes for questions where you turn your conf doc into a talk for a broader audience, followed by an interview.

Standing up the front, like any other presentation, I was nervous. But I really started to sweat as I watched psychology academics, phd students, undergrads, researchers from other universities and national security experts trickle through the door!

The talk went well and I took some great (and some difficult) questions from the audience. Everyone then left and I was interviewed by my four readers. These are some of the smartest people I've ever met, so it was great to soak up their advice.

It was now my turn to leave the room while the readers asked my supervisor, Jason Tangen, how I'm really going in the PhD program. I returned and Jason left so the readers could ask me if I'm happy with his supervision and how things are going more generally.

After this seemingly endless process my readers decided that I have what it takes to continue, and they confirmed me as a bonafide PhD candidate. Smiley face.

My experience with this first PhD milestone was great. It was stressful, but it forced me to clarify my thinking in a way that would not have happened otherwise. The only problem is that now I actually have to do all the wonderful things I told the audience I would do.

Back to work I guess.

Matt Thompson
PhD Candidate

What do you do all day?

2010-06-16T11:45:00.000+10:00

Me and James with the best car I've ever owned (also the only car I've ever owned).

One of the most common questions I get asked by people thinking about doing a PhD is “what do you do all day?” This question is almost impossible to answer, because it’s rare that two days are ever the same. But here’s what I did today:

I got a call from the place where I took my car to get serviced, and they told me my car was ready to be picked up. I really didn’t want to have to catch the bus to get my car because that would end up taking over an hour for what should only be a 30 minute trip. I didn’t want to ride my bike because I didn’t want to be smelly and sweaty in my office for the rest of the day.

So, I asked my good friend and office buddy Felicity if she could drop me there. Unfortunately, Felicity was crazy busy with something or other so she couldn’t drive me to my car. BUT, she did say I could BORROW her car if it helped... which of course it didn’t, because I can’t drive two cars at the same time.

Fortunately, James had finished solving problems and was willing to help me out too and drive one of the cars. So James and I jumped in Felicity’s car and went to the car shop where James drove my car back to my place and then we both came back to uni. Piece of cake (except I forgot to tell Felicity where I parked her car so she apparently spent ages looking for it when she went home later that day)!

What does all of this have to do with my PhD? Absolutely nothing, really. But doing a PhD means that what I do with my time is almost entirely up to me. I set my own deadlines, I organise my own meetings, and I don’t have to ask a boss for permission if I need to leave uni spontaneously to run some personal errands.

It’s also great to work right next to friends who are willing to help me out with pretty much anything! Hmm... I wonder if they’ll help me clean my car now that it’s running so well...

Is that mold on my roof?!?!.

-Will
www.willjharrison.com

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog?? Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

The Student Becomes the Teacher

2010-06-10T10:50:00.006+10:00

Looking back over my long (and arduous) life I cannot think of any one second in which I haven’t been a student in some capacity or other. And boy was I some student – cheeky in class, disruptive in discussions, but oh-so engaged. Because I love teachers – they blow my mind and challenge me and make me want to become more than I am.

While in primary school I had a teacher who ran us around the playground, weaving stories that somehow tied in with tree-houses, swing sets and monkey bars. In high school I learned to calculate distance using the speed of light, to imagine imaginary numbers, and think critically about Dorian Gray (which was not too hard to do, let’s face it). On to my year as an exchange student in America, and I met a tiny gnome of a teacher called Mr. Ribbich – he and I argued gun laws and beat poetry and the political landscape that makes up America. Finally in psychology I found a department of mentors. In particular, throughout my PhD and now my post-doc I am (still) learning to think about understanding human behavior and thought empirically in a way that I never knew was possible.

Which brings me to the point of this post. While I have been tutoring and lecturing for a long while now, and am very comfortable with soap-box ranting about statistics and social psychology, this year has brought me my very first honours students. Having honours students (and masters and PhD students) provides a unique opportunity to teach and mentor. In large university classes you have very limited one-on-one contact with students, but as a supervisor you become an integral part of your student’s life and learning experience. All of which has led me to think about the sort of mentor and teacher I want to be to my honours students (and eventually PhD students). Below I review some famous examples of teachers – one that I refuse to be, one that I would like to be (but probably couldn’t pull it off), and finally one that I want to be.

The teacher I refuse to be:

American Mary-Kay Letourneau, at the age of 35, became pregnant to her 13 year old student. She eventually served seven years in prison, and upon release married the student. She now frequently hosts ‘Hot For Teacher’ events in Seattle. Do I even need to comment on why I refuse to be the Mary-Kay Letourneau of the psych department?

The teacher I could try and fail to be:

In ‘Dead Poet’s Society’ Robin Williams plays an inspirational teacher at a conservative boys’ school. He teaches the boys to appreciate poetry, stands on tables whilst doing so, and instructs them (a la Walt Whitman) to call him ‘O Captain, my Captain’. I want to be this teacher, and I want it bad – stirring students into a frenzied revolution of learning sounds like fun. Teachers who aim to emulate Robin Williams’ example, however, typically tend to fail spectacularly. They are met with rolling eyes, heaving sighs and general mockery. I do not necessarily abandon my hopes of being referred to as ‘Captain, my Captain’ someday, but will perhaps try for it when I become a little more eccentric in later life.

The teacher I want to be:

Finally, an example of the sort of mentor that I would like to be – that definitive teacher, Albus Dumbledore. Dumbledore (like all people) is flawed, but his influence on Harry is ultimately extremely positive. When Harry worries that his nature is inherently bad, Dumbledore says to him “It is choices Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” This quote has struck with me, perhaps more than any other uttered by Dumbledore (yes, I know he is imaginary). Dumbledore is profound, kind, and teaches Harry while allowing him to also grow and learn on his own. Yes, in conclusion I think that I am going to model my honours supervisory style on Dumbledore.

So… what sort of mentor are you going to be?

Alcatraz

2010-06-03T14:00:00.001+10:00

I just had a friend come and visit me in my office for the first time. He made a joke about how much the office hallways made it feel like we were in the famous prison Alcatraz. Is doing a PhD really any different from being in prison?

My office hallway, actually.

I guess superficially there are a lot of similarities between being a PhD student and an inmate serving a 3 - 5 year sentence: we are put in small rooms with limited daylight, we spend long hours with nothing to do but read, we have to share basic bathroom facilities, we often eat the same food day in and day out, we might not see our families for long periods of time, we have to go through several review processes before we can “get out”, the building gets locked down after 9pm, and when you’re ready to scream you can’t out of fear that the anxious guy sitting next to you will shank you in your eye ball.

Obviously being a student is nothing like being a prisoner - I got given a brand new computer when I started, the people I share my office with are awesome, I get flown to really fun conferences at no expense of my own, and, of course, I can leave whenever I want.

The freedom and perks of being a PhD student don’t stop some people from feeling trapped, though. Even after being a PhD student for less than a year, I certainly have felt at times that I can’t leave my office when I want to, even though I’m the one who holds the key to my door.

Fortunately for me, feelings of being a PhD-prisoner are few and far between and 99% of the time I love my time at uni. I attribute a lot of the joy I have during my PhD to the fact that I took a lot of time, a whole 6 months actually, working out whether or not I wanted to do it in the first place because it is a big commitment. I also took this time to think about who I could be happy with as supervisors for years on end, because they're the closest thing to the "prison wardens".

I wasn’t planning on being preachy in this blog post, but I do feel like I have to end with this final point. If you are considering doing postgraduate research, and I highly encourage it, take the time to think about it and plan it carefully and you’ll never feel like you’re in prison!

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog?? Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

and the winner is...Science!

2010-06-01T16:11:00.010+10:00

Last week I posted one of my favorite statistics puzzles on the blog and promised to reveal the answer this week. While writing this post it became apparent that the real trick is not solving the problem but adequately explaining the solution. Here goes...

The scenario is the following: You are on a game show and you are faced with three doors. Behind one of the doors is your dream prize (my very own lightsaber) while behind the other two doors are dud prizes (a homeopathic contraceptive). You are given the opportunity to select one of the doors and attempt to win your dream prize. After you select a door but before revealing the location of the prize, the host reveals to you one of the doors that did NOT contain the prize, leaving the door you selected and one other. The host then asks you whether you wish to stick with the door you originally selected or change your decision and choose the other remaining door.

This problem is referred to as the 'Monty Hall' problem and the question is whether a) you should stick with your original decision, b) change your decision and selected the other remaining door or c) it does not make a difference either way.

So the answer is that if you wish to increase your chances of winning your dream prize you proceed with option b). That is you should abandon the door you originally chose and select the other door. By doing this you increase your chances of winning from 33% to 66%.

There are a number of places where people can go wrong with this puzzle, however in my experience the most common response is c). That it makes no difference whether you switch or stay. This response suggests that there is an equal probability of the prize being behind each door or that you have a 50% chance of winning regardless of the door you choose. This is in fact incorrect for reasons I'll now attempt to explain.
Hopefully you can all see that to begin with, the probability of guessing the door which contains the prizes is 33% or 1 in 3. This also means that there is a 66% chance that the door you chose does not contain the prize. That is, there is a 66% chance that the prize resides behind one of the other two doors.
When the host reveals one of the doors that does not contain the prize the chance of your door containing the prize does not change, it remains at 33%. Importantly though we know that the probability that the prize is behind one of the doors is 100%. So given there are two doors remaining and the probability of your door containing the prize is 33%, the probability of the other door containing the prize must be 66%. There was a 66% chance that one of the other two doors contained the prize. Now however we know that one of those doors does not contain the prize, therefore the other door must account for the remaining 66%.

If you're not yet convinced by my solution or you're having trouble getting your head around it, imagine the exact same scenario only instead of 3 doors to guess from there are now 100 doors. Your chance of guessing the correct door is now 1% or 1 in 100. So you guess a door and then I take away 98 of the doors that did not contain the prize leaving just 2 doors. The one you chose and one other. I now ask you whether you'd like to stick with your original choice or switch doors, what do you do? You switch obviously because you know that the chance of getting it right the first time was 1 in 100 (1%). The probability in this case that the other door has the prize is 99%.

No one emailed me the correct answer which means I hold onto the used handkerchief. The good news though is that this means the prize pool doubles for the next time I post a problem. So check back in if you're eager to win the handkerchief plus an additional prize of equal or lesser value.
James
Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Surviving the Second Year Blues

2010-05-27T15:04:00.002+10:00

Have you ever had one of those dreams in which you are trying get somewhere and you can’t? I am having these dreams with increasing frequency; I think it’s my subconscious mind’s not-so-subtle hint that I’m hitting a lull in my PhD progress. Something I rather naively hadn’t realized until now is that the demands of a PhD increase as you go along. Studies start piling up; rejected manuscripts need to be rewritten and sent to another journal; resubmitted manuscripts need to be thoroughly vetted to maximize their chances of getting accepted. This may not be the case for everyone, but I have certainly found myself to be under more pressure in my second year than in my first. I’m sure also that the pressure will only increase in my final year.

Pressure can be motivating or it can cause people to freeze. I believe that the trick to dealing with the pressure of the later stages of a PhD is to do with passive and active responding. Passive responding to pressure involves withdrawing and freezing which, although dysfunctional, at least has the benefit of keeping you out of contact with the thing that is causing you anxiety. Unfortunately I think that a lot of people use this strategy (you know the ones – they’ve been here forever and their catch-cry is “I just need to run one more study before I write up…”). Active responding is harder than passive responding. It involves forward planning and strict adherence to the deadlines that you (and other people) set for yourself.

My advice to anyone who, like me, is experiencing the second year (or third year, or fourth year) blues is just to get on with it. Confront the issue head on and try to make headway on small tasks by writing up a results section here, a general introduction there. Have a serious chat with your supervisor about the direction you’re heading in and the timeline you need to meet in order to finish. And above all, don’t let it get you down. Most people feel like this at one time or another in their postgraduate degree so don’t sweat it.

First prize is a used handkerchief

2010-05-25T17:10:00.015+10:00

I’m not going to lie, my past few weeks have been largely unproductive and uneventful. The majority, if not all off my time has quite literally been taken up marking student essays and reports. It is an incredibly boring, tedious and painful exercise and I do not wish to reminisce on the experience here. Instead I thought I’d present a statistics puzzle that I just gave to my first year statistics class and that I find very cool.

Suppose you’re on a game show and you’re given the choice to pick one of three doors. Behind each door is the prize that you’ll win. Behind one door is an infinitely cool prize (insert an infinitely cool prize of your choice), behind the other two doors are foils or dud prizes, lets say someone’s used handkerchief (not much fun). It is important to know that the host of the game show knows what is behind each door.

So lets say you pick door number 1. Before they tell you what you've won, the host then opens door number 3 and reveals a used handkerchief. The host then says to you, “Would you like to change your choice to door number 2 or stick with your original choice of door number 1?”

The question is, given the new information provided to you that door number 3 did not contain the infinitely cool prize, should you change your decision and pick door number 2, stick with your original choice of door number 1 or does it make no difference either way?

Anyway have a think about it and I'll post the answer this time next week. If you know the answer please resist from posting it in the comments section. First person to email me the correct answer though will win one of my very own used handkerchiefs. Get to it!

James

jdretell@gmail.com

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog?? Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Conf Doc!

2010-05-18T14:00:00.007+10:00

Last week I submitted my confirmation document, or ‘conf doc’ as we say in the business. It was daunting and I’m glad it’s over. The thing is, you’re not actually a ‘PhD Candidate’ until you have been ‘confirmed’. (Until recently, I assumed the PhD confirmation process was just like the catholic one.)

So I’m still a lowly ‘Provisional PhD Candidate’ until I’m told otherwise. To become a PhD Candidate I need to submit my conf doc to a small group of academics (my readers) who will decide my fate: Am I on track to producing research worthy of the Dr. title? Do I need a few more months and a bit more guidance? Or maybe I’m just not cut out for a PhD.

The conf doc is ten pages with a few sections:

Proposal (i.e. “What are you gonna do?”)
Literature Review (i.e. “Surely someone has done it before?”)
Feasibility (i.e. “Is this even possible?”)
Importance (i.e. “Will anyone care?”)
Funding (i.e. “Don’t ask for more money.”)
Timeline (i.e. “How long will all this take?”)
Work Completed (i.e. “What the hell have you been doing for the past 12 months!?”)

So after all this I’ll be confirmed right? Unfortunately not. I now have to turn this document into an hour long seminar for my readers, other academics, PhD students, and guests from other universities. As if that weren’t enough, the audience will then leave the room and I’ll be interviewed.

I present in two weeks on Thursday 3rd June at ~~12pm~~ 2.30pm (Sir Llew Edwards Bldg 14 Room 115) and you’re welcome to come along. Or you can wait for my next post when I’ll reveal whether or not I’ve been confirmed...

Matt Thompson

The purpose of a lanyard.

2010-05-13T13:48:00.002+10:00

After being harassed about it for about 4 months now, I’ve finally decided to contribute to the Psych blog, to represent the clinical psych student component of the school.

This year I switched to the combined PhD program- clinical masters and PhD. My first year in the clinical program was the most enlightening, testing, rewarding, challenging, busy, enjoyable, and awful year of my life. But, having lived through it, and now being able to take a breather from the fast pace of the clinical program and complete it at a slower pace whilst starting my research, I can look back and see how much I learned and how far I’ve come!

It is nerve-wracking starting the program, organizing registration, college membership, blue cards, text-books, etc. and over coming your anxiety about actually seeing your first REAL client- “what forms do they need to sign?” “Do I tell them about the limits of confidentiality first, or after I’ve made polite chit-chat?”, “what if they tell me they are suicidal?”, “what if my pen runs out?”, “where can I sit so I can see the clock?”, “How do I stop them talking off topic without seeming rude?”, “what if I haven’t ticked all the boxes on my intake form?”, “what if I forget how to speak?”, “Have I asked a double-barrelled question?”, “Is my posture making me look warm and engaged?” “what if they don’t like me?” etc. etc.

Then once that’s all sorted out, you find yourself juggling 5 classes, case presentations, 8 clients, research projects, supervision requirements, MSATs, exams, assignments, board paper-work requirements, client reports, progress notes, and discharge summaries, plus trying to have a life, and make a living somehow. Actually the last 2 tend to not happen very often- you find yourself having a chocolate bar and a diet coke for lunch, and then by the time you get home at 11pm, you’re too tired to make dinner, you have had no time or money to go to the supermarket, and you know you have to be in there at uni again by 7 am anyway so you just collapse into bed (after a shower- although sometimes personal hygiene slips a bit as well) !

Ok, so maybe it’s a little bit of an exaggeration, some weeks are better than others, but this story was true for too high a number of my weeks last year for my liking.

But you do learn a lot about organization, time management, the importance of work-life balance (through learning first hand what happens when it’s absent), psychopathology (again, through first-hand experience with anxiety, mood disorders, stress, and sometimes a little psychosis), and of course a little bit about interpersonal skills, psychological treatments, and about the field in general.

I was asked at lunch today, why I felt I needed a lanyard with all of my keys, swipe cards etc on it. And I would like to clarify this for everyone, so that you don’t think it’s just the clinical psychs being pretentious. When you are in the situation as described above, it is very easy to forget things, leave things places, forget your clients’ names, write the wrong names in reports, be disorganized, lose things, AND lock yourself out of places at 7am or 11pm when there’s no-one around to let you in.

SO, the purpose of a lanyard is to decrease the chance of this happening, or even just to decrease the chance of having to walk back to where you came from to get your photocopy card because you forgot it (these things tend to be enough to tip you over the edge when you’re in this situation). You only have to remember one thing and you have instant access to your St Lucia clinic key, Herston clinic key, computer lab swipe card, photocopy card, locker key, and USB. The importance of this was demonstrated one morning last year when I didn’t have my lanyard for whatever reason. It was 7am and I had a presentation on “Theory of Mind and the Frontal Lobes” for neuroanatomy class at 9am (Which was barely started), I arrived at the computer labs, put my stuff down and went to make a cup of tea. Without my swipe card. I had to wait about 40 minutes for someone to arrive and let me in and my presentation suffered greatly!

This year, although I am finding myself with a much better work-life balance ( I actually get weekends and the occasional evening off!), I am still juggling clients, coursework, therapy research projects, supervision, board requirements, reports, paperwork, a folio, and that little thing called a PhD. So my lanyard now has:
Photocopy card
Swipe card for UQ
Swipe card for Royal Children’s where I have a desk
Key for office at UQ
UQ clinic key
Herston clinic key
Locker key
Filing cabinet key
And USB.

It is not because I like to look important- it is because my brain is so scattered and in about 10 thousand places at once, so my lanyard is my safety blanket that keeps me slightly sane and with everything in the right spot.

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

I bet you can't stop your eyes from moving.

2010-05-12T08:59:00.003+10:00

I’m fascinated by the control we have over our eye movements, because we first use our eyes to explore the world around us. Our control over what our eyes do largely commands how we complete complex behaviours like driving a car.

Some of our eye movements are automatic and made reflexively in response to some visual event. Imagine, for example, standing on a train platform and looking across the tracks to a friend on a platform opposite you. If a train flies past between you and your friend, your eyes can’t help but to flick back and forth, following parts of the carriages. This is an eye reflex called optokinetic nystagmus, or OKN for short.

To induce OKN in the lab, I get people to sit in a pitch black room and stare at the centre of a computer monitor while I track their eyes with the eye tracker. I tell participants that their goal is to stare directly at the centre of the monitor. But then I display 800 little white dots on the screen, all moving at the same speed from left to right at a rate of a few centimetres per second. Because there is nothing in the centre of the monitor for participants to keep their eyes fixed on, their OKN kicks in. My participants end up following a single dot smoothly for a short period of time until their eyes flick in the opposite direction to start following a new dot - this pattern repeats over and over regardless of how much the participants try to keep their eyes still.

Testing OKN in the eye tracker (the ghostly face at the far right is Morgan).

Below, I’ve graphed examples of what the data end up looking like, but let me quickly explain the graph before you click on the picture to see it in full size! Along the x-axis is time, and the y-axis plots how much the eyes move left and right. If someone kept their eyes perfectly still, the graph would be a straight line along the value “640”. Values higher than 640 represent eye movements to the right, and lower values are movements to the left. Each coloured plot represents about 2 seconds of OKN from a different participant in a different condition.

Eye data showing less and less OKN for different conditions -- click the image to make it bigger and see the paragraph above the photo for more detail about the graph.

You can see that, over time, participants eyes smoothly move right, and then really quickly flick back to left, making a saw-tooth like pattern. This pattern is most obvious for the red plot, and becomes less for the purple, and even less for the blue plots. The decrease in OKN over these examples is because of an experimental manipulation I employed to help people keep their eyes still - even from this small amount of data it’s obvious that it worked!

The results from my experiments will hopefully inform our knowledge about how motion and eye movements affect our perceptual organisation of the world.

-Will
www.willjharrison.com

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog?? Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Hands-on research.

2010-05-06T11:42:00.016+10:00

I may be just an RA (research assistant) but I get to do some pretty cool stuff. Take fingerprinting, for example. Part of my job is to collect fingerprints from people so we can use those prints in experiments where we look at how people process complex visual stimuli.

Believe it or not, taking someone’s fingerprints is actually pretty difficult. You have to (gently) twist a person’s arm in really awkward ways to roll their fingers evenly across a 10-print card. At the moment I’m pretty crap. Here are some examples of crap print rolling:

A twitch during the roll (the vertical smudges in the centre), and too much pressure (the smudging along the top)

Not enough ink covering the finger

Too much ink (coupled with too much pressure)

Sigh. Looks like I've lots of practice ahead of me...

- Morgan

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Your research on a poster

2010-04-30T08:56:00.005+10:00

Wen and Steph at EPC!

Will, Matt and James have all shared their wonderful experiences at the latest Experimental Psychology Conference in Melbourne. I thought I would shed some light on what the girls got up to during this conference.

Just like Will, Matt and James, Stephanie Goodhew and I made our way to Melbourne for the 2010 Experimental Psychology Conference. It was Steph's first time visiting Melbourne, so this trip was very exciting for both of us (me being from Melbourne, I was excited to show Steph around). We were also extremely excited about the conference dinner, because it was held at the Melbourne Zoo this year. The conference was held at The University of Melbourne, which is situated in an inner northern suburb of Melbourne called Parkville. Steph and I shared a room near the university, which made our trip extremely affordable.

At the conference, Steph presented a talk, and I presented a poster. Presenting a poster is another way to get your research out there without the pressures of doing a talk. Because a poster presentation is more informal than a talk presentation, I was able to get a lot of individual feedback about my research. Unlike talks that were scheduled throughout the day, the poster session was one big session scheduled in the evening of the first day. At the beginning of the poster session, I stood quietly in front of my poster, felt very nervous about what I was going to say and how I was going to answer the questions that people may have had about my research. As I waited for people to make their ways toward my poster, a very well known researcher in the area of faces walked towards me and asked: "Would you like to tell me about your research?" Filled with excitement and anxiety, I walked her through my poster. From then on, I became more confident, and all my nerves turned into excitement and enthusiasm.

This conference was a great opportunity for me to present my research and gain invaluable feedback. It was an eye opener for me. I was inspired by all the experimental research that people are involved in around Australia and New Zealand. And last but not least, it was wonderful to have shared this experience with Steph.

--Wen

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog?? Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

CV Envy...When aiming high hurts.

2010-04-27T16:24:00.004+10:00

I’ve been lucky to meet some amazing researchers of late. You know the ones. Those that fill your nerdy little heart with joy when they present the neat findings of their incredibly clever studies, that inspire you to take on 3 extra lines of research even though every 2.5 minutes of the next 5 weeks are already scheduled into your Google calendar, and get you daydreaming of a lecturing job at Cambridge when you should be focussing on writing a first draft of a manuscript.

Meeting researchers we admire is one of the best parts of being a PhD student, the chance to hear about exciting new findings, and run your own ideas past the people who edit the journals you fantasise about publishing in, and generally get yourself known to those who might offer you research collaboration and job opportunities in the future. The worst thing about high achievers? Looking at their CVs.

However irrational it might be, I somehow can’t help but look up the CVs of people I admire, and directly compare myself and my achievements to these high flyers. Somehow my tres-high impact, lonely, single publication in Journal of Environmental Psychology starts to look incredibly dubious next to double-digit Psych Science articles. Media mentions in the Bundaberg News Mail look a little lame next to The New York Times. I start to question why I’m here, to feel like a fraud, and wonder if I will ever succeed in academia at all. A perfect example of the optimally de-motivating upward comparison, or so I thought.

I mentioned these feeling of inadequacy to my supervisor. How the sight of the endless lines on superstar CVs sometimes make you feel like assuming the foetal position on the floor of the office and ignoring your dubiously consistent data altogether. She laughed at me, and proceeded to assure me that many of the most successful academics she knows were on the verge of tears after perusing the CV of one recent international visitor. It turns out that practically no one is immune to the hazards of CV envy; that us postgrads should relax and not worry about comparing ourselves to unbelievable levels of productivity and brilliance. I found this thought comforting for about 5 minutes. But soon the urge to plan new studies, pursue collaborations and apply for overseas awards took over. When I look around the department the other postgrads also seem too busy getting started on that new line of research, pitching their papers at top journals, and applying for prestigious overseas conferences to dwell on their academic inferiority for long. Perhaps a little CV envy doesn’t hurt after all.

--Rachel

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

On perpetual questions, the meaning of life, and the risks associated with starting a controversial line of sex research

2010-04-23T09:11:00.003+10:00

“Love is the answer, but while you’re waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions” Woody Allen

The hands down, knock down, down and dirty best thing about being a researcher is the fact that you not only get to wonder, you also get to know. What excites me about my PhD, and now my job, is that the I can turn things I always wanted to know into research questions, and research questions into studies, and studies into answers (or hints), and answers into articles.

As such, my guiding passion for racial equality has led me to research into race-relations. After several years of researching almost exclusively on race-based topics, and having just conquered my fear of saying the word ‘race’ in public, and engaging in this hot topic of research, I have recently decided to turn my SPSS hand to something a bit different.

In particular, I have always been fascinated by the disparity between men and women’s sexuality, and the need to talk about women’s sexuality honestly and openly. Recent articles that I have read about female anorgasmia (inability to orgasm or difficulty reaching orgasm), and related evolutionary articles about the evolutionary uselessness of the female orgasm compounded my interest. Accordingly, a few weeks ago I launched an online sex survey that asked members of the general public to tell me the ins and outs of their sexual experience. This survey has been an incredible challenge, and an unrivaled learning experience. I found it very confronting to gather my materials, compose my questions, and disseminate the study with my name publicly attached to it. Likewise, participants reported that it was good, but also scary and shocking, to be asked these questions and answer them with candour.

About a week after I launched this study I attended what I think is my 6^th conference of the Society for Australasian Social Psychologists, in Perth. Being the sort of ambitious tool that I am, I decided to present the preliminary results of my sex research – results of a study that had been running for less than a week.

On the plane, sleep deprived and wary, I downloaded the results from about 500 participants, and set to analyzing. At first glance, the findings were extremely promising and interesting (I am currently writing a report for participants). Despite this, however, I was not thrilled. While they were very interesting and above all important to me, it became salient that I would be presenting on salacious and shocking data, that really delved into sex – not just vague sexual attitudes but specific sexual practices and knowledge.

“Oh no!” my inner dialogue began. “They will think that I am a strumpet!”

“No, no.” I reasoned back to myself. “They will understand that it is valuable research, even if it is a little sexy.”

Never to be defeated, my defeatist self replied “Who are you kidding – you are going to be banned from returning to another conference, and also will be stoned to death I bet.”

Thus soundly beaten, I continued working on my slides, dreading the mocking from my peers that I knew would come.

So what happened? Well, yes, my talk raised eyebrows. It made people giggle, and it made people blush. After the talk, it seemed to disinhibit people as well – various other academics and PhD students approached me and told me ribald jokes. At first glance it looked like maybe I was right – that sex research simply couldn’t be taken seriously, and that this was risky departure for me career-wise.

BUT WAIT! Since the conference I have been inundated by e-mails from top-level academics from the conference who have told me that they have been thinking about my research, and have some suggestions about what factors may explain my findings. I have had about six offers to read drafts of my first article on this topic from people that I previously did not engage with. Members of the general public have sent me over 50 e-mails, thanking me for talking about this topic, telling me how personally important it is to them, and inviting me along to small group meetings at hospitals and public venues so that my next survey may better tap in to the wide range of factors that make up who we are sexually.

Going down this research road has been TERRIFYING, challenging, and already, exciting and rewarding. Presenting this research at the conference, and publicly outing this line of research before I felt ready was a risk. But hey! I think that now is a good time to remind myself (and you), that this is what is so EXPLETIVE DELETED sensational about being a researcher! We get to ask and answer the questions that we are intrinsically interested in. We get to gather knowledge about the crazy phenomena of human existence and feed it back to the public. Hoorah for research! Knee-knockingly frightening, overwhelmingly important and interesting, and a challenge worth taking.

How to publish, or: No seriously, how to publish?

2010-04-20T14:18:00.004+10:00

There are many unspoken rules to abide by as a PhD student, but one trumps them all: publish, publish, publish. Gone are the days when people committed four years of their lives to write a tome, only to spend a further 6–12 months condensing it into publishable chunks. As ‘thesis by publication’ becomes the normative standard, we are expected to write up and submit papers throughout our PhD. But how can we maximize our chances of getting published? As someone who has received my fair share of rejections, this naturally is a question I am keen to answer.

Recently I attended the national social psychology conference and got some advice from the experts. I attended a postgraduate workshop on publishing given by Professor Shinobu Kitayama, editor of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. He summarized what he saw as the qualities of good empirical papers: they make a substantive advance to the literature (i.e., are novel and interesting), have a clear theoretical story, with data that are rigorously (and appropriately) analysed. Naturally, you need good data to get into top journals, but Professor Kitayama’s point seemed to be that you can get away with a lot by telling a good story – it’s up to you to make people interested in your topic (even if you lost interest ages ago) and want to read more.

I think this is great advice, but as a social scientist I’m interested in actual data. I attended another talk by Dr. Nick Haslam who has analysed the publishing strategies of successful and unsuccessful academics. There were some great pearls of wisdom in this talk, like the fact that there is a non-linear relationship between being first author on a paper and academic success: having a minority of first-author papers is beneficial career-wise, but too much solo publishing is actually detrimental. The same goes for publishing in teams: a bit is good, but you shouldn’t always be one of many. Perhaps most interestingly, he found that quantity of publications predicts impact better than quality. So the message is to publish lots, not necessarily to publish well!

I feel a little better informed now than when I started, but the answer of how to publish is still elusive. What you can do is maximize your chances by following advice from people who know–your supervisor, other academics, and your peers. Look at the programs of the conferences you attend; you will always find roundtables, workshops, and seminars devoted to this topic. I find this sort of comforting; it just goes to show that no one really has it all figured out. There’s no magic formula you can follow to get published, but if anyone figures it out please let me know!

Katie Greenaway

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??
Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Risk and Reward

2010-04-16T15:45:00.011+10:00

The Psyc Conference -- Part III

Last week I travelled to Melbourne to present a poster at the 37^th Experimental Psychology Conference (EPC). If you read my previous post you’ll know that my lead up to the conference was by no means smooth sailing. The weeks prior to the conference were filled with sleepless nights as I rushed to finalise experiments and piece together my presentation. On top of this I was racked with anxiety at the thought of presenting my research to my peers and having it ripped to pieces.

I am here to report that contrary to my fears the conference was an incredibly rewarding and enjoyable experience I’ll not soon forget. My expectations were exceeded and my fears were quickly quashed. There was a wonderful relaxed vibe that really fostered the communication and discussion of ideas. It wasn’t long before my anxiety of presenting was transformed into excitement.

It was incredibly cool discussing my research with people who seemed genuinely interested and intrigued by it. Suddenly the stresses of the previous weeks seemed so irrelevant and trivial. If this was the pay off then I’d gladly go through them all over again. In retrospect I’m thankful that I was able to overcome my anxieties and take advantage of the opportunity to promote my work and meet new people.

So if like me you harbour an inferiority complex and think who would ever be interested in what I do, give your head a shake and jump at the first opportunity you get to put yourself and your work out there.

So now I’m back in Brisbane brimming with confidence from the conference and unscathed by the experience. Unfortunately though my poster didn’t survive the trip back home. Not because it was ripped to pieces by my peers but because I left it sitting at gate 7 at Melbourne’s domestic airport...

Click here to see Part 1!!!

Click here to see Part 2!!!

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??
Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

“You’re too comfortable…but I like it.”

2010-04-14T15:09:00.006+10:00

The Psyc Conference -- Part II

At first it was strange sitting at the table with high ranking academics at the EPC dinner. I felt unworthy, and a little out of place. But it soon became clear that they weren’t interested in maintaining my delusions of inferiority. They, like me, just wanted to relax after an exhausting day of talks.

So I gradually became less inhibited and, before I knew it, I was speaking as though I’d known these people for years and we started to banter. But I thought I’d gone too far when one of the top vision scientists in Australia said to me, “You’re too comfortable…but I like it.” I shat myself and thought I’d overstepped the mark.

But he went on to tell a story about the late great physicist Richard Feynman. As a grad-student, Feynman stood-up and questioned the Nobel prize-winning Niels Bohr during his talk. Feynman later shat himself when he was ushered to Bohr’s chambers for “discussion.”

But it turns out that Bohr sought out Feynman because most physicists were too in awe of Bohr to argue with him. Feynman had no such inhibitions and said he felt as much respect for Bohr as anyone else, but once anyone got him talking about physics, he would become so focused he forgot about social niceties.

Academic etiquette in the 40s was a little different to the way things are now. I doubt a first-year PhD student like me would be allowed to sit at the same table as full Professors, let alone engage in some pretty risqué banter. I love this change and really appreciate being treated like an equal. (Some have even added me on facebook!)

So whoever your academic heros are, when you read their awesome work and see the impressive things they’ve achieved it’s easy to forget, they’re just people — don’t be afraid of getting too comfortable ; )

Matt Thompson
mbthompson.com

Click here to see Part 1!!!

Click here to see Part 3!!!

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??
Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Conference hangovers are so worth it.

2010-04-13T11:44:00.007+10:00

The Psyc Conference -- Part I

Matt, James and I just returned from Melbourne where we attended my first Experimental Psychology Conference, and it has been one of the best experiences of my life! I had my nerves tested when I presented some data to a packed lecture theatre of academics from Australia and New Zealand, and then I had my liver tested when I celebrated my presentation on the first night, the conference dinner on the second night, and the goodbye party on the final night!

As great as some of the science discussions were, what really made the experience for me was all the crazy interactions outside of the conference. The conference dinner was certainly a highlight - a room full of experimental psychologists with a never-ending amount of beer, wine, and champagne... My abs got a great workout from laughing at all the things coming from academics' mouths!

As if partying until 4am with renowned academics wasn’t enough (one academic even stayed out until 6.30am on the morning of his own presentation!), but we also got to see what PhD students from other universities were like. They were all great - talking to students from Victoria and Western Australia for the first time was as easy as talking to my old friends down the hall at UQ. For example, at one bar where we were surrounded by people dressed in suits and drinking expensive wines, I spent 30 minutes talking with a student from the University of Western Australia about whether or not to include error bars on graphs! That’s pretty special (albeit extremely nerdy).

The UWA girls with Matt and I. From left: Matt, Rachel, Kat, Vanessa, and me.

I think the best part of the conference was the range of experience of the young researchers. Research assistants, Honours, Masters and PhD students all got involved, and all were really impressive. If you hear about a conference coming up that is in your area of interest - find a way to go! You don’t even need to present data - you can just go and see the sort of research being done by other people and make new contacts.

Three days later I’m still exhausted and I feel like I haven’t slept for a year. But it was all worth it - I’ve made some great new friends with students and academics, and I got some great feedback about my own research. It was also great fun to share this experience with two friends, Matt and James, and it makes me wonder what we’ll get up to in the future!

James and me... this must have been one of the 4am moments!

-Will
www.willjharrison.com

Click here to see Part 2!!!

Click here to see Part 3!!!

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??
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Love and some Hate

2010-04-04T14:45:00.004+10:00

On wednesday next week I am heading down to Melbourne for the 37th Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference (EPC). Although I've been to conferences before, this is the first conference at which I am presenting my own research and I won't lie, I'm incredibly nervous. The last few weeks have been a mad rush to get experiments finalised, data analysed and a coherent presentation put together.

Two weeks ago I was running what I thought would be my last participant through an experiment I plan to present next week at EPC. This particular participant was quite interested in the experiment and afterwards was eager to know more about what I was studying (always nice when someone shows an interest in what you're doing). I proceeded to debrief them.

As I was explaining the results the participant commented on my conditions and suggested that I had excluded one from my analysis. Slightly alarmed by this remark I attempted to clarify what they meant.

Their response: "I'm sure I saw such and such happen during the experiment."

I immediately felt sick, the participant had alluded to a potential confound in my design and there were only two possible explanations. Either they were asleep during the experiment and dreamt what they saw or there was an error in my code. Participants falling asleep during my experiments is not as unlikely as it may sound, it happens quite regularly. This particular participant seemed quite switched on though and I was immediately suspicious of the latter.

I opened the experiment and begun scouring through the code for the error. It didn't take long for my fears to be confirmed, the error was obvious. I began to stress a little. Without going into the details of the error I clung to the hope that it hadn't shown up in the data despite my last participant's testimony tending to refute the possibility. There is was though, where I had previously overlooked it, the error was blatantly obvious. I began to stress a lot.

So a long story short, I have been scrambling to rerun this experiment plus an additional experiment as well as trying to compile a presentation for EPC. Since monday this week I have run 41 participants across two and a half experiments. this includes running an entire experiment (7 hours of testing) on wednesday. The anxiety of potentially finding null results wreaked havoc on my sleeping patterns throughout the week.

I can report though that the results look fantastic for now and my presentation is coming along nicely. So onward to EPC where my results and presentation will likely be ripped to pieces by the academic elite. More sleepless nights ahead I suspect.

James Retell
Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??
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Psyc update - 30th March 2010

2010-03-30T15:49:00.003+10:00

First semester is well under way and the research is getting done!! I thought I’d give a quick summary of what’s been going on over the last month or so.

Conference Preparation
The first big local (Australasian) psych conference is coming up in a week or so. The Experimental Psychology Conference (EPC) is to be held in Melbourne this year and a large contingent of cognitive and perception psychs are busy getting their presentations and posters in order, booking flights and accommodation, and sussing out what mischief they can get up to when south of the border. While I’m not attending (Matt, Will, and James are, so stay tuned to see what they trouble they cause in Melbourne), I am keenly monitoring the process of creating a poster because I'll hopefully be presenting one in San Francisco later this year!

Confirmations
The first major milestone of the PhD is confirmation and tends to happen about a year into the program. Up until this point you aren’t technically a PhD student, you are a PhD candidate, which essentially means the university hasn’t committed to you or your research yet. You need to convince a panel, representing the school/faculty/university, that your planned research is interesting, innovative, and feasible enough to continue. Since a lot of the latest batch of PhDs started about a year ago we are having a lot of PhD confirmation talks. The ones I’ve seen so far have gone really well. It’s great to hear what projects other people have been beavering away at. I’ve found attending conftalks helps me overcome the facade of pretending to understand what my friends are researching. There are one of two outcomes for me: either I finally understand what they do, with the help of their finely-tuned explanations and diagrams, OR, I still don’t understand, which by this point is no longer hidden by the facade but exposed as glaring fact (“What do you mean you don’t get it? You were at my conftalk, right?!”)

Assassins’ League
I can’t give too much away about this, it’s terribly secretive (though I’ve already been chastised for blabbing to anyone who’ll listen). It’s a tense game of cat-and-mouse that lasts for two weeks, played exclusively among psych students and faculty, and not for the feint-hearted. I won’t say any more about the actual game but I will say that it’s a really fun way to get to know others in the school. Currently playing are a bunch of second-years, some masters students, some PhD students and some RAs. You never know who’s coming for you... Anyway, if you are interested in finding out more please visit this site.

So, fun times around the school. Almost makes a fella wanna do a PhD ;)

- Morgan

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Freudian Slippers

2010-03-26T16:24:00.008+10:00

Academia. My Dad was a UQ man, my husband is an academic, and I've been at Uni myself on and off since the mid-1980s - so I can't say I wasn't warned. For those who are curious, I'll attempt to describe a week in the life of a new lecturer.

Monday. Is supposed to be my writing day. My dropping-the-kids working-from-home writing-without-interruptions day. We're way into March and this is the first Monday that it's actually worked out. And I've woken up with a splitting headache and an upset stomach. Luckily I've just joined a writing group based on the helpful guide "How to Write a Lot". These writing groups are springing up all over the School: small cells of academics huddle together and contract to meet specific writing goals during the week to which they hold one another accountable. So I can't crawl back to bed and be sick. Must. meet. writing. goals.

Tuesday. Start the day with an hour of clinical supervision. I love clinical supervision. You get to work on fascinating cases without the direct responsibility for treatment. Today's cases include a teenager who has been badly bullied for his effeminate ways. I watch a DVD of a session in which the teenager is explaining his anger management strategies to my intern on the whiteboard. I'm proud of my intern. This client is going to be ok.

Lunchtime: RHD committee meeting (that's research higher degree). Due to the large numbers of RHD students in Psychology, including the large number of out-of-load PhD students (a parlous state that I myself am familiar with), Eric and co have worked up a set of milestones to help students keep on track: confirmation; mid-candidature review and thesis review. It's anxiety provoking for the students and its anxiety provoking for me because I now have 4 milestone meetings to chair and I'm falling behind. I wonder if it's possible to be out-of-load in my committee job?

Wednesday. Big day. There are 25 first year undergrads due to start my "Tuned In" program today – a music based emotion regulation program designed as an alternative to CBT. My Doctorate student Carly is leading six groups (3 now and 3 wait listed control groups) and we have interns as co-therapist in each group. I’m nervous about how the Uni students will respond to the program. Carly texts on Wed evening that they all turned up and gave the activities a go: drawing their imagery; describing their body sensations; the meaning of lyrics. Relief.

Meanwhile I'm giving an evening lecture to 150 third year students on Psychoanalysis. Freud’s theories are easily criticised in this place and time so I have to work hard to make them relevant and interesting. I consider wearing my Freudian slippers to the lecture but my superego wins and they end up on a slide instead.

Thursday. Meetings. An interesting meeting with Kim (the Director of Clinical Programs) and a visiting academic from NZ who is touring clinical programs here and in the UK to benchmark the way clinical training is done. Listening to Kim it’s hard not to catch his enthusiasm about what we're doing.

Friday. Start revising a rejected paper in preparation for our writing group at 2. Everyone has met their goal this week and Natalie gives us immediate chocolate rewards. More clinical supervision and then finally 4pm Friday comes around – staff club time. Everyone said the first year with all new teaching, new systems and policies to figure out is a killer. It is. But the rewards are great. So far so good anyway....

-- Gen Dingle

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Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

BRAINS!

2010-03-23T14:55:00.003+10:00

Check. This. Out.

It’s not every day you literally get to see inside your own head. Last year I participated in a brain imaging study. My friend who was running the study just emailed me videos of the scan of my brain and I can’t stop watching them!!!

The first video is a scan going from the front of my face to the back of my head. You should see the vague outline of my nose, then eyes, then frontal lobes appear. At this point I’d like to thank my frontal lobes for giving me the ability to create blogs and such a hilarious personality.

This next video slices through my head horizontally starting from the left side. The first thing you’ll see is my left ear, and then the left side of my brain. If you pause the video about half way, you should see my corpus callosum. It’s the white thing that can be found right in the middle of my head and kinda looks like the top of a mushroom. It’s also the bit that connects the two sides of the brain. You might remember my blog post where I mentioned that Kim Peek was missing this part of his brain!

I was quite hesitant to post these videos because I feel like there’s something really personal about them. It’s kinda like people are seeing me stripped of my clothes, but in a completely different way to me being left naked. If consciousness is purely a result of what’s happening inside the brain, then these videos are really the most bare I can be. Weird.

Will Harrison. (Click here for my personal website.)

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??
Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Tutoring Take Two

2010-03-16T13:36:00.005+10:00

There’s something very energising about the start of a new academic year. For those of us not yet jaded by the research process it brings with it the prospect of new and exciting research ideas and results. For others it may invoke stresses and anxieties as you prepare to meet the challenges of yet another fast paced and hectic year. Adding to the excitement and the atmosphere of a new year is of course the return of students, in particular the new cohort of first year students who, this semester, have flooded the department in unprecedented numbers.

Last semester I was given the opportunity to tutor first year statistics and this semester I’m back at it again, out of the lab and into the tutorial room. Although I have no experience with which to make the comparisons, it would seem that tutoring first year students is in some ways quite unique. Unlike students in later years, first year students enter the tutorial room unsure of what to expect, filled with the anxieties of entering a foreign environment yet with an eagerness and enthusiasm to learn.

For a large number of my students, my tutorials represent their first experience in a University learning environment. This lack of experience and freedom from expectation as to the format a tutor and tutorial should follow, affords me a certain freedom to define my role as a tutor and the forum in which I teach.

I believe it’s very important to create an environment where students feel free and confident to question anything and everything I say. I know when I went through undergraduate I always viewed my tutors as exceptionally intelligent people (which I’m sure for the most part they were) but also that they were always right and that they new better than me. Certainly from my experience as a tutor this could not be further from the truth.

So if you’re a student reading this, my advice is to never let your curiosity go unsatisfied. Tutors are there to facilitate your learning not to “teach” you the material. So engage with your tutors and take the opportunity to put forward your own ideas. As well as benefiting the students it’s also a rewarding experience as a tutor when my class engages with me in discussion of ideas.

If I haven’t been made to look silly in front of my class at some stage throughout the semester then my students haven’t done their job. I can report though that I’ve been caught out more than once this semester already and it’s only the second week of tutorials...

All the best for the year folks

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??
Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Share the Experience

2010-03-09T11:04:00.005+10:00

The best thing about a PhD is the people you get to work with. I share an office with human factors and organisational researchers, I lunch with cognitive neuroscientists, and argue at a journal club with evolutionary psychologists. This diversity creates unique opportunities.

Recently, the HFES-UQ Student Chapter organised a field trip to a local hospital to check out Tobi's PhD work. Tobi has set up a patient simulator in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU). It's a $50,000 doll that breathes, blinks, has a pulse, takes real drugs, and pisses its pants. I thought the study was amazing but, of course, this was all in a day's work for Tobi.

The PhD is often a very personal experience. But I think sharing that experience with fellow post-grads, who are likely suffering the same problems and experiencing the same daily roller coaster of emotions as you, is really important. So show your comrades your lab, clinic or field study. It may seem mundane to you, but I'm sure we'll be sufficiently impressed by your brilliance!

Matthew B. Thompson
President HFES-UQ

The control room -- eye tracker, head-cam, two HD field cameras and the mannequin control system.

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??
Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Questions unanswered

2010-03-05T09:17:00.021+10:00

Stuck in the middle ground between earning a degree and starting a PhD means I am often easily confused. I, therefore, ask lots of questions. Actually, scratch that. I would like to ask lots of questions. I don’t, which is probably linked to my initial comment about being easily confused. I don’t often know what’s a sensible question, which, when asked, announces to my peers that I am an intellectual, or what’s an insensible question, which, when asked, exposes me as the fraud I am.

What stops me asking questions? Many things, though mostly it’s my interior monologue second-guessing myself. Is my question relevant? Has it already been covered? Am I wasting time by asking it? Should I already know the answer? How can I put my question into words? How do I put it into words AND sound smart?!

This cloud of confusion suddenly lifted in spectacular form last night. I, along with 1500 of Brisbane’s atheists, evolutionists, and critical thinkers, enjoyed a public lecture by Prof. Richard Dawkins about his current book ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’. Richard went through each chapter of his book and summarised the most important parts for us/those that hadn’t read the book. It was when he covered Chapter 11: History written all over us, that my ears piqued. Richard said:

Look at whales, they have land animal written all over them. Even look at humans, they have aquatic animal written all over them.

Aquatic..?! He didn’t mean....?! No....

From this point on I had it. I was going to ask Richard Dawkins a question!! My interior monologue started playing up but I fought hard to quash it. I spent the rest of the Richard’s lecture thinking about how to ask my question and how to look suitably intelligent in the process (half of the psychology school was there after all :P ) The lecture finished and the audience was called up to microphones located at the front of the auditorium to ask questions. After a moment of deliberation I shot up and squirmed through the stalls to get to the microphone. Knee-caps shaking with anxiety, but with a calm and collected face on, I waited for my turn.

In the end I didn’t get to ask the question. Richard could obviously tell I was going to say something amazingly profound to stump him, or that I was going say something profoundly stupid and look like an idiot. Either way he called the question-asking short, just before I could ask mine. For those of you that care I’ve written it in full below.

Relating this back to asking questions, I actually learnt during my undergraduate degree that asking questions in lectures is a really efficient way of clearing up areas of uncertainty. Somewhere between graduating and floating around the psych halls I forgot that. Maybe it’s my (falsely-held?) belief that once you have a degree you’re actually supposed to know something and I felt I didn’t. I’m not so sure. Regardless, students should ask lots and lots of questions and I will endeavor to do the same.

- Morgan

“Richard. When you were talking about the huge history within us you mentioned that whales have land animal written all over them and that we even have aquatic animal written all over us. I trust you didn’t mean aquatic in the sense of Elaine Morgan’s aquatic ape theory (theory in second sense)? I understand this has been rigorously challenged and perhaps debunked. Do you think that interpretations of evolution, such as Elaine’s, hinder or help the communication of evolution to the lay-person?”

I’ll have what she’s having: Faking it in academia

2010-03-02T08:35:00.003+10:00

At start of the second year of my PhD my supervisor told me it was TIME. I don’t want to name names, or implicate anyone in criminal activity, so for the sake of maintaining anonymity let’s just call my supervisor “Dr Winnifred Rose Louis”. Winnifred said to me, “Barlow, my good lass, it’s time you presented your research at a conference.”

The conference was the annual meeting of the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists, and the year was 2006. Obeying the command of my supervisor, if not the dictates of my own heart, I accordingly submitted an abstract, was accepted, packed my bags, and jetted off to Canberra. I was not, however, a calm little academic.

My main concerns ran as follows:

1. My research will be publically debunked.
2. My inadequate grasp of the intricacies of the literature will be brought to light.
3. The other academics will hate me.
4. I will hate the other academics.
5. My shyness will overcome me in all possible embarrassing ways.
6. In general, I will be discovered for the fraud that I am.

Now these fears may come as quite the surprise to those of you who know me. I am aware that nowadays my booming voice regularly rings through the psychology halls, engaged in lively debate with my fellow empiricists. But back them I was a green, wet behind the ears PhD student, and I was absolutely paralyzed by fear at the thought of strategically networking with fellow researchers. It was primarily that word, “networking”, that had me running scared. I had always thought of networking as a bit of a dirty word – I had an idea that it consisted of schmoozing and romancing people that I did not like or respect, all in a desperate bid to get ahead.

And yet… Winnifred had spoken and I had obeyed. There I was, at my first conference, sick to my stomach, and feeling woefully inadequate. My talk had, despite my worst fears, gone off smoothly. I came across as a passionate and engaged young thing, and those who attended were universally kind. That was all well and good, but the highly structured presentation was not what I was worried about – it was what was coming next.

“There are some people that would like to meet you Fiona, and that I would like you to meet.” Winnifred told me after my talk. “We are about to go and have drinks at the poster session, I will introduce you to them there.” Mouth dry and heart thumping, I escaped to my room. The social setting of the poster session made everything worse – how could I do this!?

It was at that point I made a critical decision – I would fake confidence. I would breathe deeply, straighten my back, beam a smile, and talk clearly. I, in my shy and retiring way might not be able to make it through networking, but I could certainly make an attempt at faking.

Both Men and Women can fake it.

Decision made, I marched down the stairs to the conference room where the poster session was being held, and bravely faced the waiting masses. What transpired next was a blur. Winnifred shepherded me from person to person, and eventually, confident that I could navigate the vicinity on my own, left me. To my surprise, that afternoon and in to the night I met a range of fantastic people – researchers who like me were passionate about racism and discrimination, people who could chat about statistics and theories and the wonderful phenomena of existence that we study in psychology. Suddenly, networking wasn’t so scary or so crass – really it was just chatting to people who were interested in the same things as me, who found a joke about regression funny like I did, and who could tell me personal anecdotes about the researchers that I admired.

I still maintain friendships and collaborations with researchers that I met at that first conference. When I see them at conferences now it is like a family reunion, and I am thankful that I had the presence of mind to fake what I could not legitimately produce that first time.

To this day I still fake it – producing a facsimile of confidence when I feel none, and cracking a seemingly off-the-cuff joke in my lectures that is in fact elaborately rehearsed and ruminated about. But those times are rarer, and what was once acting has become a reality – I can genuinely enjoy conferences, dinners, networking and public speaking. I suggest that this is the way that it is for most of us. We take a while to find our feet and engage with other academics outside of the comfort zone of UQ (or even here as new PhD students!). But the benefits of engaging through public speaking and networking are intellectually stimulating, socially rewarding, and infinitely valuable for our future careers. I urge you all to attend every conference you can, to present your research in a talk rather than a poster session, and to choke down your fear and approach the academics that you would love to chat to. Although scary, I promise you that it will be worth it – and remember, clichéd as it is, faking it until you make it is a fantastic approach to take.

“It’s alive!”: A social scientist discovers physiology

2010-02-23T15:56:00.002+10:00

I am a social psychology PhD student, and proud of it. I love my research – it’s loads of fun and I’m generally not hampered by a lot of the constraints that students in other areas of psych tend to face. For me, no specialized equipment required; paper and pencil are my weapons of choice. No crash course in computer programming at the start of my PhD: my first study (N=120) was run in the refectory area on campus. In about an hour and a half.

Yep, I was leading the methodological good life. Until I realized that my research questions aren’t totally answered by self-report measurements. You see, I study the effects of global threats on intergroup relations. A main problem of threat is that sometimes it’s so threatening that people just switch off and deny that it’s there. I’m beginning to find strange patterns in my data where sometimes people in my low threat condition report being just as threatened as people in my high threat condition.

So how to deal with this problem? I decided I needed to a radical new approach. I needed to tackle this problem head (and body) on. In short, I needed…physiological measures. A few weeks on from this decision and I’ve entered a turbulent world full of heart rate, skin conductance, startle eyeblink, and facial electromyography. I won’t lie, approaching a whole new methodology in my final year of data collection is a big step, and is more than a little threatening in its own right. But it’s also liberating and exciting and opens up a whole new avenue of potential research questions.

The best lesson I’ve learned during this process is a simple one. No one methodology is infallible; a research question needs to be approached from multiple angles to really get a full picture of the human experience. A pretty basic principle, I know, but often it’s easy to get stuck in a methodological rut. We get such a short time to really immerse ourselves in a PhD topic that when we find something that works, we often stick with it. I’ll update everyone on how my personal quest for methodological rigor goes…

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??
Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au