Thinking about the Pipeline

By Athene Donald. A PhD should comprise both education and training. It should not be slave labour or done in blindness about where it might be leading. But I fear these statements don’t always apply. In the research grouping in which I sit at the Cavendish, which now has quite a large number of attached staff and research fellows, we try to provide a programme both of locally relevant pedagogy and more general talks about research skills: topics students might find helpful, regardless of what they end up doing next. So, when it came to my turn to give the week’s lectures to the 1st years I chose to include material concerned with preparing for life beyond the PhD. In other words, I used the well-known Figure 1.6 from the Royal Society’s 2010 Report, The Scientific Century, to provoke thought. More...