A Sudden Flurry of Activity

27 July 2010

By Elizabeth Dodson

Like Matthew, I’ve been conspicuously absent from the blog recently – and I’m now attempting to make up for it with a sudden flurry of belated commenting and blogging.  Sadly I’ve not been away on holiday, but have found all my time eaten up by other things.  The current public spending cuts have started to bite and the pressure is on to find new project funding.  My department, like many across the country has a substantial task ahead.  There is less money available and therefore likely to be more competition.  We must look for ways to diversify and expand our research area, without diluting the core of what we are about.

This of course resonates with Sarah’s post, as I’m spending a lot of time at the moment not doing research.  Exploring funding options, gathering background information, deciding strategy, costing out work and writing proposals, could easily be a full time job – but I guess just like a large part of a lecturing post is actually administration, marking, preparation etc., a large part of a research post is ensuring financial sustainability.  I work within a research group that strives to keep staff beyond their initial contracts so I have actually been in post for over 5 years – a luxury that I’ve become somewhat accustomed to.  Now however, the pressure is on to demonstrate that this continues to be a viable model. 

It is really important to me that we continue to prove that it is possible to have a research career that isn’t based around brief fixed term contracts with little opportunity for progression.  It will certainly be challenging, but hopefully the 3 Musketeers ethos of, “One for all and all for one” will help us to meet this challenge head on.