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Big Wide World:

June 2011 archive

Juliet Davenport, CEO and founder of green energy company, Good Energy

When I was studying atmospheric physics at the University of Oxford back in the 1980s, little did I realise how soon almost every member of the public would have a view on climate change and what to do (or not do) about it.

In the last 10 years, the rise in awareness of the global issues we face is encouraging; with big business in particular understanding that sustainability will be a key driver of their future success. But with awareness quite rightly comes debate, which is often followed by dissent, discord and disharmony.

I read with interest the comments left on my first blog; they provide a good illustration of the many and varied views on future energy production in the context of climate change, from strong opposition to wind farms to a sound understanding of the need for immediate action.

I set up Good Energy 10 years ago to empower people to do something about climate change. Today, with subsidies such as the Feed in Tariff - a financial incentive paid to individuals for generating green power, people now have a myriad of ways to take action but first they need to realise they have these options.

As a result, much of my time these days is spent engaging with communities and communicating Good Energy's vision of a decentralised energy market, powered by the people. This is an amazingly empowering message and it is built on solid scientific foundations, but it has to be well communicated.

Penny Sarchet, contributor

Today, the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) released the results of a survey of 202 graduate recruiters, reporting an increase in graduate vacancies and the first rise in graduate starting salary since 2008. However, with more competition for graduate starter jobs than ever before, these statistics are little comfort to those about to face the job market for the first time.

I graduated from my biological sciences degree in 2008 - the year that everything went wrong. I had always intended to stay on for a PhD, but suddenly I was being congratulated by struggling friends for my canny plan to weather the storm in academia. Three years on, however, the storm is still raging and the signs of recovery are minimal.

Back when it first began, my peers were more concerned with not getting that City job they'd always counted on, rather than the likelihood that we could be the first generation in over a century to struggle to do better than our parents.

It isn't, however, only those wanting a top-flight corporate career that have suffered, and large numbers of science graduates looking to use what they learned in their degrees are also struggling to find a job.

A friend graduated from the University of East Anglia in 2010 with a BA in environmental science and a master's in climate change and has been looking for a job ever since. 50 applications later, she is still doing temp work.

Science graduates have valuable skills and expertise - so why is it so hard to find a use for the training that the government convinced us it was worth borrowing money to pay for?

According to the AGR, in 2008 there was an average of 31 graduate applications per job vacancy. Today's figures (which were collated during April and May this year) have hit a record high of 83. With so many applications per job, I wonder how this impacts upon the selection process.

At a recent university careers event, a recruiter from a television channel said that they looked for remarkably special graduates, not because they necessarily needed them, but because they can. With so many applicants for every graduate job, surely most recruiters will soon be finding themselves in this position?

Jim Caryl, postdoc


(Image: Jim Caryl)

Jim Caryl is a postdoctural fellow at the University of Leeds studying how antibiotic resistance affects the fitness of bacteria.

My first reaction to being picked for I'm a Scientist, Get Me Out of Here (IAS) (if you haven't heard, IAS is competition where school kids ask scientists questions and vote for which ones should stay on in the competition) was "Yay!" Quickly followed by "Ah..."

In the time between applying for IAS and being selected, I had gone from being pretty busy to I-have-no-life busy. How on earth was I going to find the time to engage at a level where I could do enough to stay in the competition?

In the end I made the time, signing up to as many chat sessions as I could and even taking part in a live chat while on the shores of Lake Windermere on a rare Monday off work. During the competition you need to be prepared to answer a stream of non-sequitur questions, from "Do you have a dog?" to the more precarious "What happens when my grandfather has two strokes?"

Simulating Mars on Tenerife

Lewis Dartnell, planetary science postdoc

simulatingmars.jpgEl Teide Volcano Crater, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain (Image: Luis Castaneda Inc./The Image Bank/Getty)




Stephanie MacLean, careers advisor at the University of Dundee

Two weeks ago Charlie Ball delved into the numbers to see whether science graduates need to do an MSc to get a job. Now Stephanie MacLean analyses the reasons why graduates sometimes feel obliged to do a PhD and highlights some science-related careers you can do with just the letters BSc after your name.

Graduation is fast approaching. Having worked your socks off for the past few months, you are looking forward to kicking back and relaxing. But try as you might, you can't quite ignore that niggling voice in your head, asking you what you should do next.

I work mainly with science students in my careers advisor role at the University of Dundee. When asked what they plan to do next, a common response is a PhD. An attractive option for many - you get to put your research skills into action, delve deeper into your subject, call yourself "doctor" and can stay at university for at last three more years.

As well as these reasons, I've noticed that many science students are loath to leave their scientific knowledge behind and feel the only way to pursue a scientific career is to do a PhD.

But what if you are not sure if a PhD is really right for you? For some, it isn't an option because you didn't get the grades. For others, perhaps you have simply fallen out of love with the lab. "Lab work is not what I thought it was going to be" is a sentiment I hear fairly often.

Gloeta Massie, PhD student 

Gloeta Massie mad scientist.jpg(Image: Gloeta Massie)

Gloeta Massie is two months into her PhD research at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. As well as studying venomous marine creatures, she is taking part in "I'm a Scientist, Get Me Out of Here!" (IAS), a competition a bit like X Factor for scientists.

Scientists put up information about their work on the IAS website and school students ask them questions about it. This is how Gloeta got on.

00.00 Tweet and answer questions on I'm a scientist get me out of here (IAS) "Hi Scientists, How could I become a marine scientist and what does a day in the life of a marine scientist entail????????? Thanks" 

00.39 Check the time zones. If it's 12.39am in Australia, it's 3.39pm in the UK. Time to chat!

00.40 Speed typing as 30 students simultaneously fire questions at me and the other four scientists in my pod (IAS is organised into 23 pods of five scientists. Students can email questions or participate in a live multi-way chat with us).

01.21 Breathe.

01.22 Get a tweet from the IAS organisers about writing this article.

01.23 Tweet my goodnights.

01.24 Sleep.

08.00 Hear alarm.

09.03 Wake-up. Check time - WHAT?!? Jump out of bed.

09.04 Take shower.

09.05 Run out the door.

09.09 Jump onto the ferry just as its about to leave.

09.10-09.25 Relax in the gorgeous Queensland sunshine.

09.26 Grab a smoothie for breakfast and a croissant for lunch. Who needs fruit and vegetables?

09.28 Run to the office. Log in to my various email accounts. Check my IAS questions. "Do you believe in god?" Start working through my paperwork, checklists, calendar, where is my calendar?

09.45 Find the calendar. Realise I don't know where my 10am meeting is. Look at the map. The building isn't listed.

09.59 Finally find the right room off a hallway buried in an alley hidden behind a walkway.

10.00 Slip into my lab coat, grab the safety glasses and walk into the histology lab. I'll spend a lot of time over the next three years in this room prepping cephalopod venom glands. The unpleasant scent of carcinogenic chemicals used to preserve dead animal tissues hits me as soon as I walk in the door.

Anna Richards, fire ecology postdoc


(Image: Barbara McKaige)

Imagine some of the largest tracts of "pristine" wilderness on the planet are right on your doorstep. Thousands of kilometres of grassy woodlands - savannahs, as they are better known, pockets of rainforest, huge wetlands and rivers, and a vast diversity of plant and animal species. The savannahs are home to one of the oldest indigenous cultures on the planet, with many areas owned by Aboriginal people.

Incredibly, I am paid to work in this amazing environment which is located in the tropical north of Australia. I am a post-doctoral scientist working for CSIRO, a multi-disciplinary government research organisation, based at their Tropical Ecosystems Research Centre in Darwin.

This is a great place to live and work but dig beneath the surface and there are many problems. Some of the biggest include dramatic declines in the population of small mammals so bad that they may herald major extinction events; increasingly large greenhouse gas emissions from the savannah fires, which account for more than 3 per cent of Australia's annual emissions and massive social disadvantage in remote indigenous communities.

Jessica Griggs, careers editor


(Image: Antonio Saba/Photographer's Choice/Getty)

"There is a continuous battle being waged against us, day in and day out", lamented UK defence minister Liam Fox last week. No, he's wasn't talking about the threat from Al-Qaida or even attacks on troops in Afghanistan. He was talking about something far more insidious but potentially as devastating - the long, intangible arm of cybercrime.

Fox revealed that the number of cyberattacks on the Ministry of Defence has doubled in the last year. And what with Sony being hacked twice in the last two months, Iran's nuclear programme being infiltrated by the Stuxnet worm last September, and an article published today revealing that the US power grid could be crippled by nefarious hackers, the need to tighten up cybersecurity is at the forefront of many CEOs' minds.

The trouble is it is difficult to find people with skills sophisticated enough to repel cybercriminals hell-bent on stealing credit card details, selling government secrets or just indulging in a bit of cybervandalism. According to information security company, the Sans Institute,  90 per cent of recruiters are struggling to fill cybersecurity positions.

Which is why last Wednesday I found myself in a room of 100 suited and booted executives (almost exclusively male) and 16 men who were perhaps less used to the formal dress code, at a dinner hosted by the consultancy group PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to raise awareness of the issue. It is also why a group of organisations, including the Open University, the security firm Sophos and defence contractor QinetiQ launched the UK Cyber Security Challenge in March last year.

The challenge set out to find the UK's best untapped talent and attracted all sorts of people - from teenagers you can imagine beavering away at their computers until 5am to people already employed in the IT industry who wanted to test their skills. The 4000 people who entered were whittled down to just 25 over a series of gruelling heats. Dan Summers, a postman, was crowned the eventual winner after the final 25 spent an exhausting day attempting to fend off a vicious cyberattack on a fictional company.

To read an account of the final competition, click here.

Until now, a career in hacking or cybersecurity hasn't seemed like the kind of thing you can legitimately tell your careers adviser you want to do. This competition is about changing that, Kevin Streater, executive director of IT and telecoms at the Open University told me at the dinner, which was also held to honour the challenge winners. "There is very little information available on how to get into cybersecurity so it is inevitable that people will find it hard to get into the industry even if they have the talent, " says Streater.

The competition is about demonstrating that there is a proper career path for people with these skills, and offering them a way in. For example, Streater, who acts as the talent manager for the challenge winners, has been working with Dan to find courses that will get him up to speed so he can get a job in cybersecurity. The runners-up also received internships and training courses.


Have you heard the one that goes: "There are so many graduates these days and it's so hard for them to find work, that they have to have a master's to get a job now"?

Now this is an interesting statement for a number of reasons. It's an instantly recognisable argument - you've probably read it in the press or maybe you know someone who struggled to get a job with a degree and took a master's. Or perhaps you are considering further study for this reason.

But, I'm skeptical. My master's didn't help me get a job in the last recession and I'm not sure things have changed.

Let us examine the evidence, in this case, the Destination of Leavers of Higher Education (DLHE) Survey. DLHE tells us that in 2008/9 (sorry, we're a few weeks from the 2009/10 figures - ask me then), at the depths of the worst employment market for graduates in 17 years, the majority of graduates just six months after graduation got jobs, and most of those got graduate jobs*.

Did they need a master's? No.

Now, let's delve into the special case of the sciences and crunch some numbers. If we look at degrees awarded in 2008/9, then some things become noticeable. Most science graduates don't go on to get a master's.

For those that do, we can roughly divide them into two populations. The first is the master's mainly taken by physics and chemistry students - the MRes (and MChem and MPhys), which is essentially an extended first degree taking four years. Over 40 per cent of degrees in physics and chemistry were awarded in this way in 2009.

The second is the master's typically taken by biological and environmental scientists, as a separate mainly taught qualification, usually directly after an undergraduate BSc. In these subjects, there are quite a lot of people getting master's qualifications, but unemployment rates are not dissimilar to those with a BSc.

So it seems the BSc biologists were perfectly capable of getting a job without a master's (although, interestingly, they seem a little more likely to have gone into a job that wasn't related to biology. If you're a numerate scientist who decides to chase the financial services dollar, your BSc should be quite sufficient.)

Now, apart from a few niches that require specific vocational qualifications, there isn't actually an employment market just for master's in the UK. There is for first degrees, obviously, and there is for PhDs, but you rarely ever see job adverts that specifically ask for a master's without stating a discipline. They don't really open up many new employment options.

This means that most master's graduates find themselves competing in the same labour market as BSc graduates. And those graduates find that just having a master's doesn't magically make you more employable. It's what the graduate does with the time spent doing a master's that is just as important as the qualification itself - I'd like to go back a couple of decades and remind my past self of that.



Animal skeletons not optional: Jack at his desk (Image: Dave Stock)

I was the kind of kid that brought home skulls I'd found in the woods, dissected owl pellets on the kitchen table and looked at fungal spores under the microscope. Things haven't really changed, except Monday to Friday I'm paid to be interested in such things, and in my free time I do it for fun. I work at the Grant Museum of Zoology - the largely Victorian collection of animal specimens that were put together to teach zoology at University College London, and are now a public museum.

Some might say that this makes me a zoologist, and indeed that's what my degree was in. However, when I describe myself as a zoologist I always feel the need to go on to explain that I'm not an academic zoologist - I'm not employed to carry out my own research or to teach undergraduates.

Rather, I am the museum's Learning and Access Manager. We are a small team and my remit is fairly broad. I'm responsible for anyone who uses the museum's specimens and spaces. That includes the general public, lecturers, schools, researchers, artists and people at our events.

The thing about professional zoologists is that nearly every one I know has always been zoologist at heart, and I am no exception. Like many specialisms, people who do it, do it out of love. Out-of-hours they do the same thing, only as a hobby. And in fact I'm writing from Broome, Western Australia where I'm en route to join a team of ecologists who are performing a survey of an Australian wildlife conservancy sanctuary, trapping small mammals, lizards, snakes and frogs. This is how I spend my holidays, and it makes me better at my job.

Jessica Griggs, careers editor


(Image: KPA/Zuma/Rex Features)

The summer is almost upon us. Here's to long evenings spent in sunny beer gardens, amassing a collection of festival wristbands on your tanned arms, rained-off BBQs and careers fairs.

Yes, that's right, careers fairs. If you are graduating this summer, or even the summer after, and don't yet have a job lined up then the careers fair is an essential part of your job-hunting tool box. Taking place up and down the country, at universities and conference centres, the summer careers fair has become almost as ubiquitous as the boutique music festival.

But just how can you make the most of the experience, and make sure you come away with more than just a sagging canvas bag full of promotional material and Celebration wrappers stuffed into your pocket? As with pretty much anything, the trick is to prepare. Get hold of the list of companies exhibiting and go through them, highlighting the ones you want to talk to. If you have time, check out their websites so you can avoid that really impressive opening gambit, "So, just what is it that [insert company name] does then?"

Since any one person is likely to only have a few minutes' one-on-one time with the representative on the stall, already knowing the basics will give you time to ask more useful questions, such as what it is like to work for them and whether you might be a good fit.

Konica Stones, senior manager of the student recruitment team at PricewaterhouseCoopers, says: "Often there are several people from various departments of an organisation on the stall so it will help if you know who to direct your questions to. A bit of preparation can help you have a more focussed conversation"

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