Senior Lecturer and Past President of BSG Department of Sociology University of Surrey

I don’t have all the answers of course, but what I can offer are some tips and suggestions for embarking upon an academic career as a budding gerontologist when your main activities will be getting grants/working on established projects, getting published and getting some teaching experience at the same time. I am mindful for that some of you there is nothing new here, but it may be useful to have an overview of the issues.

Firstly, I suppose you need to ask yourself why do you want to research and/or teach gerontology. To most of us, this is patently obvious – society is experiencing a demographic wake-up and whilst we should and could be celebrating the phenomenon, much media attention is being paid to the doom and gloom, apocalyptic approach. There is a compelling need for policy analyses of a multitude of aspects of ageing including health, housing, pensions, social service provision, community and residential care and the whole tranche of legislation dealing with direct payments, older people’s choices and decision making – the list is almost endless. It is equally important to impart our knowledge to rising generations of students and practitioners through teaching, and to justify our existence in our academic institution through publications.

Probably the most pressing task is to be part of a research team and ultimately to get your own grant funding. Let me set the scene.

Ageing is indeed on the agenda for research programmes: we have had the recent New Dynamics on Ageing joint research councils’ programmes which have employed many emerging scholars; there are governmental departments such as the Department of Health, the Department of Work and Pensions, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for example, who will commission research. As a post doc, you are less likely to have been involved with the early stages of a grant submission and will be engaged following an advertisement for a post of Research Associate. However, the ESRC www.esrc.ac.uk offers small grants (under £100,000) for early career researchers, and comprehensive guidelines as to what constitutes a good proposal and how to submit it. It is well worth checking out their web site. Academic institutions highly value the awards from these bodies as they receive full economic funding (fEC), which means revenue and kudos for the institution and the relevant department.

Less valued to the university, but of great importance especially to an emerging researcher on ageing, are grants from charities, non-government organisations or the third sector. These awards do not attract fEC, but they do pay salaries and some will cover specific overheads such as a computer/software and publishing/publicity material. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has been a good source of funding over the last two decades; the Nuffield foundation too will consider projects on ageing as will the Wellcome Trust, although the latter has a bias towards medical research. The Big Lottery Fund has a pot of money for social research on ageing issues but the lead partner must be from the community, with academic institutions employed ‘on contract’ for their input. All these bodies help produce valuable projects and make a great contribution to our understanding of older people in the community. The reports produced rarely count towards the RAE (or whatever will supersede the exercise) but they are a really good, quick way of getting your name known as they are often very widely read.

However, it seems increasingly difficult to get funding for such research, although it must be recognised that in the current economic climate, research into ageing is not the only discipline to suffer from this.

Unless of course you come up with a stunningly innovative idea for looking at a hitherto neglected aspect of ageing that someone is eager to fund. But that’s not so easy. For example, our research in the Centre for Research on Ageing and Gender identified the relatively little work done on older men, their social networks and health behaviours by marital status – and from this came the whole issue of masculinity and ageing men, another neglected area of investigation. My mantra: “Gender means men as well as women, and we ignore the social worlds of former at our peril” stimulates lots of nods from both men and women in the audience. We hit a rich vein and I’m fortunate enough to have been invited to speak both nationally and internationally on the subject. It’s a question of luck and harnessing the zeitgeist.

There are a couple of points to bear in mind when embarking upon a research project after the PhD. Although you will be losing the guidance of your supervisor, with whom you are likely to have a good and close relations, it is terribly important to have a ‘mentor’ to whom you can turn. Often if you stay in the university where you did the PhD, your supervisor will become your post doc mentor. If you move on, which is the more frequent occurrence, it is normal to keep in touch with your supervisor, but you will need to find someone, usually the Principal Investigator (PI) of the project on which you are working. Don’t forget that they will have been budding researchers once, and will be well aware of your needs in the new environment.

Importantly, unlike doing your PhD research, with your own agenda, you will be working with others, and largely to someone else’s agenda. This can be enormously enjoyable and refreshing after all those solitary hours staring at a blinking cursor on a virtually blank screen awaiting inspiration. Team working has many benefits. But it means that you are unlikely to publish the findings as a sole author, and there are questions about intellectual property rights. This is less of an issue within social sciences, but can be tricky as the award holder and PI may get top billing regardless of the amount of input to the publication, which is often the case within the ‘hard sciences’.

So I suppose my advice here is to get as much as possible of your PhD published in high impact journals, as soon as possible after (or even before) its completion as this may be one of the last times for a while at least that you will be the sole author, and ultimately very important for your CV and for the RAE (in whatever future guise). Get advice from your supervisor, the internal and external examiners and your colleagues as to what and where publications might be accepted. I promise you, a couple of years down the road when you have to meet report and other publication deadlines, your own work will constantly be put on the back burner. So be warned.

The final side to the budding gerontologist ‘triangle’ is teaching. If you are working in an institution with established programmes on ageing – usually at post graduate level, you will be encouraged to offer tutoring and/or teaching modules and sessions, and may well have been doing so during your PhD, this aspect is unlikely to be a problem. More problematic is when you are more isolated in a department, school or faculty where ageing is not a focus. The answer is to be a ‘fifth columnist’ and infiltrate the curriculum. You will no doubt be asked – or offer to tutor social research methods or other relevant subject. Firstly, you could offer insights into topics looking at the life course and then gradually steer the students towards considering later life and research/economics/psychology for example. It might be that you can ultimately offer an undergraduate or postgraduate module for other programmes, although this involves much hard work and may not be feasible coupled with your research project. Nevertheless, you should grasp the opportunity to speak at conferences and seminars in ordered to get ‘noticed’ and get your research known.

It goes without saying that belonging to BSG-ERA is very important, as membership brings you within the community of other budding gerontologists where you can share your experiences, advice and suggestions. I urge you to attend the conference in Cardiff 14-15 May, which, if anything like the excellent conference at Brunel last year, should be an invaluable resource for early career researchers into ageing.

 

End of Education and Careers section.