Methods and data are just the beginning: The talk I wish I heard during my HDR program

By Dr Jasmine B. MacDonald on November 6, 2024

I was invited to give a keynote presentation at the 2024 Faculty of Business, Justice and Behavioural Sciences (FOBJBS) HDR Online Conference, Charles Sturt University. Below is the talk that I gave on Tuesday 5 November 2024.

Good morning, everyone. It is lovely to have this opportunity to speak with you today.

I acknowledge the Wurrenjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nations, the traditional owners of the lands that I am joining you from, here in Naarm.

I am Dr Jasmine B. MacDonald, but you can call me Jaz. Today I want to give the talk that I wish I had heard during my HDR (Higher Degree by Research) program.

Throughout your HDR program you are compiling and finessing your subject matter expertise – that specific knowledge that you gather and create throughout your program. You’ll also acquire a wide range of technical and methodological skills, becoming increasingly sophisticated in these abilities. Some of you will even develop new methods for others to use.

That is excellent and the beauty is that you have your supervisory panel to guide you with these things until the point where you might be able to share new knowledge with them.

I want to bring to your attention, though, to the idea of success.

When you complete your HDR program, how will you know that you have been successful?

Ok, for some of you that might be a while down the track, so let’s get a little more current. If you and I were having a coffee together this afternoon and I asked you ‘how successful are you in your research at this point in time?’, what criteria would you base your assessment of success on?

While you are in a HDR program, you have your 6 monthly progress reports to the research office, which I remember vividly. You likely have laid out some reasonable steps for what is achievable in the next six months, thinking about the methods you’ll use to collect and analyse data, and how you will turn this data into meaningful outputs.

You probably also have some other milestones you are working towards, additional things that would indicate success; things like presenting at a conference, getting some teaching or research supervision experience, or submitting a journal article to be reviewed for possible publication.

Where did these goals come from?

I get it. These goals are your childhood dreams, right? You were one of ‘those’ kids. It’s cool, we all knew one. You know, the kid who couldn’t wait to grow up and present the findings of their latest logistic regression to a conference room full of other researchers. Typical, right? You were 10 and chasing that high of finishing a talk you worked so hard on for so long just to get to the Q&A afterwards and field a bunch of statements veiled as questions.

These kinds of milestones and goals are external success indicators. They come from our discipline or from our research supervisors, or what we see other researchers doing and think ‘Hey, I should probably be doing that, too‘. This social referencing upwards to our supervisors or other experts, and social referencing laterally to our peers and what they are achieving, makes a lot of sense.

We learn methodological and subject matter expertise from our supervisors and other researchers. We find people we respect and try to replicate in our own careers the things that have helped them develop their skills or earned them a positive reputation.

I think you might be able to tell where I am going with this… [Smile]

I started my psychology and research journey on the Wagga campus of CSU. When I finished my undergraduate studies I had met the external success indicators for majors in psychology, social work, and sociology. I completed my Honours in social work and my PhD in psychology, all in Wagga, and all based on the external success indicators set out by my disciplines and the specific expectations of the reviewers of first my dissertation, and then my thesis.

During my HDR program, I got experience coordinating subjects. I published multiple papers in top tier international journals. I presented at national and international conferences. I showed competence in qualitative AND quantitative research methods. And I had finished my thesis in a reasonable period of time. [Wink]

I was proud of my ability to see what success looked like in academia and to set goals and achieve them. It was hard because HDR programs are hard, but it was also hard because almost no one I knew in my non-academic life understood what I had been spending so much of my time on.

But I was part of a club and I was doing my time, so to speak. There is light at the end of the tunnel because this hussle will only be for a finite amount of time, and once I finish, I will be Dr Jaz and I will have actualised. I will be an unquestionable expert and no one will ever doubt my skills because I will have proven myself. [Smile]

After my HDR program, I worked as an academic for 5 years with research and teaching allocation in psychology departments at CSU, ACAP in Sydney and RMIT here in Melbourne. I taught almost everything that there is to teach in undergraduate psychology.

The external success indicators for these kinds of roles do vary from institution to institution but tend to include things like: publish 2 articles in top tier journals every 3 years, supervise 2-5 Honours students a year, supervise HDR students to completion, obtain however many thousands of dollars in competitive grant funding a year, and have high student ratings on the subjects you teach. The last one often proving the most challenging.

With career progression comes a new set of external success indicators. The tricky thing with external success indicators is that the goal posts shift and workplace culture, especially in places attracting high achievers like yourselves, is competitive and there can be a pressure to achieve the next thing, with little value placed on finding the role and level that suits you and sticking with it because it feels right. There is an urge to continue climbing the ladder and for the gamers in the room, I can assure you, there is no end boss to the career game. There will always be the next person to look up to and the next set of criteria to meet.

Do not get me wrong, external success indicators are necessary, but they are necessary only up to a point. I am not a complete anarchist arguing to burn down the system. I value my education, I loved completing my PhD, and there is a lot to love about academic work. I now work as a Research Fellow in the Australian Public Service, so now I am working within a whole new world of success indicators that are oriented towards informing policy, enhancing the use of evidence in practice, project and resource management and people management.

I am here today to encourage you to think beyond the methods and data of your project. Rest assured that to complete your HDR program, you will have met all those external success indicators anyway.

Then what?

I contend that there are some draw backs if we are to assess our individual success using external indicators alone.

First, relying on external success indicators encourages a focus on outcomes instead of processes. In this way, we run the risk of not appreciating our own individual journey on the way to the destination.

Second, by relying on external success indicators we stick to the path well-trodden. Doing what others have done in the way they have done them starts to make all research projects and researcher’s experiences converge. It suggests that all it takes to be a successful researcher is to tick a predefined list of boxes and then you are ready to go into the world and make a change, have job security, and be fulfilled in your career.

In fact, this kind of approach can sometimes lead to researchers never knowing the things that their own supervisors never knew. Think about that for a moment. That is like growing up and never knowing things that your parents did not already know. We want to stand on the shoulders of giants, not become the people they are or worse, hang around in their shadows.

We need our supervisors and our discipline to show us the fundamentals, but we need to then take those fundamentals and use them in unique and novel ways, in ways that feel right and are exciting to us individually.

Sticking to a predefined list of success indicators can also lead to unexpected and problematic outcomes. You might have a supervisor who values presentation skills and encourages you and other HDR candidates they supervise to apply to speak at the same conference or to compete in something like the 3-Minute Thesis. Scenarios like this – where all researchers are funnelled into the same directions – can lead to bottle necks where only a small number of people get through. They foster a sense of competition over collaboration.

If you are successful in achieving goals others set for you, you may find yourself in the odd situation of not feeling how you thought you would when you met that goal.

If you are not successful in achieving goals others set for you, then you may find yourself feeling sad, demotivated about not succeeding at something that you never really cared that much about anyway.

And this last point is key. When we judge ourselves and our research based solely on external success indicators, then we are giving over our sense of value and control to other people or systems in our lives. They then hold the vision and the power. While there is huge strength in having others around you to mentor you, review your work, and push you in the right direction, this same kind of arrangement can see journals, professional associations and employers having the opportunity to act as gatekeepers.

Now that I have thrown a whole bunch of shade on external success indicators, what is it that I want you to do?

First, I want to get real for a moment and quote the most doctory of Drs: Dr Seuss. ‘Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is You-er than You‘.

What I want, is for you to turn your investigative powers inward. While you are kicking goals in your research and ticking off those external success indicators, carve out some time to get to know yourself.

You are not the goals or milestones you have achieved. You are your values in life, including your work life. Your values help guide you, they are the internal rules you have about the world, and they tell you what your own internal success indicators are or should be.

The best thing about values is you can’t tick those babies off! Now, I love lists and ticking things off. But there is a real peace and assurance that comes with knowing, no matter what you are working towards right now, you have a constant candle to direct your energies and tell you how successful you are – by your own standards – right now.

You are also the skills you have collected throughout your life, including throughout your HDR program. Yes, some of these are data collection and analysis skills. Awesome. But they are also things like time management, problem solving, communication skills, managing upwards, empathy, emotional expression and emotional regulation.

The best thing about skills is that they are always transferrable – even the ones that you learn in really niche contexts. You are a specialist but that specialization is the tip of the iceberg. Under the surface, supporting that expertise, are all the general and adaptable skills that you use every day to complete your work and to have a life outside of work.

I have already listed some, but some other key transferrable skills for me are:

Perseverance. A sense of humor. Confidence. Curiosity. Bravery to ask questions I don’t know the answer to. Kindness to answer questions that others ask in a way that validates them. The ability to Google stuff – don’t under estimate this one – what I am really saying is that if you give me a task with little information about how to complete it, I will roll up my sleeves and work something out.

Here is a call to action for you. In the true spirit of this talk, an external expectation thrust upon you with the intention of improving things for you, delivered from a human who knows different things than you know…

Make some time over the next couple of days to mind map your values. What motivates you? What gives you energy? What kind of change or impact do you want to make in the world?

Once you have a bunch of values on the page, choose 2 or 3 of the ones that are most important to you and can be applied to your research.

Then, for each value, decide on 3 goals that you want to achieve. These goals should come from you and link directly to your values. These goals are the things you can tick off. They are the ways that you will realise your values in the real world.

Here’s the beauty of the whole thing – there will be some overlap between the external success indicators in your environment and your internal success indicators. You have, after all, self-selected to undertake a HDR program, you big nerd, you. [Smile]

By this point you will have at least one value that has 2 or 3 goals associated with it. Now, for each goal, list 3 transferrable skills that you currently have that will help you achieve this goal.

This is an exercise that I did myself about 5 years ago now. I was at a training session held by Dr Amelia Aldao, a therapist and PhD from New York city. The training session was called ‘Making the leap from academia to industry’. This exercise changed my life. I stopped thinking about what other people expected from me and instead worked out what I wanted in life and in my career. I really love the work I am doing now.

Now I will provide a concrete example from my own experience, that you can use to start thinking about your own values, goals, and transferrable skills.

A key value for me was teamwork. I realised that I spent a lot more of my time than I would like working independently or only ever having conversations with key collaborators via email and often months apart. I wanted the dynamic exchange of learning from others, sharing my insights and creating something together that was much better than we could each create independently.

Ok – teamwork is the value. So, one goal I set myself was to find a job in a team. The transferrable skills I had that would help me toward my goal were:

interpersonal skills
project management skills
mentoring skills.

Another teamwork-related goal I set myself was to publish papers – boom, I told you there was overlap with external success indicators! I wanted to work as a team to create new knowledge and share interesting ideas. And this lines up well with my third goal for that teamwork value, which was create podcast episodes. I didn’t want the knowledge I was creating or the coolest ideas in psychology to remain behind a paywall for other people in the same club as me – the less noble aspect of this goal is that I just love meeting people and talking to them.

The collective transferrable skills that I listed for these two goals of publishing papers and creating podcast episodes were: time management, providing and receiving feedback, subject matter and methodological expertise, creating a narrative, science communication skills, and the ability to interview and build rapport with people.

What I started to realise was that the world was a lot bigger than I had previously felt it was for me professionally. Those external success indicators are the things that get you the degree. They are often the things that get you the interview as well. But it is the transferrable skills that employers value most. The teams you work in will value them highly as well. But most importantly, you will start to look for opportunities that fit your values and skills, rather than trying to fit in.

You’ll start to appreciate other people and the things they prioritise when you pay more attention to values. This is where your empathy skills will really kick into overdrive and you will be a better colleague and manager for it.

I went from maintaining a resume of my academic achievements, like lists publications and awards, to a CV that speaks to my skill set – the skill set that I can apply in almost any situation. An excerpt from my latest successful promotion application:

A motivated, innovative, and proactive researcher and project manager, I am a responsive and respectful leader committed to developing and maintaining cohesive, collaborative, support-focused teams that empower staff to progress in their careers. Strategic and highly analytical, my psychology expertise enables me to provide meaningful support and problem solving when issues arise, ensuring team wellbeing is maintained even in challenging situations.

Who would you rather work with, the person I just described or the author of three recent publications called:

The publications are great and other psychology people will get excited and we can nerd out together, but I want to be recognised and have opportunities outside of the specific parameters of my discipline.

What I hope you realise is that the value of your HDR journey is much greater than you even realise right now and it’s not valuable for the reasons you may have previously thought.

Finally, when it comes to career goals, be a little more like Nicholas Cage is with the films he creates: one for them and a hand full for me.

I am a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Family Studies (or AIFS). AIFS is an independent Government research agency with a wide variety of short and long-term projects. The common theme at the heart of the work we do is improving the wellbeing of Australian families.

My subject matter expertise is in trauma, mental health and IPV. I am currently leading a large project funded by the Department of Social Services to build the capability of mental health practitioners who work with children and young people 0-18 years, and their families.

I have published 22 peer-reviewed journal articles and 12 practitioner-focused practice guides and papers. I have presented at national and international conferences, published book chapters, and contributed to a variety of industry magazines. I have been co-investigator on several competitive industry and Government grant projects, some through CSU and others through my current role.

When I am not at work, the research obsession and nerdiness ensues. In my own time I create and host a podcast called Psych Attack, where I interview guests from around the world about their research in a diverse range of psychology topics. The most recent episode was about the use of smart phone meta-data to predict adolescent mental health symptoms. An upcoming episode is about why some people like watching horror films and others do not. Psych Attack has reached 73 different countries. I recently served as a judge for the Australian Podcast Awards.

I also have a psychology and research blog, where each month I aim to post something that I have written as well as having guest authors. Some topics that might be of interest to a HDR audience are posts about choosing a journal for your research and developing an abstract submission for a conference.

Thanks.