Andrew Pontzen, astrophysics postdoc
One of the benefits of having a postdoctoral fellowship is that you get to choose what you do with your time. In November, I agreed to create some animations for the BBC showing what a computer-simulated universe looks like from the inside. There was a strict deadline - they were for Stargazing Live, a television programme broadcast in mid-January in the UK. As a result, my research pretty much ground to a halt for a few weeks while I gave priority to coordinating the video production.
The flip side of postdoctoral freedom is that, if you want to secure another job (fellowships are fixed-term positions), you need to have a whole lot to show for the current one. The apparent consensus of hiring panels is that just two things matter: papers and citations. So, logically, the best thing is to keep your head down, churn out papers, and go to the occasional specialist conference to remind people how much they'd like to refer incessantly to your work, thank you very much.
On the other hand, making animations and discussing them live on national television is more fun.
It's not only more fun but seen from a wider perspective than impressing future employers, it's important in its own right. These days, universities - especially in the UK - are increasingly aware of the need to communicate science more widely. In future, research council funding will be based partly on the outcome of the "research excellence framework" (REF). To score well, research groups need to justify not only their academic worth, but their societal "impact". Annoyingly that's not a very well-defined thing. What is clear, though, is that one of the few routes open to astronomers to tick this box is to engage with the community around them.
Stargazing Live should form an excellent showcase for my department, since we can point to fellow postdoc Chris Lintott's Planet Hunters spot (viewers of the show discovered a brand new planet) as well as the simulation videos. We can put a notional hard cash value on the work we did for the BBC, or calculate the equivalent value in advertising. (Money, even if theoretical, is always a good start.) We can point to my follow-up video (see below) for the simulations which accrued over 60,000 hits in its first two weeks on YouTube.
More than 1000 people came in person to the local Stargazing Oxford event, one of hundreds of BBC-endorsed events across the country. Many visitors had no prior experience of university-level science, and there are plans to track how many of those continue to engage with astronomy or physics.?This kind of sustained contact should score highly in REF, at least according to a pilot impact analysis conducted to establish the format and scoring methods of the first real grading in 2014.?
All very well for the permanent academics who can afford to worry about their group's REF score. But for everyone else, it's finding the next job that matters. Scientists, whether they want to or not, make regular moves between countries and continents to secure continuing employment. So UK policy is a relatively minor consideration when deciding how to maximise job prospects.
Even in the UK it's not really clear whether the "impact" agenda will materially affect hiring decisions. In fact I suspect it won't: there will always be enough enthusiastic postdocs in a department to sustain a reasonable level of outreach. The permanent staff will just need to marshall them into doing something measurable.
Nonetheless, I'll risk the occasionally hiatus from the pursuit of papers and citations to carry on with the whole outreach thing. I love research but it's refreshing to get away from it and talk about the bigger picture. And if we spend our lives obsessing over how to secure the next science job, we may lose sight of why we wanted it in the first place.
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