Itâs also increasingly frustrating when Universities are now vaguely aware of outreach and itâs general importance but arenât willing to pay more than lip service. Not just outreach, but student care and mentoring is disproportionately performed by minorities in science as people see a need to help people below them navigate hostility and find success quicker than they did. Pastoral care, teaching and outreach are, by pretty much every panel, considered ânice to havesâ in faculty or post-doc candidates. For those not in the know, grant money income/awards and the H-index are considered the most important. H-index is a measure of your âsuccessâ and âproductivityâ in the field; someoneâs H index is the number H of papers that have H citations each (so someone with a H-index of five is on at least five papers with five citations each). Thatâs it thatâs how itâs done. Itâs one of many metrics, but itâs taken too rigidly by everyone. Itâs sometimes (often?) used as a cut.
âLottie, how is this related?â Well, the more time you spend churning out (decent) papers, the less time you have for teaching or taking proper care of your students (so much rage for other students here) or disseminating your work to the public, or taking proper care of yourself now I think about it. So those who didnât value outreach - and got their higher H-index because of that - are more likely to be interviewed. And those that spent time doing outreach and pastoral care? More likely to be cut. Not everyone who avoids outreach undervalues it, some people would be too nervous etc, but Iâd rather it be that they give a damn good reason they werenât involved in their department in some fashion rather than outreach peeps explaining and apologising as to why they only have twelve not thirteen papers or whatever.
And it gets worse, because if youâre in a discipline like astronomy or theoretical physics your work does not have easily quantifiable impact. Impact is a word that strikes fear into the hearts of many UK scientists, itâs part of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) university ranking and determines department funding. One of the three measures, (research quality (papers) and environment (money) are the other two) and gaining massive importance is what the impact of your research is on society. Itâs a daftly short-sighted thing as if youâre in a physics department with idk a tech group who are coming to market with products your dept can get a really high score, but if youâre in my old widdly department that has astronomy, theory and expt particle physics and quantum computing, youâre going to have a hard time. So, what can we use for impact case studies? We use outreach. And, even though in the past seven or so years undergrad physics numbers have more than doubled in our department, the REF panel decided the case studies were âokay, I guessâŚâ and were weaker than other depts. (For the record, Brian Cox got 4/4 stars for Manchester IIRC, so someone did well). What impact we do have is usually undervalued anyway as itâs hard to quantify, so people who do outreach have to work harder to have the same âimpactâ according to funders. FTR if you had a good experience with an outreach event, email the team and say âyour event changed my mind about X and made me do Y and Z science-related things and career choicesâ because they can use that in the REF and theyâll love you for it.
I can rant forever on the REF but my eventual point is, disciplines like astro and particle physics NEED people who do outreach, and, looking at the stuff coming out of the woodwork with astroSH, NEED proper pastoral care at all levels. Hiring panels say they care but they only use it as an âif all else is equalâ metric, by which point itâs too late really, youâve lost a lot of decent people. You need people focussed on it. :( Top that off with full-time outreach positions being really underpaid and the impact and importance undervalued⌠no wonder, even with âunbiased, we promiseâ hiring panels, minorities in science arenât being selected. ::throws table::
