workforce
campusreview.com.au
The weight of success
An ANU academic on the
pitfalls of a successful career.
Inger Mewburn interviewed by Loren Smith
I
t began – as the cliché goes – with a list
on a napkin. Associate Professor Inger
Mewburn, director of research training
at ANU and founder of the blog The Thesis
Whisperer, was lunching with a colleague
when the discussion turned to the perils of
their respective professional success.
That rough list turned into a honed one
– in the form of a post on her blog. In ‘Are
you prepared for the problems of success?’,
she outlines her success bugbears. Among
them are ‘professional jealousy’ and
‘everyone wants a piece of you’.
“These problems annoy me, or they
make me – sometimes – sad,” she said.
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Are you rolling your eyes? Mewburn
expected some people to react this way.
Her friend jokingly referred to her list as
“high-class problems”. “They sound very
whiny,” she acknowledged. Indeed, last
year, Campus Review interviewed her
about woeful academic job prospects for
PhD graduates – in essence, the failure
of many.
Yet she persisted in penning her post
for a reason: in addition to offering
commiseration to the successful, it also,
less obviously, offers lessons for those who
are still striving.
“I’m actually providing a valuable service
by being a bit of a mess in public.”
Campus Review spoke with Mewburn
to find out more about the hazards of
academic success.
CR: Can you tell us a bit about yourself,
professionally?
IM: I’m a research educator. I’ve been doing
this since 2006. It’s a weird kind of job. Most
people don’t know it until they encounter
someone like me. I work with researchers
in all disciplines, and I teach them how to
navigate academia, how to communicate.
I teach them research integrity and writing.
So, I help PhD students get their PhD faster
and with less pain.
One of the reasons I have become very
famous in my field is because I run a blog
called The Thesis Whisperer, and it has a lot
of followers.
What made you write this particular
blog post?
This one’s been brewing for a long time.
I’ve been reflecting on the experiences
I’ve gone through over the last 10 years,
particularly since I started the blog nine
years ago, and it revealed to me a whole
different world of problems that I hadn’t
realised existed before. These problems
annoy me, or they make me – sometimes –
sad. And some of them are irritating, and
I’ve just been running the problems by a
few people lately or people have been
bringing me similar problems.
So it just all reached a head one day over
lunch with a colleague. I pulled down a
napkin and started writing them down, and
it kind of came out in a rush.
Could you briefly talk through the four
problems you raised?
The first one I talked about was professional
jealousy. This one’s hard for me. I’ve
been subjected to it intensely by about
three different people. The thing about
professional jealousy that I’ve come to