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realise is that it’s very easy to blame
yourself, because it doesn’t appear to
be jealousy. It appears sometimes in
the helpful suggestions or backhanded
comments that make you feel bad about
yourself. And I’ve moved away from certain
opportunities and people because of this
kind of professional jealousy.
The saddest thing is that it often
happens between women. I also think the
person who is acting from that place of
jealousy is often unaware of what they’re
doing. They’re just acting on their feelings.
This also happens within the PhD
community. Successful PhD students
often find they are subject to the tall poppy
syndrome. Professional jealousy is alive in
academia, and it’s quite subtle.
The second problem is being the person
who’s good at something, and therefore
becoming the go-to person for that thing.
An example of that in my university is the
Three Minute Thesis competition, which
is a presentation competition for PhD
students. I’m the primary trainer inside my
university, and the Three Minute Thesis
competition has become really popular
among early pre-researchers who might
never have had the training back in their
PhD days. So I get asked to do a lot of that
sort of help and extra training for people,
which is really hard to manage time-wise.
Another aspect is people emailing you
and asking you questions, or wanting to
have a one-on-one meeting so you can
apply your knowledge to their particular
circumstance. I actually love doing that kind
of work – it makes me feel great. I enjoy it.
I feel like I’m practically applying the skills.
I’m giving back. But the sheer number of
them becomes really hard to manage, and
saying no feels bad. I don’t want people to
stop asking, but sometimes I just really have
to manage the flow.
The third problem is being as good as
your boss, or knowing as much as your
boss about something. So, I don’t know
my boss’ whole job. She does a whole
lot of stuff that I actually strategically
don’t want to know about because I don’t
want her job, but I know a great deal
about research education, so I act in an
advisory role.
Luckily, I have a really good relationship
with my boss at the moment, but in the
past I’ve had much more difficult situations
where my advice was either being ignored
or pushed aside or I’ve been told not to
give it. So I’ve had to learn how to be a
good advice-giver, so that can be really
problematic. I think many academics
would experience that. I call it the ‘curse
of knowledge’.
Lastly, it’s just everyone wanting a piece
of you. That’s actually different from asking
for help. It’s offering you an opportunity –
keynotes, travel – and it sounds so whiny
to whinge about something like that; that’s
why I’d say these are problems.
My friend Richard Hume described
them to me as “high-class problems”.
They’re the kind of problems that everyone
goes, “Well, I wish I had that problem.”
So we really can’t complain about being
asked to travel overseas four times in three
months. It just sounds very whiny. So, you
have to learn how to say yes or no to those
opportunities. Some of them are so good
that you feel like you have to jump on
everything, but that’s just too exhausting.
Your post has only recently been published,
but are you expecting any pushback?
I was a little bit, especially about the last
one, but I’ve actually had quite the deluge
of really lovely emails. There are not many
comments there, but people wrote to me
in private saying, “Oh, I’m sort of reading
between the lines that you’ve experienced
some hard times and I just want to say
to you how much you’ve really helped
me.” So, actually, I’ve had the opposite of
what I expected to have. And I should’ve
expected that from my audience because
they are very lovely, generous people.
I really tried to write the post from the
point of view of ‘you may experience
some of these problems’ or ‘you might
be experiencing different versions of
these problems, they don’t have to be as
extreme as I’m experiencing them’.
You can get a lot of opportunities offered
to you in the general run-of-the-mill as
an academic, but you have to manage
your time. A lot of students, for instance,
are offered things like teaching gigs, and
they’re asked to help on committees and
to organise conferences. These are all
good opportunities to build skills and your
career and so on, but managing your time
around them and getting everything done
is a skill everyone has to learn.
Do you think the blog post offers lessons
for people who aren’t as successful, in that
it humanises success and shows that it’s
not the perfect thing some people perceive
it to be?
One of my colleagues, Victoria, always tells
me that I have knack for humanising things
and making things approachable in the
classroom, and I appreciate that feedback.
She particularly likes the way I’ll freely
tell people I’ve been in therapy. I’ll say ‘my
therapist says this’ or ‘my therapist says
that’, and people are sometimes shocked
and come up to me after and say, “You’re
in therapy?”
I say, “Well, yes. I need to debrief with
someone, and I don’t want to overburden
my relatives, child or friends with these
thoughts and problems I have, so I see a
therapist and I just try to normalise that.”
And people say, “That makes me feel
relieved, because I see a therapist and I
saw it as a deficit in me, and the fact that
I’ve been subjected to
professional jealousy intensely
by about three different people.
you’re so visibly successful and you still
have those feelings, that makes it okay.”
That’s one thing I didn’t realise about
being a prominent person: you act as this
model just by being yourself, and being
vulnerable can actually be helpful to other
people. It comes naturally to me, that’s just
how I am, but I’m starting to realise that
I’m actually providing a valuable service by
being a bit of a mess in public.
I agree. Also, it takes a certain degree
of self-confidence to admit your
vulnerabilities.
Yes, and probably emotional privilege.
I’m a twin, and I’m happily married and
have a beautiful son. So I have three
people really close to me who’ve always
got my back, and it gives me a kind of
cushion on life, and I have to recognise
that I’m able to do and say things and to
express things because I have that. It is
emotional privilege. Not everybody has it,
and I can’t expect everyone to react the
same way or be able to do that.
Not everyone has people around
them who are genuinely helpful. And
I encounter this a lot in my work. PhD
students have some very complicated life
circumstances. And so, although I can be
a model on that, I wouldn’t expect anyone
else to feel they have to be that confident
themselves. ■
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