{"id":71,"date":"2019-12-16T12:01:58","date_gmt":"2019-12-16T12:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/NUPHSIpgr\/?p=71"},"modified":"2019-12-16T12:01:59","modified_gmt":"2019-12-16T12:01:59","slug":"braving-the-stage-my-experience-of-the-insights-doctoral-thesis-public-lecture-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/NUPHSIpgr\/2019\/12\/16\/braving-the-stage-my-experience-of-the-insights-doctoral-thesis-public-lecture-award\/","title":{"rendered":"Braving the stage: My experience of the INSIGHTS Doctoral Thesis Public Lecture Award"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Here is where I admit in a previous life I was an actress,\nobviously not an amazing one as I still don\u2019t have my Oscar but luckily I have\njust got something that feels pretty close to one! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you tell people you used to be an actress people often assume\nthat you are a confident public speaker, however there is a big difference\nbetween acting and presenting your research. Acting is more about presenting\nsomeone else\u2019s work and you can hide behind a character whereas presenting your\nown research feels a lot more personal. You are sharing something you have spent\na huge amount of time and effort thinking about, planning and conducting and\nthat can feel scary. It is, however, an important aspect of being a researcher.\nConducting research and publishing in journals isn\u2019t enough anymore, you need\nto be able to engage with other people, whether that is the patients who may be\naffected by your research, the participants who took part or the general\npublic. Talking about your research to many different audiences is a vital skill\nrequired to survive academia.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few months ago my supervisor nominated me for the INSIGHTS\nDoctoral Thesis Public Lecture competition, this first part of the process was based\non the research abstract and supervisors application, six people were selected\nto go on to have training to put together a presentation\u2026. Well I didn\u2019t get\nthrough this stage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A couple of weeks before the semi-finals I got an email to\nsay that someone had unfortunately had to drop out and I was the first runner\nup, would I be interested in taking part? I decided that I probably wouldn\u2019t\nget very far but it would be a good experience and free training. So I agreed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A week later I had put together a vague outline of a presentation\nand turned up for a training session with Jackie Dack, a theatre director who\nspecialises in helping people with presentations. It was one of the best\ntraining sessions I have ever had, and really made me think about every aspect\nof presenting. The words I used and whether they were easily understood, what\nwas on my slides and how I physically moved and expressed myself during the\npresentation. She asked how brutal we wanted her to be\u2026..I picked very! I don\u2019t\nregret it, sometimes you really need brutal honesty to improve what you are doing.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main point I learnt through this training and putting\ntogether my talk was the need to have a story, all research has a story but it\ncan sometimes be tricky to find it. Humans love a good story, it is how we\u2019ve\nalways passed information on and catching people\u2019s interest this way helps them\nengage with you and what you are doing. For some people the story comes from\nyou the researcher, why you do what you do. For others the story comes from the\nprocess or your findings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My research is on routes to diagnosis in head and neck\ncancer and how patients experience this route and their diagnosis of cancer. I\npicked to tell my research story through the patient\u2019s words as not only were\nthey impactful but I felt that this was a story which would resonate with most people.\nSo that was my starting point tell the patients journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next stage was the semi-finals; six of us presented our\ntalk to four judges, one person was selected through online voting based on their\ntopic and then two others were selected by the judges. This was a great\nopportunity to do the talk in a safe environment and get feedback. We luckily\ndidn\u2019t have to wait too long for the results and Richy let us know that Alex,\nRamtin and I had won the competition and would be doing our public lecture in\none week. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So a week later at 4.30pm I found myself stood in a glass\nbox waiting to get into the Curtis Auditorium to see what it was like. I\u2019d felt\npretty calm up until that point but the nerves really kicked in when I saw the\nsize of the room, and then when I saw the amount of people coming in. I\u2019d\ninvited my supervisor, family and friends as well as people from the local head\nand neck charity I had worked with. There was something even more terrifying\nabout doing this lecture in front of these people than the people I didn\u2019t\nknow. These were the people who had supported me through my PhD and had\ninvested a lot of time and effort in me so I felt it was important to show them\nwhat I had achieved during this time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Waiting to go on was terrifying, I won\u2019t deny it, but once I\nwas up and talking about my research I loved it. It was fantastic to look\naround the audience and see people nod when they recognised something I was\nsaying. The questions at the end gave me the opportunity to see what people\nfelt about my research and what they wanted to know more about. There was\ndefinitely a need to understand how my research would impact the current\nservice provided and what changes I thought could improve this. It was great to\nsee that people understood the potential impact of this type of research and\nthat they also felt it was important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We get used to talking about our research at conferences,\nsymposiums and with other students and academics in similar areas to us, and we\nget used to using academic language, so this opportunity gave me the chance to\nreally get out of my \u201cbox\u201d to think about how my research might be perceived\nand understood by people not in my research area. I had to change how I thought\nabout my research what the important points were and how this could be\nexpressed in a way that wasn\u2019t only informative but also interesting to the\naudience, after all the majority of the audience were there for a fun and\ninteresting night out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Would I recommend this to anyone else? Yes, it was an\namazing experience and I enjoyed the whole process, from writing the talk\nthrough to the semi-finals and the main event. It has changed how I think about\nmy presentations and how I will approach them in the future. It was also an\namazing adrenaline rush. We are incredibly lucky in this faculty to have many\ndifferent opportunities to develop other skills so if you have the chance take\nit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In true Oscar style I\u2019d also like to say thank you to my supervisor Linda Sharp for nominating me, Joanne Patterson, Jackie Dack for the fantastic training session and the brutal feedback, Richy Hetherington for organising it all, the judges, John Kirby and the INSIGHTS team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Written by Jennifer Dean, PhD Student in the Population Health Sciences Institute, Newcastle University.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is where I admit in a previous life I was an actress, obviously not an amazing one as I still don\u2019t have my Oscar but luckily I have just got something that feels pretty close to one! When you … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8219,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,7,4,8,9],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-achievement","tag-award","tag-phd","tag-public-lecture","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/NUPHSIpgr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/NUPHSIpgr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/NUPHSIpgr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/NUPHSIpgr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8219"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/NUPHSIpgr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/NUPHSIpgr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/NUPHSIpgr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions\/75"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/NUPHSIpgr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/NUPHSIpgr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/NUPHSIpgr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}