Speaker 1: Hi everyone, so welcome to the video. This week I'm going to talk a little bit about tips to help you get a research talk ready for an interview. So if you're new, my name is Caroline. I'm a lecturer in physics at a UK university. And maybe you've got an interview at a university, maybe you're just thinking about what the interview process would be like. Quite often as part of the interview, you're going to be asked to give a talk. Now it can sometimes be a research talk. Sometimes they can ask you to talk about your teaching. Quite often it's a combination of the two things together. But in this video, I thought I would share five tips to help you get the research part of your talk sorted. Just a quick disclaimer, I'm a physics lecturer. Obviously, I'm talking from my own experiences. So hopefully these points will translate across to your subject. I'm based in the UK, different countries might do things in slightly different ways. But as I said, hopefully these points will be useful for you as you're getting ready to give your research based talk. Point number one then is to understand the goal of your talk. Sounds obvious, but it's so important to understand the question that you're being asked to prepare your talk for. So as I said, typically it will be research or teaching or a combination of the two things together. But make sure if the title is very specific in what it wants you to do in this talk, that your talk is going to address those points. Essentially, make sure you're answering the right exam question when you're getting your talk ready to go. So now you know your exam question for this talk, let's think a little bit then about the content. And I think step number two is one of the things that's important to do in a research talk is to demonstrate your personal capabilities. So by that I mean, you might have worked in research teams, you could have been involved in experiments where there were several people working together. Maybe you've only done collaborative based research. In this interview situation, it's really important for the people interviewing you to know what you did, what were your contributions, what are the skills and attributes you have that you could bring to this role. And just as an example, so when I did this in my own talk, quite near the front of the slides, I included a picture of me actually working on a cryomagnet in France. And in that one picture, I was trying to show that I could handle equipment. I'd worked in different facilities. I was confident installing, you know, quite complicated pieces of physics tech. And I was the one actually doing that particular piece of work. I wasn't supervising it. I wasn't working in a team. I was the one with my hands on the piece of equipment trying to install this magnet on this French beam line. So just think about when you're preparing your slides, how you are coming across. So how are you demonstrating to the people watching the talk that you have got these research skills, you've got these particular abilities, and that you are capable of doing the research or you are capable of leading the team to do the research. So it kind of depends on what level of job you're going for as to whether you're going to need to be showing mainly your own personal work or maybe showing your leadership of others. And in my case, it was a combination of the two. So I showed hands on personal work where I was the one doing the research. And I also showed examples where I was the one coordinating and leading a research team. And that seamlessly brings me to my third point, which is about providing evidence of your research leadership. Now, this will vary depending on the position that you're going for, the level of seniority of the role that you're applying for. Maybe you've led PhD students, maybe you've been leading an industrial based research team. But in this category of showing evidence of your research leadership, there's several things to think about kind of demonstrating you want to show that you could organise. So maybe you had to coordinate people from several different places, or maybe you had to make sure a student was able to do their research around their wider timetable. You probably want to try to get in if you had to raise funds. So did you apply for research grants? Were you the leading person on those research grants? Were you contributing towards those funding applications? You probably want to think about external pressures. Did you have to coordinate with another party, another university, some kind of technical supplier? And how did you bring those pieces together? So these are all different ways you can demonstrate that you've got leadership experience in a research field. And as I said, it's going to be a bit different depending on where you are in your career as to how much you can show this. But if you have got research leadership, then it's important to try to bring that out in your talk. And that brings us on to point number four, and that's giving formal evidence of your research outputs. And when I say that, I think we all typically tend to think of journal publications and conference proceedings. And if you've got those, you might want to pick one or two out. You know, they're kind of the flagship ones that are particularly important or significant in your research. But you might have other formal research outputs too. You know, you might have given a key talk at a conference. You might have written an article, be that for a local media outlet, for some kind of magazine relating to your specialist research area. You might have been invited to talk about your research either at a conference or a public event or on the radio. So just think about how you have taken your research and how you have shared it in some capacity. And if that is a document or an oral presentation, you know, these are things to bring out in your talk. What you're trying to show to the people who are interviewing you and watching your research talk is that your research goes somewhere. You know, you're not just doing research and then nothing sort of happens with it afterwards. You're doing research and it leads to an end destination. You know, be that your conference paper or your journal publication or something else, your research is going places and you are finishing your research to a standard where you can share it with others. It kind of shows in this point that you complete tasks. You know, you don't start some projects and then not finish them. You might start a selection of research activities. Not all of them will be successful necessarily, but the ones that are, you are able to show a formal research output. And I think the thing that's really key in these research talks, and you're giving them as part of an interview, is if you're interviewing for a lectureship position, you need to demonstrate a research vision. So you need to show those people that are interviewing you why you would fit into that university and bring really interesting research that would help shape projects and opportunities for students and lead to good things for that university. So when I put the word achievable research vision, there's a lot of things you can do here. You need to show that your research ideas are credible, that they're well-founded, maybe that you've got collaborators to work with, you've got access to key pieces of equipment, you've got a plan as to where you're going to apply for money, which are the research grant applications that you're going to write. You've thought about your research and how it would link to the students at that university. Would your research lead to bachelor's programme projects? Would it lead to PhD projects? Are you going to be able to offer summer internships? How are you going to bring these projects together? And then if you're in a lectureship position that combines research and teaching, how are you going to balance this research vision alongside your teaching duties? But I think this is quite a nice point to include at the end of your slides. So having introduced them to your own personal capabilities, talking through your key research output so far, you then want a nice chunk at the end of your talk talking about your personal research vision and how you would deliver it whilst you're working at that particular university. And again this point will change, so if you're applying for a lecturer, senior, if you are applying for a lecturer, a senior lecturer, a reader or a professor, it'll be slightly different. If you're applying for a research fellow, maybe you're applying against a research project where the research vision is already there and then you're showing how you will be able to deliver against that particular research idea. But in any case, make sure that you are selling why you are the right person to fit into that university research puzzle and to deliver really good research and opportunities for that academic community. So they are just my five top kind of points. If you have a look on the internet, I'm sure there'll be loads of different points out there about how to get ready for your research talk. Everyone will do it differently, just some things that I definitely I considered when I was applying for mine. As I said though, these talks will often ask you to combine research and teaching, so if this was the research video then in a future video I should probably cover how I tackled showing how I could answer the teaching part of that question. But in the meantime, I hope this helps a bit. Good luck if you've got any interviews coming up. As always, please do leave me a comment, like and subscribe. It's so lovely to see your comments that have this little space here on YouTube, but look after yourselves. I'll be back next Monday with another academic video. Take care and I'll see you soon. Bye.