Castles and Coprolites

It’s hard to believe it’s already been six months since I joined Durham University . The time has absolutely flown by, and I’ve found myself in the midst of a whirlwind of new ideas, collaborations, and opportunities that are making this next chapter of my career incredibly exciting. One of the most rewarding aspects so far has been the chance to work across disciplinary boundaries. There’s a real appetite here for collaboration, and I’ve been lucky to connect with brilliant colleagues in engineering, biosciences, and computer science. Together, we’re developing a cross-department XR-CT centre, bringing together our  complementary facilities in Archaeology and Engineering . I’ve also been exploring new collaborations with the computer science team, particularly around machine learning for XR-CT segmentation and analysis. There’s huge potential here, not just for streamlining workflows, but for transforming how we interpret complex datasets in archaeology. We’re already thinking ...

Go team! There was liberal use of the poop emoji. The blog has been quiet this year, but there is lots to report. As well as the announcement of the Earthslides relocation to Newcastle , our NERC project is now a few months into its second year , and we are beginning to see results from all the hard work that the lab team have been doing. Back in April project research associates Dr John Blong and Dr Helen Whelton gave presentations on the palaeoecological analyses and faecal lipid residue work respectively, at the Society for American Archaeology conference in Washington DC. The papers were part of a session we organised on Coprolite Research: Archaeological and Palaeoenvironmental Potentials. Despite being amusingly puntastic, the session really highlighted how coprolites are an extremely important archive of information, despite the fact they are often dismissed in archaeological analyses. I was also very proud to see geoarchaeology PhD student Alicia Sawyer give a great pr...

I came across this article ages ago about jobs academics did before they became academics , and have been meaning to write something about it, but the semester has been so very very busy that I haven't had a chance. Having just handed in what I hope is my last lot of marking before I'm off on fieldwork next week, I thought I'd sit down and do some reminiscing. My early adventures in the world of work. My very first job was as a assistant at an amusement arcade in my hometown of Newcastle. It was so monotonous and very depressing, spending the whole day handing out change to people that they would then just put into slot machines. I always knew I wanted to go to university, but that experience really reminded me that I would never be happy doing something 'normal'. It was the summer before I was about to head off to university, and I worked really hard at that job, saving up enough money to buy myself a desktop computer that I could take with me. I remember it wel...

Since joining Newcastle I have been on two shortlisting panels, one for a temporary teaching post and the other for a permanent lectureship. Having been on the other side of things for such a long time , I think I have honed my own application skills considerably, and it has been quite eye-opening to see how the hiring process works, and what other peoples' applications look like. It was really obvious the people who 'knew what they were doing' (i.e. had probably talked to senior colleagues and gotten advice) versus those who just wrote what I would consider a 'first draft' type application. The application is like a piece of work for publication; everything needs to be spot on. It was frustrating to see what were probably good candidates not really sell themselves well, and often not demonstrate how they actually fit the job criteria. There was a tendency I think in many cases to make assumptions, that the reader would just know what the technical skills were, or w...

Following a discussion over on Twitter about whether you should apply for a particular academic job or not I decided to have a look through my archive of job applications. Having been a bit rubbish at blogging over the past couple of months, procrastination is back with a vengeance, as usual correlating nicely with many many deadlines. This analysis is something I said I would do if I ever got a permanent job - whilst the numbers are somewhat depressing, I hope it is informative. At the very least, it shows that rejection is the norm, even for someone who eventually did get a job. I finished my PhD in 2008, though due to an unusually long time between submission and viva, then corrections, I didn't officially graduate until 2010. I began seriously thinking about applying for academic jobs in 2009 (yes, AFTER I had finished; I was clueless). Looking back my first attempts were rubbish. I got some very harsh feedback from my first proper interview in 2010, which I found very upsett...

I don't really do 'advice' posts that often, but I was inspired to do this after a recent 'mini interview' I did for the Chronicle of Higher Education on what it's like doing multiple postdocs in the humanities. The resulting article is all a bit more doom and gloom than I was expecting, so I thought I would do my own version here that focuses on the positives. Disclaimers. 1. The Chronicle article I assume is for a US audience, and it's worth pointing out that there is  a terminology difference. Postdocs in the UK, at least in my field, are not really training positions, but contract research jobs. You may get some additional training but that's not the main purpose, and you're expected to be able to do the job from day one. 2. Also I am an unusual case in many ways, as I sit right in the middle of the sciences and humanities, and actually for the scientists in my field it's the norm to do multiple postdocs and fellowships.3.  And my case is ...