The Thesis Whisperer Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode The Thesis Whisperer Walk

Hi, I'm Helen Sword from helensword.com, and this is SwordSwings, my podcast series for writers in motion. Whether you're out walking, or riding in a car, or on a train, or a bus, or just pottering around in your kitchen, this recording will help you move yourself and your writing to someplace new. I've extracted today's podcast episode from a conversation that I held back in 2021 with Professor Inger Mueburn, better known as the Thesis Whisperer.

Inger is the Director of Researcher Development at the Australian National University and the author of numerous scholarly papers, books, and book chapters about research education, post PhD employability, and many other topics. If you are not yet familiar with Inger's fabulous, long running blog at www.thesiswhisperer. com, make sure to check it out. So, let's dive into this extract in which we discuss how Inger developed her blog, the role of technology in writing, and post PhD employability.

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Helen: Can we just start off by getting you to tell us a bit about your background, your academic background has been a bit checkered, starting out in architecture, and then how you came to start the Thesis Whisperer blog.

Inger: Thank you. Yeah, it's a long and I think patchwork story.
So I always liked writing as a child when I was in primary school and I used to write like writing stories. And I used to get good grades for those, but then writing in high school turned into this kind of analytical exercise that I did not enjoy. And I actually went to architecture so I didn't have to write. And all I did was label drawings for 10 years. I did like to draw as well. So I came back to university to do a master's degree in order to be able to teach architecture, and that plan didn't really work out.

It's just very hard to get an architecture lectureship if you're not a practising architect at the same time, and I had a young family, and I got this job in research education by mistake. They should never have given it to me. This was 2005, end of 2005, start of 2006 and my master's supervisor is literally like this: my master's supervisor's best friend was going on maternity leave. and she had this weird job called research fellow, which up till then I hadn't really heard of. And I was saying, I didn't want to be an academic anymore. And I wanted to do a more kind of professionally oriented job in the university. Cause I just like working with clever people in nice places with trees and coffee shops. I mean, who ever really wants to leave a campus? It's a great place to work.

And so I went for this job and there were five people with the PhD going for this job. It was quite desirable. And the only reason they hired me was that I had done a course in Blackboard—you know, the content management system, learning management system. It was at the bottom of my resume, literally a one-liner saying I can make Blackboard courses, Which I kind of could. But I mean, I hadn't made one, but I kind of knew how. And so like, they threw out all the other PhD ones and hired me because I think they thought the technical bar on that was higher than it actually was. And so I started there, and I did a six-week contract, and they're like, ‘Hey, you're pretty good. You seem to enjoy this. Do you want to stay? Here's a three-month contract’, then a six-month contract. And then I started my PhD. I did my PhD in hand gestures in architecture classrooms, which is really. Interesting kind of crossovers with language studies in lots of ways. But I was just studying. And then when I finished my degree at Melbourne uni in 2009, I said to them, ‘right, so I'm off, I'll go and do something else now.’ And they said, ‘Oh, please stay. Here's a permanent job!’ Um, and I was like, right, I'll take that then.

I started the blog in 2010, and I basically started it because I got one of these, right. (gestures to phone). And I was taking long commuting journeys, and I noticed there were these things called blogs, and you could read them on your phone, and it seemed like a really good way to spend the time on the tram, so I was finding all these blogs that people were writing on all sorts of interesting things, how to do things.

And I thought, Oh, is there any blog for PhD students? And I, there just seemed a gap in the market. So I just started the blog that I wanted to read. And because I was teaching at the time and my students would say, Oh, can you record that? Or can you send me the PowerPoint slides? And I thought, Oh, if I write blog posts, I'll pretty much have everything that I've got to say about doing a PhD, I'll be done in six months. And then I'll have an archive of stuff that I talk about in the classroom and I can kind of, it's like my handouts and, um, obviously I have more to say, cause that was 11 years ago and I still haven't finished. I'm actually slightly amazed that every month I manage to think up something to say.

It really is about life and the PhD. For a long time, for 10 years of that, I did take user-generated essays and so on. So it was a space where other academics and students could talk about their experiences. And I sort of saw like a newspaper, like the local newspaper, you know? The local newspaper is really great because it's got places, you know, and even friends of friends and those local newspapers, the hyper-local newspapers are really fascinating.

And so I sort of thought about it like a sort of hyper-local newspaper. But about two years ago, I just, honestly, I had quite the mental health breakdown. And, um, through a lot of therapy worked out that a lot of, there's a lot of vicarious trauma in editing and reading these stories. And also just so much communication with the audience and so much… it was just too much for me. And I actually had quite a serious mental health crisis in 2017. And after that, I had to really reconsider how much I could hold that space for people. There was just endless numbers of articles coming in, endless numbers of trauma stories also coming at me through email. And I just lost my capacity to really be able to keep my boundaries up very well.

And that actually prepared me for the pandemic curiously well, because I had to put a lot of sandbagging in around my writing practice. I was losing the joy for it; it started to feel like a chore, but I didn't want it to die because it was so part of me and my identity that I ended up pulling it back to once-a-month publishing. Just being my space to talk about anything to do with the PhD and whatever I'm interested in, in my research. And, you know, that resulted in less readership because you're not publishing as often because blogging is about regularity and about being out there. But really, this was just what I had to do.

And I think all writers, you know, especially, I mean, some people write about much more traumatizing things than I write about, right? Like I've got friends who did climate change research and research into foster children and all sorts of things that we're sitting with terribly difficult topics. And I think as writers, that internal writer's voice is speaking to us.

You know, we speak to ourselves as we write and. You've got to tell different stories to yourself. I know that sounds weird. So I was writing, I think I was writing too much in that space and I wanted to start to write other sorts of things in other spaces and get the balance back. So that's a long history of how it's got to where it is now.

It's geriatric as a blog, right? Like that's geriatric. So I can kind of do what I like with it I think now.

Helen: Yeah. I'm fascinated by your story, which I don't remember hearing before, of having got your first job in this kind of space because you had blackboard on your resume. And it's always struck me that you've definitely been ahead of the curve in your comfort with any kind of facility with technology with communications technology and with social media and all those things. nd it's interesting how your projects now are still doing that at scale.

I feel like you're kind of several steps ahead of most of us in seeing what's happening in the internet and how to use that for good, I think.

Inger: I don't feel like I'm several steps ahead, but thank you. I'll take that action when I'm 50.

Helen: Well, you're several steps ahead of me anyways. You can take that one anyway.

Inger: But I've been on computers since I was nine years old. My father was a computer programmer in the 60s, the 70s and 80s. So I've grown up with it. Most people didn't get the kind of exposure I had until the 1990s. So I had sort of 20 years head start on people. And my father, because he was a computer programmer, he had actually programmed mainframes. And I used to sit under them as a child and, you know, they had the punch cards. So I used to literally sit with my back against this mainframe because it's really warm and I found it really comforting. He worked in a dye house, and they used this mainframe, and he learned how to use the computer. And then he transitioned from the manufacturing out, and then they closed all the dye houses down, and everyone lost their jobs and everything. So I saw that really powerful experience at home that if you want to stay employable in a changing world, you've got to see that technology is a tool that you need.

And my father, I remember the first time I sat in front of a computer and it was like one of those beige boxes with kind of vinyl. Um, it was sort of made like a Star Trek console or something. And I remember saying to dad, ‘Oh, but what if I hurt it? What if I kill its brain?’ And he said, ‘It's no more intelligent than a worm. There's nothing you can do to hurt it.’ And then he stopped and said, ‘don't type format C colon, but anything else. That's the one thing you can't do. You can type anything else. You can do anything you want.’ So it gave me a lot of freedom. I remember in the nineties, I worked in a record store (remember those, right?!) Um, and that was transitioning to DVDs. So I remember there was a guy there at the time who told me about streaming in 1992. And I was like, ‘what? No, that just sounds ridiculous.’ And I computerized their stock inventory and stuff like that.

So I've always been a nerd with computers, and now I do machine learning, and that's another form of teaching. You're teaching a machine this time and working with AI is really interesting because that takes a lot of text…and editorial eye because it is how you train it with text. So that's really interesting. Yeah, it's such a powerful combination and it's one of those crossovers of disciplines that you get so many people who go into a particular academic discipline. In my case, literary studies, you know, you do it because you love books and it's going to be the rare person who loves books and computers. And those are the people who are at the forefront of the digital humanities, but, you know, everybody else is like, ‘computer, what's that?’

Helen: Um, so this is kind of jumping ahead, but can you tell us a little bit about your post-ac work? Because that's also very much in that, kind of, big data space, isn't it?

Inger: Yeah, well, I mean, we're trying to work on the post PhD post-employability problem because actually, the number of PhD students has outnumbered the academic jobs since 1996. The crossover point was there, and it's only got more extreme every year. So the growth in academic jobs is linear, but the growth in numbers of PhD grants is not linear. And so, it seems to me like we are training lots and lots of PhD students, and them, I mean, if you look at it at a labour force kind of level, they are providing very cheap labour to the universities. And this has annoyed me on principle because I'm deeply left-wing, like my parents were also labor unionists and all. So I'm a member of the Greens! I'm very…labor exploitation really annoys the crap out of me. So I thought, wouldn't it be good if the university had to compete a bit more? Right, so they train lots of PhD students, they've got this big labour pool, and they can, therefore, offer contingent and casual work, and people will put up with it.

But what if people knew more about the job opportunities that were available outside academia? So it's coming from that impulse also. Training people, working with people…well, you don't really train them, You know, you walk by their side doing a PhD. And I just see so many amazing educated people that will be on the line today. Like incredible thinkers, creative people, thoughtful, caring people. People have gone into research because they want to save the world in some way. And yet I see the universities as this system that kind of eats people up. So post-ac is our effort around that. What we're trying to do is surface the hidden job market.

Most jobs that are advertised for a researcher outside academia do not say ‘PhD’ anywhere in them for a variety of reasons. So, we did what's called a schema in machine learning and annotation —- We created a description of the ideal PhD student, and then we tried to map that to the text in the job ads.
And you've got to code thousands of job ads and multiple people have to code them at once. The machine doesn't learn that well if there's only one person teaching it, which is really interesting. Two people have to look at the same piece of text and agree it means the same thing the majority of the time for the machine to be able to learn… and then it can find unique instances of it. And when it does learn, it's really quite spooky.

It'll interest all of you to know that in this model of the ideal PhD student, which I can't share all of because it's commercial confidence, but we did strategically leave things out. And we had to imagine that you're a graduate from a PhD program. What are all your skills and attributes? What are you great at? And we took out writing. We thought, actually, we're not entirely convinced that the PhD makes you a better writer. Some people, it certainly does. Other people, it makes them go backwards. I know I've worked with many journalists who've gone into a PhD who've really struggled with the PhD as a format.

It trains you in a certain very dry didactic style, um, that isn't, you know, the style that a lot of employers are looking for people to write in. They want a much more straightforward style, very much like you Helen, not as nominalized, much more active verbs. So, that's what post-ac does— it's an algorithm that reads job ads and it ranks them from 0 to 10 on a scale of nerdiness.

And, we have what's called a PhD threshold and anything that falls past the PhD threshold, we say is good for a PhD graduate. So we take all those jobs. And then we put them in a job search engine so that it makes it very easy. It's like SEEK.com, but just for researchers. And we also look at their features and we extract their skill sets. And we do a whole lot of data mining techniques.

So it's been a really interesting space to work in this sort of learning how machine learning scientists think and how to talk to them. And I've been really helped by Harness Lilliman in that, who's my amazing colleague over there. And one of the only machine learning scientists that I could speak to who I understand, she takes the time to explain to me in dummy language what's going on. But also just the way that machine learning is not like human intelligence, and at a certain point you get to working with the algorithms and tuning them, and that tuning process is really fascinating. And then when you start to…the idea being once you distill down an algorithm, what's taking you 18 months to teach it, it can then go and look at 5 million jobs and just digest it, and it takes about 3 days to do a 5 million job set. And this will be much faster once quantum computers come online. I've never really seen the point in quantum computers because computers seem pretty fast to me now, especially from when I was young. Um, but now I do, because that 3 days seems to me to take a long time! But it starts to give you things like …it's quite bizarre! You start to talk to it and it starts to feel like a thing. It's not a person. So I really enjoy that work. If I had more time, I'd rather go fully into that, but, the right opportunity hasn't come up yet.

Helen: Wow. That's fascinating. My son's doing a PhD in machine learning and I truly don't understand anything of what he does. Cause it's, it's very much of this sort of theoretical mathematical neural networking. And, but as I understand it, it's trying to teach the machines to learn without you having to tell them what to learn.

Inger: Yeah, so they do things by themselves. And we do both supervised and unsupervised learning and unsupervised learning is pretty interesting because you don't know how it got to where it got to. Yeah, so yeah, it's fascinating.

Helen: Yeah, really interesting stuff. So that was jumping ahead to other stuff. We probably ought to get to the topic that I put as the title of this session, which is based on your still fairly recent book, right? How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble.

Inger: Oh, yeah, that one's been out since 2018. Oh, let's see some copies. Yeah, that was a labor of love. I think that was my favorite book so far. Yeah, with a couple of co-authors, Catherine Firth and Sean Lehman.

Helen: Can you just tell us how this came about?

Inger: So we've been running a thesis boot camp at ANU for about five years. And the thesis boot camp is where you hothouse a whole lot of students together for three days. And the promise is that they'll write 20, 000 words. And we just teach them free writing and not to stop word choice. And we teach them creative methods of of writing, diagramming, um, other kinds of ways to get meaning to cohere into words. And we speed them up basically. So out of a group, I need about 40, we take about 45 students at once. And we set them a target of 20, 000 words and everyone writes 5, 000 in three days. And we get about four people who will write 20 000 and the rest will be somewhere between five and 15 000. So in that process, we also offer sort of academic counseling. So people come in and say, ‘Oh, I'm just really stuck. I don't, you know, I don't know what I'm doing.’

And they showed us these drafts of their writing. So Catherine Firth ran bootcamps at Melbourne Uni and Sean Lehman was my writing coach assistant at ANU. And these people would bring in these drafts and they'd have the supervisor's comments down the side like ‘This doesn't flow’ or ‘you don't sound very academic’ and there would be no instruction on how to make it flow or how to make it sound academic. And when we unpacked what was probably going on in this writing with the editing skills that we all had, we could then say, well, there's probably eight or nine reasons why something doesn't flow.

And then I went to Britain, uh, 2015. There's a publisher there who said, ‘do you want to have lunch?’ and they took me out for a nice lunch, which publishers sometimes do. And she's like, ‘you've got a great profile. We want to book from you. We don't kind of care what it is. Can you do a book on writing?’ I said, ‘well, there's so many great books on writing. Why would I do another one?’ Um, and then, for some reason, it must've been three glasses of wine. I said, ‘you know, what's missing is the book where the supervisor writes something really weird on the side of your manuscript, and you can just look up that weird thing and then see what it might be.’

So it's kind of like a problem diagnosis manual for your car. And so it's kind of backwards from what a lot of other writing books do. A lot of other writing books set out how to write. You know, with exercises, this was what's gone wrong, how to fix it.

And the book has been really popular. My only gripe is that I had so many changes of the publisher through the process. And we did get it written into the contract that it had to stay at a reasonable price. And they keep selling it at an unreasonable price! So please don't pay $70 for it. I will sell you a copy for 30! And I bought a whole bunch of copies just so that I can undercut my own publisher, because that annoys me… Leftift daughter of unionists and all… so that offer is out there.

So it's done really well, this book, and I've done a series of workshops that accompany it that break down, you know, one or two pages of the book into an hour with a few examples. So they've been really popular and we build them into our online boot camp programs today and they are sort of short teaching segments.

So the one I think I said I would do for you is how to write clearer sentences. And that one is in there somewhere like this, it's like, um, it takes a bunch of stuff from inside the book and sort of takes it for a walk. So it was great to have your books and Pat's books. It was a really good way also to direct people to other books where they can, you know, where we got a lot of ideas from everywhere, cause there’s almost nothing new in writing when it comes procedurally. But it was a good way to collate very many different sources of advice. And so there's a bibliography in the book. I'm pretty sure there's still a bibliography in the book in this version. There isn't my copy.

Helen: Yeah, there is!

Inger: Okay. Right. Anyway, it's been a journey. That publication has been a journey.
So $30 a copy. Thank you. Booktopia. Thank you for that.

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I hope that both your body and your mind have moved to someplace new since we started. And maybe you've taken away a little gem from that conversation. I especially loved hearing about Inger's childhood as the daughter of a computer technician and how she used to play under the desk beside her dad's big mainframe computer.

If you'd like to get access to the editing exercises that Inger took us through during the second hour of our Wright Space special event, you can watch and listen to the full recording in the videos section of the WriteSpace library. That's my online resource site at helensword.com, where you can also find my full series of SwordSwing podcasts and transcripts.

Thanks for listening, and I look forward to walking with you again soon.