Transcript

Nothing is wasted – turning bad experiences into good lessons | Dame Athene Donald | TEDxWhitehall

meaning I can hear your guests that was a remark thrown into a discussion with a man who really should have known better and it wasn't said to me many years ago when I was young and inexperienced it was said to me just a few years ago it was a great way to try and derail the debate he was losing it still lost but he needs certainly certainly back and afterwards I thought what she's really % to him was a progressive blonde I can hear you're getting angry and maybe better to have the same it occurred to me that next time I will be better prepared that I will know what to do when someone tries to plant on me I think one should think of situations like that as a learning experience so my message for you today is nothing is wasted good or bad now as you heard I am a Cambridge professor an FRS I'm a master of Churchill College but I wouldn't like you to think I'd always know what I wanted to do that my life is carefully planned I think when you're young it's very easy to think that you uniquely are the father about what you're trying to do and everyone else knows exactly what they want to do and how to get there another week saying but their lives like that I know I certainly happened but what I do think is as I have gone through life I have taken the different experiences I've had I'm woven them into the fabric of what comes next a bad experience may teach you never to go near that situation again or as with my first example teach you how to do better I think that everything that happens like your mic packs up you have to learn how to get through it in one piece without falling flat on your face and it's not always easy but bad experiences may teach you you never know what to do another TEDx talk no let me take you back let me take you back to when I was young and inexperienced and I had finished my PhD and my husband and I decided we were going to go to the States it looked like there was something there for both of us that would satisfied both of us but my first poster was a total disaster I spent two years being utterly miserable I produce just about no results I really got culture shock actually and I found the whole experience very dismayed so what did I learn from that well with hindsight not at the time I realized that being a failure at something doesn't mean that you are inherently a failure that you're always going to be a failure and I hope that it is also helped me understand better now that I've supervised students and postdocs myself I hope it has helped me understand when they are struggling and I can say to them look I know what it's like I've been there and they can absolutely see that I know what I'm talking about because I have this sort of two year blank in my CV now obviously I wouldn't be standing here if my next post had been equally disastrous I was very lucky I I stayed at Cornell for reasons to do with my domestic circumstances and they need to get another V I stayed at Cornell I swapped who I worked with I moved field slightly I work for the different professor and this professor was just a totally different kind of person to work for and he encouraged me and he was the first person who really encouraged me to think about an academic career I had to be able to pick myself off this very literal floor that I had fallen on failing to do my research tour well I had to motivate myself to get on but I quickly found that I'd fallen in love with a research in a way I never had done before so I think resilience is another skill you have to learn but having been through that process as I say I hope it helps me sympathize with my students some of whom undoubtedly find research very disturbing and difficult to get on with throughout my career I've moved from one research topic to another I've worked on starch I've worked on plant plants I've worked with plastics I've worked with living cells and I think one can always take what you learn sort of in the previous bit of your research and turn it into something that is relevant to what you're doing now so for instance at one point I was working on the mechanical properties of snack foods made out of starch think cheezy what's it's I think what happens when you buy too cheesy what's it you want the right mechanical properties so the theoretical equations that were relevant to divert to getting some sense out of our experimental results turned out some years later those equations were just as relevant when I was trying to understand what happens when you slice carrots carrots are a vegetable phone the same equations apply now you might be thinking those are really odd things for a physicist to study and many of my colleagues colleagues thought the same thing when I set out and started working on the really quite messy world of food and biological systems some of my colleagues were undoubtedly quite sniffy did not think that these really very complex materials will at all approach pria for a physicist and again relatively early in my career I had the kind of remark that is very hard to deal with thrown at me by the then senior professor in my department the Cavendish lab in Cambridge who said things have come to a sad pass one people at the Cavendish study starch and again I didn't really have a very good answer I could try and say that it's really interesting or I could try and say with a bit more sort of sum for its what physicists do but neither of them are particularly good reports and I'm not sure I've ever got a very good one to that one but nevertheless I hope I had the last laugh because as complexity has become sort of fashionable far more people are moving into the kind of areas I was working in 20 years ago so I think yep well tough I did I did the right thing and staying with it now it's my first anecdote showed I don't think it's just a case of knowing facts and taking effect from here and applying it there or a theoretical equation I think it's also about soft skills of how to deal with situations I expect many of you will have had that experience when a child have being taken to visit an elderly relative and your parents sort of trying to tell you how to behave and you feel as if they're all nice adult rules and you don't really understand them but somehow you've got to get through the maze of this visit and I think that kind of feeling that there are rules that you have to apply is something that applies to professional life - the difference perhaps is when you're an adult you know when you can break rules and you know when you're likely to get away with it but I think you can learn an awful lot in this sort of soft skill arena by watching other people watching other people get things right or get things wrong and you can learn from both of them so think about all the awful presentations you've ever been to and I know I'm sort of putting myself at risk here but just pause for a minute and think about the awful presentations you've been to where people have had umpteen PowerPoint slides in very small font and you can't possibly take him he said or remember it because it's just being thrown at you really really fast or the one where the speaker spends the entire time muttering into their shoes or standing pointing at the screen and never showing you eye contact at all no you can sit and go sleep during presentations like that and if you're the parent of a small child that may be the best thing to do during the afternoon but otherwise I would say you should watch and think well I wouldn't do it like that and I realize that 10-point font really doesn't work in this lecture theater so you can learn and you can profit from it and one of the situations where I think I've learned most is actually sitting on committees and watching the chair who has quite clearly never been videoed so they absolutely don't know what they're doing wrong so you will all have seen a committee chair who never stops talking never gives there anyone else a chance to talk or the committee chair who never intervenes at all and just lets two of the committee have an argument over in one corner and everyone else gets very bored and he's just doodling on the agenda or she or you have the situation where no comfort break disaster or no coffee and biscuits that's about to or the meeting just over runs horribly you've seen all these examples of bad chairing and they're all quite straightforward to sort out get someone to organise some coffee it's not that difficult so do you actually profit from watching people get things wrong because I think it's a very valuable skill to get under your belt as it were so that when you're asked to take on some new and exciting opportunity you are in a good position to do it well now I think this willingness to dip your toe into lots of different ponds it's very important when I was introduced it was said that I chaired the Royal Society Education Committee and I was asked to do this it's school education it's not higher education and I was asked to do it and I said well I don't know anything about schools and they said no no we don't want anyone who actually knows what they're talking about we just want someone who's going to draw all the different bits together so I thought okay and it was really educational if you like taking on that role I got to attend a select committee for instance I had a meeting with schools Minister Nick gig who during the course of the meeting else which do a long division some and I said excuse me Minister I don't really think that's the best use of our time and the staff around the edge of the rooms have had a quiet snicker I think because I refused to do this long division zone and it was during the time that Michael Gove was the Secretary of State for Education there were consultations coming out all the time and I had to read the suggestions about the curriculum and everything you've helped the wonderful staff here do the responses and everything I learned a huge amount now had I known back in 2010 when I did this that I was going to be the master of a Cambridge College I couldn't have asked for better preparation most researchers don't know about school education and for me to have had this crash course was really really useful but in 2010 and I had no aspiration to be master of Churchill's so it was just by the by but I think it demonstrates the fact that whatever you do you will probably find it comes in useful some time or other as long as you have the confidence to join up those dots which may not be entirely obvious and as I say that applies to bad experiences too so if I go back to the remark I introduced this talk with a fini I can hear you're getting emotional that was said to me when I was Cambridge University's gender equality champion by a senior colleague who did not like the fact he was losing the argument but it sort of sums up why I had become the gender equality champion because I was fed up with sitting on committees where I was stuck there as the token female professor and then find that no one was listening to me or I would look around me and think why are all these other professors getting more space or students or whatever resource and somehow my voice falls on stony ground and it I think it was because I was different so the comment that was explicitly said to me when I tried to be head of depart and that I was too emotional it's the same thing again I was a female in the male world if you don't know physics it's very male I do not look like your typical physicist and I think I just saw through them and this comment about being emotional I've come to realize it simply means you're not like us it doesn't mean actually we think you're about to burst into tears but they might be worried I might begin to burst into tears but I have never done that so they have no justification but it seems to me that it's one area where being a woman you are judged differently it seems to be alright to be cross angry thump the table I have seen men do that don't think I've seen women do that but I'm saying they come and you have this situation where being sort of different is an issue and that is why I became the university's gender equality champion again I learned a huge amount from that role including I hope how to be more persuasive so you can learn from all experiences I took what was anger but a slow burn kind of anger not a thump the table kind of anger to take to that work being gender equality champion and I hope I made a difference in my own university while I was doing that but I think you can learn from any experience good or bad and you should take away from this that nothing is wasted so as you leave here I hope you'll go away think about how to be true to yourself how to take advantage of the different experiences that come your way and not forget that luck is something to play with so good luck with it all thank you you