Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the OOC AHRC DTP conference at Cambridge. If your first thought was “that’s a lot of acronyms!”, you are 100% right and it is a bit of a mouthful to write out or say. Essentially, the conference was for HDR candidates primarily at Oxford, Open, or Cambridge Universities (OOC), funded the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, the UK’s main arts and humanities research funding body) for PhD students (DTP stands for doctoral training program; i.e. training to be doctors or PhDs). It wasn’t only the OOC that was there, however. I was there along with three other students from the Australian National University, there were four students from MIT in the USA, and several students from Stockholm (Sweden) and Cologne (Germany). The objective of the conference is, as far as I can tell, to bring together some of the brightest young minds across the world and have them share their research with each other and start making connections and networking. This was a great opportunity to do so, because so often I feel in Australia we are slightly hampered with our distance from the rest of the world in terms of meeting new people and networking globally. I was also pretty chuffed that I was selected to go, and I am very grateful to Professor Sam Bennett at ANU and the rest of the HDR team for this opportunity, which I am now making the most of by also doing some research in the UK and Europe at the same time. Those are stories for future weeks, however: this post is about what I learned at Cambridge, and what I’ll be taking away from my time there.

Nature is great and we should spend more time in it

It was my first time going to Cambridge at all, and I was blown away by the amount of nature that was there. You walk anywhere in Cambridge and it feels like you have been transported to the picturesque image of a quaint English town that you would find in any film ever. Cambridge also exists in a bubble: the town is pretty much just the university, so everyone there just about is connected to the university or a college in some capacity. Being a bubble brings its own problems; fortunately I was not there long enough to fall prey to some of those issues. It is easy to see why, though, the bubble works so well: you can walk into a garden and not hear traffic, and for the week I was there it felt like the real world didn’t exist; that I was in some magical fantasy land where real life had paused for a while and instead I could look at gardens and squirrels. It’s easy to see how CS Lewis invented Narnia here, or AA Milne created the world of Winnie the Pooh. What I took away from this is that I should go out into nature more, go for walks and let my brain figure things out in nature, rather than (quite literally) being locked in an ivory tower sitting at a desk for 7 hours a day.

Great content doesn’t make a great talk

I will say, it was somewhat relieving going to a conference like this and realise that everyone struggles with giving talks and coming up with the best way to present it. While there, I found out that UK universities much prefer to “read” a talk: that is, have everything written out and read from a script. Very rarely do people stray away from this, though I myself in recent years now almost exclusively actually talk “off-the-cuff”, usually using my slides as the starting point for what I’m going to talk about. For my talk here, I did a mixture of both: I had some (usually particularly sensitive discussion points) written out that I read; but otherwise I talked off the cuff. Talking, rather than reading, generally leads to a more engaging presentation, and the truth is that if you practice your talk enough and know your content well, you should be able to get through the whole presentation. For particularly important talks, I might try memorising a talk. The benefit of talking is that you focus more on your audience rather than what is in front of you, and it gives you space to move around topics and change things as you go. This is particularly useful at an interdisciplinary conference, where you can’t be sure what the audience will know of your topic. If you’re losing them, you can spend more time elaborating on a point. If they know everything, you can go into more depth than you would have in a script. Generally speaking, you will talk more naturally too rather than reading, and I find it forces me to slow down (whereas when I read I go very fast). This whole paragraph could probably be expanded into its own post, because I think academics really struggle with giving good presentations, but it’s something I love to do.

Be grateful for what you have, but also commit to change

As I discussed earlier, Cambridge is a fascinating place. It is historic, beautiful, and steeped with culture. As a result, I found it a complex place to exist in at times. I was lucky to have students to take me around most of the places there; if you don’t have a student card much of the grounds are locked off. Places like the Kings College Chapel are free to visit if you are a student or accompanying a student; to the general public it costs £16 (~32 AUD). I don’t think the chapel existing in itself is a problem: many towns and cities all over Europe often have beautiful, exuberant cathedrals or churches. The difference is, in those towns and cities it is usually free to enter such buildings and look around. This is not the only part of Cambridge that is like this; almost anything worth seeing is locked behind some kind of gate which will let you in only if you contribute to the coffers of some of the already richest places in the UK (we could probably extend this to some of the richest places in the world, but I don’t have the data to back that up). I felt extremely lucky to walk around those places where so many notable scientists, artists, and researchers have lived, worked, and studied.

At the same time, I felt a sense of needing to give back. I felt that I was so lucky to be there but I also wanted to share what I had learned with others (partially through this post but also through conversations and other ideas I’ll take back with me). I think we can acknowledge that Cambridge, by objective standards, is a beautiful place, and yet at the same time has been the site and indeed protector of much of the inequality that still plagues academia. I really enjoyed my time at Cambridge, and I would love to be able to help other people get similar experiences.

And I think that’s a good place to leave this blog post. These have been very haphazard while I’ve been travelling, but I hope to get back onto the regular schedule soon.