Research students are different from undergraduates. They inhabit a parallel world of library shelves and late night laboratories, a world without vacations. And no one, except their tutor and a blogger in southwest Australia, has the faintest idea what they’re up to.
Deep question: just how salty is Liverpool Bay?
Which is what made Beyond Boundaries, a two-day conference recently held at Bangor University such an excellent idea. The idea was to bring together research students and academics from across the university’s different departments to give papers and talk about their work, to make new connections and socialise. For the rest of us, it’s a rare chance to look behind the scenes of a modern university’s research programmes and see the kind of amazing, and important, work that goes on there.
So what are Bangor’s research students up to? At the School of Ocean Sciences, they’re admiring the miraculous forms of marine algae, measuring the salinity of Liverpool Bay, counting starfish in the Menai Straits and guppies off the coast of Trinidad. Research student Nick Jones is investigating how to care for little cuttlefish in captivity, while Michael Tetley is looking at the impact of eco-tourism on Icelandic whale populations – with the aim of encouraging whale-watchers to stay away from areas where whale numbers are depleted.
At Bangor’s School of Music, meanwhile, researcher Sam Ellis is looking at how folk music has been passed down through oral traditions and on the printed page. For folklorists the question of ‘moral ownership’ – the authenticity and value of competing versions of traditional songs – has provoked furious debate over the past century. Ellis’s conference paper described how the efforts of socialists such as Ewan MacColl to wrest folksongs back from bowdlerised mediocrity may, paradoxically, have exacerbated the ownership issue.
Julia Robinson, at the School of Psychology, is researching how people with dementia respond to their condition with implicit awareness or strategies of denial. Pam Martin is developing a methodological tool for observing interactions between teachers and their pupils. And James Grange, a researcher at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, is exploring the mechanisms of stimulus inhibition that permit us, for example, to drive a car safely. Grange’s research may provide insights into conditions, such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, in which these inhibitory mechanisms can become impaired.
For folklorists the question of ‘moral ownership’ – the authenticity and value of competing versions of traditional songs – has provoked furious debate over the past century.
Beyond Boundaries heard from a researcher looking at how athletes talk themselves into success or failure (School of Sport, Health and Exercise Science), a linguist studying the adoption of English words into Welsh, a social scientist following clients of Citizen’s Advice and a biologist looking at DNA fingerprinting of endangered rhinos. Social science researcher Paul Carré talked about mental illness denial in the British Army, and its critical consequences.
The list goes on. How much each of these researchers understood each other’s contribution we can’t say, but fundamentally they’re all engaged in the same activity. The point is, you don’t get to be a research student unless you’re actually researching something: a little corner of knowledge that no one has explored, or that needs looking at afresh. If you’ve found a subject that fascinates you, this is your chance to shape the world. What could be more exciting than that?
Image: Wikipedia Commons
