 So today we'll talk about careers. I hope it's not a one-way me saying stuff, because that would be very short, if it turns out to be like that. So I would like to be interactive. Feel free to intervene, much like you did. So interesting yesterday in the open mic. And in career advice, there's not really a kind of rules that I can give you. I more want to touch on various things that I think are relevant, and they kind of come together in a big soup of ideas, objectives, and things to consider when you're making decisions. So the material I've prepared today is basically in the form of cartoons. They're not offensive, but I don't want to offend anyone by, I mean, this is not really kind of joke material, but I think these cartoons highlight various aspects that we might want to think about. So this is the most negative cartoon of all. It's the fact that there is a pyramid in jobs, unfortunately, and this is kind of true in almost any career. If you define career by just progressing and getting a senior job, then there's almost always kind of more people looking at that senior job at any level that then there are senior jobs. And well, wherever you are, you're probably not kind of head of the United Nations up here or whatever is the top, top job in the world. So this is negative and we'll try to understand why this is not even kind of a sensible way to really kind of look at things. Or at least I think it's not very sensible. So a long time ago, there were only two jobs, hunting and gathering. And so a career advice was more simple, I guess. It just went to the cave. Today, there are more options and so more things to think about. Most of us are here in the spirit of either being just before PhD or we've done a PhD. We were here because at the moment we're investing in an academic career. And so that has kind of a traditional branching into one or two postdocs, some sort of tenure track or long term fellowship that then becomes, apparently goes well, becomes a life kind of job in some department or institute. But there's of course a very traditional other branch. At some point you might branch out and go more into industry or some sort of activity related to more direct economic impact in society. And a third branch is to go teaching in either a university level or some sort of high school or school situation. And most countries also have opportunities for qualified people to end up in institutes or agencies more or less research led. And I guess the point I want to make is that you can have a really successful career and life anywhere here really. The only reason one can be not happy is if personally you've invested every single aspiration one way and then you end up being in one of the other branches. But really the point I want to make also is if you look at industry for example then there are situations in recent decades where the best research was actually done in industry in certain fields of science. You just need to think about soft matter that you heard from Eric. Yes, was it just yesterday? Yes, feels like a long time ago. Yesterday morning you all kind of got a very nice picture about what soft matter is. Well a lot of that soft matter was built at Exxon Labs in an effort to understand how to improve oil production. But at that time the Exxon Labs wasn't just doing very applied research they actually took a very broad view and a lot of the big actors in soft matter today actually spent say a decade in that Exxon Lab. And similarly some of the food companies that the giant food companies like Nestle and Unilever have very big labs that basically act as research labs. And not all the time, not every company but there are companies at a given time that are doing some of the best research in certain fields. Of course Bell Labs has a very special place in electronics. There are other examples as well. Am I missing something big and obvious? Well I think I am. I mean today if you're doing either kind of applied automation or network analysis on the web or something like that then perhaps Google is the place to be. I mean you won't beat the resources that some of those companies have in specific areas if they really care about those by being in a small university group. So really depending on what you do and the well defined kind of historical moment that there are situations where the best research is done not really through this branch but through some other branch. And agencies, I'm thinking here for example most big countries have one big health institute that doesn't seem to do very much but then when there's a health emergency you see it on the news and that's the place that's actually trying to tackle the health emergency. So they're very valuable kind of other places to be as well as the path that probably most of us have in our minds kind of standard academic path. Okay so we've asked ourselves where we are. Each of us has some idea of where you want to be perhaps more than one option. It's actually healthy to keep having a few options and to weigh them up. And we've got to think about how to get there and how to keep our options open. Okay, there's an interesting lateral move so you're not really going forwards but about crowds only move laterally so for them it's the obvious thing to do. Who should stay in academia? That's one question. There isn't a faculty job for every PhD student. That's entirely obvious. In some countries that make a lot of PhD students like the United States, the United Kingdom, it's actually a very small diffraction of people that go on from being PhD students to being faculty people in that country. It's perhaps 10% or 15%. Others are going to other countries where there are faculty jobs and not that many PhD students being kind of produced but a lot of other people are exiting academia. So one thing to obviously keep in mind is try to do what you're good at. If you find yourself being very competitive and being very encouraged by everybody around you, then that's a good sign. That probably means that you can stay there. If the signs are a medium then that's an encouragement to look around more. Understand your constraints and see if you can get random. Especially while you're young and doing your PhD or soon after, you're still kind of not set exactly in stone. You're not kind of a marble statue. You can understand whether there are things you can improve, you can understand compared to people around you. If you have more constraints, for example, you don't want to travel then that's a fairly big constraint. Or on the other hand, if you are free to travel and others around you aren't, then that's a huge advantage in terms of finding opportunities and jobs. So how do you get a job? It's not just about kind of having a few good papers or kind of the best PhD, the best CV. It's really a product of many factors. So I guess for a given scientific output, you have to have a minimum that people recognize as yours or more than a minimum in many cases. But as well as that, you have to invest in your network of connections. People have to know you, people have to trust you. Essentially, people have to want you as part of the scientific community if you're going to make it that way. And if you're going to make it towards industry, there's a whole set of other things that you need to be able to prove and that the industry research people will be looking for. Okay, so this guy, this guy has his paper published. It has to cross all the swords and being battled around and says this is big improvement over previous peer review processes. So publishing is a key thing because the published paper is basically our little deliverable and it's the thing that people can most easily count in terms of seeing what somebody has done. We've got to ask ourselves, is there anything else as well as just publishing papers and having a list of papers that we should do and that we can do to kind of survive in this, especially in the academic path? Some of these are open points. I mean, I'll keep going and we can come back to them. There's constraints. I've mentioned travel. So obviously, your relationship is not just about incomes but kind of family and whether it's one relationship or a fact or parents or siblings, whatever. It's often something that does kind of put constraints and influences choices. If you are in a very kind of market-organized system like the United States and to some extent United Kingdom, then being mortal is a requirement sometimes. You have to move between places and definitely helps. It helps, not least because you can actually look at all the job openings anywhere they are. As I can't side to that, other countries don't actually encourage movements and what we have to do to progress is really stay put and be the person in place at the right time when a job appears where you are. So I think it's actually, it's healthy that science is organized with motility and generally there's a very strong correlation between countries where science is rich and healthy and countries where people move but countries that have less resources. And I know because Italy is always kind of a middle ground between trying to be kind of an advanced scientific country and not being one as it's always kind of halfway. Then countries that kind of are not in the kind of the traditional leading league are generally organized with much less motility. So that's something to be aware of. If you do want to actually make your career in New York country, which is not one of the Western like ones, then what is the best strategy to actually land that job? But also how can you, if you don't think, well, if you want the job, but you don't think that's actually the best way to run a scientific system, how do you kind of tension between the two things? Okay, don't get stuck. I was here last year as well. Sometimes people say, well, this is what I'm doing. My institute does this. I can do it, but I don't see kind of any opportunities or nowhere else to go. I don't know what to do. And also sometimes you're doing a PhD, which is kind of narrow and kind of a bit dead end. Well, I think in the spirit of how we've run this school, it should really kind of always be thinking as independent people. And in some sense, all the time you're actually doing a PhD, you're being trained, yes, to do research and make papers in that particular area, but also to be independent and to understand how to do research in general. And if you are going to be a good serious scientist, you really have to take that and believe in that and have confidence. So what we've tried to instill here in these two weeks is also the idea that it's not that expensive, not that difficult to do something quite creative and that this is a good moment in the history of this hands-on area of science to actually do very powerful things with not that much. So really the encouragement is to keep thinking and you can start side projects, whether they are with younger students in the spirit of kind of training them or whether they are really research projects, you can actually take power and do interesting stuff. So don't get stuck, I have this in mind as being scientifically stuck in a particular line that sooner or later will come to an end as all research lines do. This is a graph, still on the same point really, that I've taken from Uri Alon's career advice material. So he says that there are really two ways in which PhD advisors advise their students and more generally how people approach deciding that there's a science problem. One way is objective driven. So you're here at Point A, you know some stuff and you have some equipment and you decide that trying to get to be is the best thing, B will give you a nice paper and then either you tell your student or you head to the lab yourself and you hack away getting to be. So sometimes that works and things are exactly as you planned. It's quite rare actually because if it was so obvious that you could go from A to B, then one of the other kind of hundred thousand people might have done this already with them sometimes. But other times it works, I mean you're the one who thought about it, it's fairly well-defined and you or your students in six months or one year gets from A to B and a paper is made, very good. And then B becomes A and you start again and as sooner or later this will actually not work. And then, so Uri Alon says quite often you start from A, you're heading to B but there's a big kind of cloud, things don't work, you get lost and in that situation, if you keep trying to get to B that may not be the best strategy. You've got to train yourselves and also train your students to also work out what to do in case the objective-driven strategy fails. And he says, well this is really where we're nurturing and explaining to people how they can find new problems is the best strategy because then every brain becomes an independent source of ideas and in going from A to B and getting lost you may end up in C. C may be more interesting because B was the obvious thing that you could actually see and that everybody could see as being the right thing. C is something where you've learned in part and also you've kept thinking more and more and sometimes C can be a better outcome than B. And if you're actually doing science and again I think this is relevant both if you're doing kind of applied research in some company or in academia. And again for yourselves if you're at the stage where you're deciding what to do for yourself or when you give tasks to students you've got to balance this kind of gain axis with a difficulty axis and you constantly have to assess especially if you're telling other people what to do you have to assess whether it's gonna be easy or hard for them and small gain or large gain on some sort of absolute scale. And of course there's kind of a sweet spot up here where it's not too hard to get the result and that the gain is big. What you don't want to do is kind of get people stuck on things that are very difficult and even if they work that they're not gonna be that exciting which would be kind of this corner. So you want to kind of maximize some sort of a locus of points up here where there's a balance between achieving the gain and the gain being some value of some value. So choosing topics and choosing things which are sensible for yourselves and for your students is a really, really key thing. And if you look around that's kind of people who've been successful and whose students have gone to be successful this is one of the things that they've done kind of with care and with consistency over long times. At some points again whether you're working for yourselves then this would be just have a main project but also keep thinking about possible side projects. Read on more than one topic so that if your main topic at some point fails you've got kind of other sticky points like a Jekyll with four legs attaching to things and knowing people in more than one area. That's really important. Develop a network. Again it could be for yourselves and also if you have students you've got to link your students into those networks. But by talking, by collaborating there's no shame in collaborating I believe. In collaborations you need to have your own special role but you will actually achieve a lot more by talking and being part of a system than you will by trying to be kind of a shell in the middle of this big science kind of big basket. Find out what can be your special contribution what are the things that you can do well. If you're just a master student starting a PhD these will be very simple things like okay I code well so I want a project which it's not gonna be 100% coding but where coding can be used because I can use that kind of skill. If you know how to build electronics again you're not gonna be defined by being the electronics person you don't want that but you can find a project where that will be used. If you're good at talking to people well if they put you down in a cave by yourselves then that skill will not be used. Don't kind of offend people. There's no reason and these things can kind of haunt you much later. People remember people for good reasons and also for bad reasons and there's no reason to be having enemies if you don't need that. And of course kind of try to have some level of funding. This will gain you the respect of everyone and will make kind of work possible. Get funding. We spoke about this with a few of you yesterday afternoon. Of course you have to write some sort of grant or attract some sort of funding from some local agency, local company or some charity. If you're in a big Western country then all these things are kind of very organized. There are websites with precise rules but depending on where you are you've got to work out what your colleagues and peers are doing or if there's even some avenue that nobody else has explored and you're the first ones to actually explore and get funding. So there's a lot of exploration and energy that is involved in getting the resources that you need for actually working. The advice is be as useful as you can. If you're useful to your colleagues then generally you get kind of a positive feedback back and help but it doesn't mean saying yes and doing everybody's tasks because that would kind of make you grind immediately to a halt in terms of everything else which is actually the things that you want to do. This is try to have a few eggs and be ready for different things to work out not just kind of one single idea that's very risky. Okay so I've been talking broadly, perhaps very broadly but we may want to go back to some of the points I tried to make. These are some more questions. What are the issues in your particular countries and for yourselves? I think if I were in your shoes and I was to some extent, I was studying in Italy then I went to UK. It's not such a big jump and it's not far away but it was still a different country. The big question is do you stay where you are or do you try to move? Basically do you, and if you move, do you go for a limited period like a one or two year fellowship or just the PhD and then go back or do you move for good because if you decided you want to be a scientist and you can only be kind of a good scientist in Germany so you go to Germany and try to make it there and if you do that sort of thing you've got to accept the culture and the difficulties of actually living your whole lives potentially in a completely different culture. On the other hand if you stay and you all come from different places so staying means quite different things but can you actually be a competitive scientist if you work locally? How can you do good science if the funding is much less than other people doing the same topic? So what you don't want to do is run a race where systematically you get beaten because there's just less money that kind of is very, it's completely pointless. So one way in which you know better than me if you look around this has been addressed traditionally is that lots of developing countries are very strong on theory and have very little experimental activity because theory is obviously something you can do with much fewer resources and it's more easy to be competitive doing theoretical stuff but this is just the way it is and it's not necessarily bad but it's also a limit to the system. Not least, I mean if the whole scientific system is doing very theoretical work then almost by definition it's much further away from any application, any company, et cetera and this creates a bit of a distorted view in society. Also in the West, depending on the country and the moments but there are moments when public opinion believes kind of science is a bit useless and should be cut but this would happen even more if that science was just theory and just very abstract which it sometimes is in developing countries. It's a very high level in groups but really completely disconnected from kind of the real economy. So that's definitely a limit and in the long run you would want things to be more homogeneous and science to have the whole spectrum of things that people and students can move and there can be a more natural and not traumatic kind of link and bridge between science and activities outside academia. It's crucial to have scientists everywhere so I would be really sad if the results of our thinking was then okay science can only be done in rich countries so the only solution is for everyone to compete and go there and say no science in Africa. That would be terrible for a huge number of reasons not least because I think we all believe that science actually has a role to play in developing countries. In developing the countries I mean but also it would be another worry I would have is that we actually want every citizen in the world to be educated to a level that they can understand the big problems and big challenges and so in that sense it would be incredibly wrong to just have a few hubs of great science because we're not, as humanity we're doing science to advance our knowledge but it's not just the knowledge that a few need to have of course it's the knowledge that we want to kind of bring back to everyone. Okay so I think although it's a model that might spontaneously emerge there would be one of hubs and places of excellence only in some places it's something that we need to be aware of and kind of actively counteract. So this is something that's close to my heart I mentioned this at the open mic the other day. There's a big thing about kind of models I mean I think if I understand correctly what China is doing it's really adopted almost a US system in terms of how faculties are recruited and how the grants work et cetera. South Korea has done the same, Taiwan is very similar. I mean there's a whole number of countries that have developed, have really expanded science in a big way in recent years and they've done so by just adopting a certain model. We heard yesterday that perhaps in South America that there's a movement to make things different I didn't really understand the details of that but I'm very curious. But this is a challenge for you. I mean if you're actually working in countries that are suddenly developing well that's the big opportunity to really think about how hiring people is done, how funding is going to work and what are the consequences of kind of setting in place rules which will then kind of affect entire careers of lots of people. And particularly if a model is adopted and distorted even worse than the original model then that's really where damage can come and I've heard kind of horror stories both from South Korea and China about rules that are very strictly imposed on a number of papers, first author ships. I mean things that are really kind of completely irrational and make the whole process of being a scientist kind of horrible, right? Some of these kind of very talented PhD students or postdocs that want to return to those countries are then kind of really single-mindedly trying to get first author papers and that's kind of, it's not the purpose of being a scientist and generating new results. Okay there's kind of causes of hope I think today now. Even if you come from a system that has fewer economic resources first of all because you have to keep in mind that kind of human capital comes even before kind of fancy instrumentation. With the access we have now to journals and to the preprint archive and generally to free information, large databases that provides very rich sources of data if you're doing kind of large data analysis and things like that. There's actually, I think less barriers than ever before in doing kind of competitive science with not very much. And also kind of cameras, computers, all of these things have progressed to the point that you can do very powerful things with very little money. And things are changing faster than I think the science system is really understanding. Publishing is being kind of constantly challenged by things like open access and generally although kind of journals with high impact factor have been taken as being very important for career progression and people who publish in a high impact journal factor impact factor journal are then hired. This system if you think of it as completely logic. I mean people have given the editors of these journals which are often, if you look at them, they're often the, don't say, I don't know how to say it, they're often the worst scientists who failed completely at being either an academic researcher or an industry researcher and the job they found was in the end being an editor and we're then giving these people the power to decide careers of everybody else. It's a bit absurd. It's a bit absurd also that the public funds the science, the scientists to do the work and then have to pay for publishing and then the journal gets paid again for people to read that paper and in the midst of that peer review was done which is a time consuming process that nobody paid. So I think that there's lots of kind of fairly illogic things that made sense when the science system was much smaller and made up of a few individuals but is not scaling up properly and is not kind of serving science as a system very well now. So whenever there's kind of something illogic, it goes on for a bit but then there can be a catastrophe and things change a lot. And if you look at the preprint archives and other ways of kind of giving value and commentaries to papers, and there's lots of ways in which potentially science outputs could be reorganized. And I think 20 years from now, maybe it was to be like now, there'll be journals, there'll be ranked. It could be, maybe the system will not change but it's also possible that the system will be totally different and whoever spots it first will have a big advantage. So this I think is my last slide and then I really want to try to hear comments back. So wherever you are, you've got to do the best science possible to you. You've got to get noticed for good reasons so that people, whether they're collaborating closely or just knowing you from a conference or from a workshop, they try to kind of have positive views of yourself in the community. You've got to always behave ethically. I mean this goes without saying but, so science has a very high kind of moral and unspoken rules and you can't really be a scientist unless you're playing by the non-written rules in every way. It's not just about kind of what choice of topic you go for, it's really the whole process of how you behave. The more you understand kind of broad changes and new challenges, the more you'll be ahead of the game. So the people who really, really make it as a scientist are not just the ones who publish well on areas defined by others. The real ground breaker of people, if you think of soft matter, the gens, perhaps people like some Edwards who brought polymer science into physics so those are people who, it wasn't even kind of the papers they made, they created entire fields and hundreds of faculty today wouldn't be doing what they're doing unless those people had suddenly kind of invented a field and the same is true for kind of non-linear systems at some point and in the 70s, the study of phase transitions and critical phenomena. So if you are, it probably wouldn't be one person, sometimes this is one person, sometimes it's a collection of two or three very talented people who just get together and have a sense that there's something that wasn't being done, that can be done and it is really tremendously important. If you are lucky enough to gather that and turn it into a field, then that's revolutionary. And it can't happen to everyone, but if you don't think, then it will definitely not happen. So here, I really want to stress linking to other people. You've got to be part of some community. My community, I mean people with similar interests with whom you can talk, sometimes collaborate or even just share ideas. And sometimes even better because if what you're doing is new, you actually got to grow your community and this is, if it works, it's really where you create lots of added value. I mean in science, fields and areas die when they get exhausted. It's not because they weren't good on the contrary. I mean, they might have been great, but at some point everything that made sense has been done and that area then shrinks away, but new areas are constantly growing. So if you're able to understand what is a possible area and grow it and create a community, then it would be at the center of that and you'll really enjoy being a scientist because you'll be central and part of something which is expanding. But if you're not lucky enough to do that, then at least you have to find some nice people with whom you enjoy working and sharing ideas. So careers are varied and predictable, but the best way of actually tackling that is to take satisfaction for whatever form of research or being a scientist you're able to do, even if you end up being an editor of a journal, you can do that in a good way. And then constantly in life, but the younger you are, the more you really have to invest in that. You've got to grow your skills in areas that you enjoy. Learn new subjects, learn how to do things in modern ways, et cetera. So that's all I have to say.