 Today, I have a bit of a structured thing for a few minutes just to focus our minds on careers. But I would like to go back to having discussion. So I'll try to keep this part no more than 10 minutes or so. So I've prepared a series of cartoons. This is not meant to offend anyone on what is quite a pressing topic in our lives. It's more just to take us through a spectrum of things that we should be thinking about in terms of our careers in science. So this is what we want to avoid. So if you're feeling that you're part of many and there's a selection, one will go on, and then it's again part of many, one will go on, part of many, go on, again, again, again. If this is how you feel a career is, this is a bit like being grounded by a vegetable cutter. It's not the best way of thinking. And so we need to find ways of not falling into this mindset. These two Stone Age people, they were from a hunting and gathering society. For them, it was very simple. You had to just choose whether you wanted to be hunter or gatherer. Our careers are more diverse. We have a lot more choices to make. So what do we mean by career development? Well, a lot of us either already have a PhD or are already in a pathway that we'll head towards there. But there's a lot of space beyond that. There's kind of a branch that is perhaps one of what we might think of as a traditional academic career that would take us from into a postdoc, perhaps a second postdoc, some sort of tenure track or junior faculty position or assistant professor of some sort, and then eventually kind of a tenured, super powered professor in the university. There's also obviously another path that perhaps after PhD or after postdoc would take into industry. But a lot of people also choose or end up in education more broadly, so high schools or other education activities. And then many countries also have a lot of government research institutes or agencies that employ people with PhDs. This is just what's on my mind in terms of the main career paths, but then there are people who do even more diverse things that are not on this page. But I want to be positive about all of these. I think one can have a very, very successful career and lots of enjoyment using the knowledge and training gained during a PhD in any of these branches of this career tree. There's lots of fruit. So things you might be wanting to have on your minds or are you on that page or are you out of that page and imagining something even more creative than that. Where do you want to be in the future and how do you optimize your chances of going from there to there? So crabs, some of them at least run laterally. So crabs make lateral moves. So in English, when you say lateral move, it means instead of pursuing the normal way, you shift to the side and perhaps you have a better way ahead doing that. So we can take inspiration from crabs. Should you actually stay in academia? This is a question that probably everybody asks themselves many times during university and at various steps. One advice is that already children at school usually learn sometimes too much, though, is to do what you're good at. When I say sometimes too much, it also means that sometimes you actually have to learn stuff and then you can become good at it. So it's not what you are kind of born with, but what you can actually achieve with sensible means that you have to try to understand if it's then going to make you competitive and if it's going to be possible to do a certain thing. So try to look at other people, look at how things work, understand your constraints and see if there are sensible ways to address them that would actually make you good. How do you get a job? So these guys are saying, oh, what do you mean it's not good resume? It's the most expensive one, they had an eBay. So you also have to be, so there's various bottlenecks in a career. This is one of the most trivial ones. I mean it has nothing to do with who you are or how good your stuff is, but there's also an element of presenting all of that to other people. So getting a job, whatever it is, is a part of many factors. Some of them take so long to build up that you can't do nothing about them on the day, but some of them are actually stuff that you have to address on the day or at the moment that you've actually prepared the application. If you are in science, then publication is a crucial thing. It's by papers, whether we want it or not, are the little trophies that we put on our shelves and that people see and they are the most important piece of a CV when you progress certainly in the academic side of that career tree. So these guys have changed the peer-review process to make it more friendly than the current one. I chose this because for many years now, I've been thinking that our current system of publishing is really pretty stupid. We tried to pitch our papers, each of them as a little scientific discovery, and this was okay 100 years ago when there were so few people in science and the papers really each one had a real breakthrough and contained something completely new, but the papers today, given that there are now hundreds of millions of people doing science, that they've become incremental, even the ones in the highest impact journals, it's very rare for a paper to really be as groundbreaking as the title and the editors and everybody else wants to pretend that it is. So is it still sensible to put our discoveries into this format? I don't think it is, but it's gonna take kind of a paradigm shift to put this scientific information into a different system. But I mean, shifts do happen in things that appear to be well-established, and if they are to happen, they've got to be triggered by the people who care the most, and those are certainly young people like yourselves. I mean, I can now survive publishing papers, but I think it would be better for everybody's career if the scientific knowledge could be aggregated in different ways than it is now. But okay, but what else, we're not gonna change that in the very, very short term probably. So what else can you do to help your survival in a scientific system? Well, there's a lot of things you can do. I'll talk about them a few slides on. There's also constraints in careers. This couple is kept together by needing two incomes, but it's not the only reason why people get together. So mobility does help usually, but not always. I mean, in certain cultures, you kind of have to go into a queue, and if you move too far away from the queue for a few days, you lose your place, but that's a bit sad. I mean, in general, mobility increases the sharing of ideas, and in science that's so important that we would probably want the system to be a system that encourages mobility, but mobility gets in the way of relationships, being close to family, sometimes there's financial constraints, there's all kinds of other constraints. So again, you wouldn't want the scientific system perhaps to have totally rigid rules, but you would want it to be a system that certainly doesn't penalize you if you move, that unfortunately happens in many countries, but it's certainly a loss for that country. I keep pressing the escape key, but I'm still trapped in this dead-end job. This is hopefully not a feeling that any of us should have because you are trained, or you're training, or you're intending to be trained as an independent scientist, and that should mean that there should never be a day like this that if you feel like this for a few minutes, you should immediately kind of have a lot of ideas that come into your brain and other things that you can point your interest towards and the ways to actually address those other interests. So I mean, if it's not us doing what we want to do and discovering new things, et cetera, who is it going to be? So you definitely need to take power over what you do and do things that are interesting for you. The next couple of slides come from Uri Alon, who has a very interesting website full of very, what I find very interesting thoughts about careers and finding topics and mentoring generally. So these are just two of his cartoons. He has this idea that often a supervisor tells students to go from this place to this place in science, and sometimes the project works really as expected and that's okay, usually the student is happy. But also there's actually not very much learned because if you already knew that you could go from here to here, then perhaps there wasn't even that much kind of excitement or learning to be done by doing that. So more often a project sets off from A to B, but kind of finds that there's all kinds of clouds and possibilities in actually reaching B and then everybody for a moment gets frustrated. And what he says is that this is actually potentially a moment of great creativity because it's when then you really have to kind of bang your heads together and find new directions and the things you might end up with after a while are potentially more interesting than the things you thought you knew already and you thought was kind of a safe path. So again, this is just really, I see this as just a representation of kind of taking power, not panicking. So kind of a panic like an animal that's about to be squashed by a bus it would be the bad approach when you're in this cloud but kind of a conversation and working out together where to go is the positive thing to do here. Also in terms of choosing what you want to do for yourselves or if you are supervising students you can think of a space that has problems laid out from hard to easy and from small gaining knowledge to large gaining knowledge. Obviously if you're up here, it's great. Large gaining knowledge with an easy to do problem. That's great. Down here is bad. This would be hard and not very useful. So you want to kind of generally be, try to be on some sort of hypothetical frontier that has either a large gaining knowledge or is really achievable quickly and where this corner is kind of the best. And he says, well maybe here down easy is where there's things that you might want to do early on in your career or you might want to tell students. Here is kind of a postdoc sweet spot and if you're planning really what should be happening over years of our research team then you've got to be thinking up here. You can afford it to be hard because it's going to be thought about by many brains. So choice of topic, especially those of you who actually are in charge of your research is you would know that it's really crucial. Another thing you can do definitely is and I can't stress how important this is is to develop a network. You have to be networked and you have to help any younger people work with you to become networked as fast as possible. Networking means all the relevant people need to know about you and about your work and you have to have something kind of unique or at least where people really trust you certain topics or certain techniques where you become a reference point for other people because that way good things will actually come towards you with a lot less effort than having to reinvent and do everything independently. I would say there's really no shame in collaborating on the contrary. The best ideas often come from talking and it's generally much more fun to work with people, with other people. This is really find out what you can do better or at least as well as other people. So your strong points, these will help you kind of actually being one of the nodes in little teams and networks. Don't make enemies, but it's try not to. With the systems we have of kind of peer review of funding applications and papers, et cetera, if you start having people who actually are just waiting for the occasion to sink you, it's really bad because they can't do that in complete anonymity. You will need to get funding, whether it's personal fellowships and then later on to actually fund projects or even within an institute that has core funding, you will be kind of competing with colleagues inside that institute for what to do, which is still kind of getting funding. And this will always require proposing or sometimes via very rigid forums. Other times it's more discussion with the people who have the money and the power. And you have to have kind of clear ideas of what's important for you. But your plans need to either be clear that there's an important application like a society needs for something that you are proposing or it could be more blue skies. You are very clear that there's a frontier in science and this is gonna bring prestige and you try to kind of explain how what you want to do progresses science. That this is becoming in most cases really, really hard to sell by itself, even in the West. The kind of more and more just people want applications that the politicians can explain to the public and everybody can pretend to be happy as quickly as possible. But again, you will eventually get more funding if the community feels you're a useful person. So for example, if you establish a database or a website or something and people know that it's you so it's actually saved them time, you will be occupying a good space of their brains and then later on when you actually ask for money that they'll be more inclined to say yes, perhaps even if they're not totally convinced about how you've written the application. That's kind of one advice. Of course, you have to be careful. If you say yes and you try to be useful to everything, you can also end up dispersing all your efforts and you might not be doing the actual science that should also be focusing your career. So there's a saying, have more than one egg in your basket which means don't bet everything on one thing. Have a little spectrum of things that you're doing because you don't know which one is gonna go well. So having just one idea and pursuing it single-mindedly is dangerous, don't have only one egg. Okay, so a lot of you work in countries where science is new. We heard yesterday that doesn't necessarily mean your country's poor but maybe if your country doesn't have the tradition or the government's doesn't have the same kind of systems and organizations as some of the Western countries. So these are some questions that I think you might be posing yourselves or you've probably already also gone through them depending on your stage in life. So should you actually stay there or should you go somewhere else to work? Would you go and come back or go and somehow be useful from elsewhere? How can you actually be a scientist if you decide to work there? What does it mean to do science if the funding is not at the same level as in other countries? There's very often a bias to fall back onto into theory or simulation which are, I hope this school kind of dispels that a bit but they're perceived to be cheaper and to offer a more fair, fair, competitive ground as opposed to experiments or stuff. But I hope this is something that should be challenged at least in some areas of science. There's often a bias to education so many countries actually have few scientists and in the university they end up having to teach a huge amount of the time. So that also hinders research more. And obviously I mean teaching and theory, it's not that these are bad things but you would want as a scientist to have enough time to actually pursue science as well and I don't think it's, you also want to be free to do the things that need doing not to be forced by scarcity of funds to do one particular thing. As a consequence of this you might think, well maybe science should just be done in rich countries. I mean what's the point? Maybe other countries should just focus on tourism. Italy should focus on making pizza. But no, I mean that obviously is not really what I think. I think that scientists should be everywhere but this is something that we need to articulate and explain to the various politicians the importance of having experts locally. Especially because they can be connected to problems and to the needs of the people who live in the various places. And those are not the same. If you leave Germany to decide a research agenda it's gonna pursue the problems that are interesting and important for Germany. And you can't, on the fringes those things might be useful for everyone but you also want other people to be setting the agenda and the only way to do that is to have science that is housed and run in a spread out fashion. Okay, so there's kind of models of running science that have evolved and again it's been the West who has set these models and often they've been adopted in very strange ways in the new countries that start up science. If you, I don't think we have Chinese representatives the way in the school. Do you have anybody from China? No? You said you're from China. Okay, so China is a great example but it frightens me a bit. I mean it's great because they have invested and they've been hiring a lot of people and they've been setting up new centers and all of that is super good but the way they have been hiring is very schematic often. They're really asking people to have a certain number of papers, they have to be first authors and they've put these rules in place that they then follow very strongly and the rules are a bit strange. I mean even the first author rule is strange because in some communities people published by alphabetical order and these are rules that somebody clearly without much experience put in place and thought they were a good idea maybe they're necessary given the huge number of people that have to be filtered out but they're not good rules. So you want to, they take some elements that clearly somebody else already had invented. I mean we do similar things in the West by looking at how much people publish but then they've become a rule that probably hinders finding the people who most merit the jobs. But you can imagine more radical things, I mean is the whole system of temporary postdocs, et cetera, the way that things should be done elsewhere as well or is it simply something that works well in the West but other countries could do things different? You have to imagine the same way that the other countries had wired telephones 100 years ago and then 20 years ago went into mobile phones and a lot of your countries just switched immediately and never had the wired system going to every single house. You could imagine science could bootstrap or jump something that wasn't actually optimal and doesn't correspond to the technologies and societies that we have today and you could actually jump into a more modern and more functional way of a more reasonable, more whatever you want, way of doing things without copying existing systems. But that requires imagination and maybe we can share ideas. Okay, so the dodo went extinct and I think some of the structures that we have currently of publishing and also other aspects of doing science are past their time. So some causes of hope. So human capital is really even more important than money in science. It's really our ideas, our abilities and our brains that are central and those don't depend on where you are in the world. Internet and shared data sets mean you can actually do really, really nice stuff that would have been impossible 20 years ago or 25 years ago from anywhere in the world as long as you're connected. Hardware is cheap. I hope this school has driven that message home. Things like sensors, all the stuff in mobile phones, et cetera. The cameras on mobile phones are, if you buy them outside from the mobile phone, they cost 10 or $15 and they are more powerful than the cameras I could buy the beginning of my PhD in 2000s for thousands of dollars. So there should be many orders of magnitude of difference that have hit that particular aspect of imaging sensors in just 20 years. And an imaging sensor I hope you've seen during the school is a terrific way of probing the world around us and whether you're doing condensed matter physics experiments or fluid experiments or even many aspects in biology, the imaging sensors is the interface between the world and getting data that you then want to analyze. Yeah, a lot of things are changing very fast and publishing access to education, to equipment. The way we want our information organized is changing very fast. And if we understand trends and how things are changing fast, we can try to be ahead or at least catch the trends as they happen. So I've spoken enough. I think you should kind of do the best science that are possible to you. You should find ways to get noticed for good reasons and things that are useful to other people. You should behave ethically. This has been discussed by Terta in one of her extended sessions the other day. It's a big topic. But scientists definitely need to kind of set the bar there. You need to, it will do well I think if you understand the broad challenges and new challenges that are relevant to people in your community because then you would actually get their support. You need to develop your own network and community. Even better, so either you join a network of people who are on a topic or even better you find enough people, either your age or ideally also a range of ages and a range of experiences and countries that actually become a new community that often enables even faster progress. And you need to keep in mind that careers are varied and predictable and can lead to many directions and if you're doing them with the right frame of mind many different directions will give you a lot of satisfaction. And you have to grow your skills in ways you enjoy. So don't think that there's one thing which is right even if it's really boring to you just try to find something that is something you enjoy because you will end up kind of putting in being happy and it will be easier to actually study that in all detail that it needs. So that's it for me, but this is not all. I was hoping these topics that I've scanned through are what I think are important in our career and the idea was to highlight this broad spectrum of questions and to open the floor for discussion a bit like we did yesterday morning. So questions or comments or things that you think are important that I didn't say. Let me shine some light on you. Any hands up? You power to speak. Good morning. If you come to think of it, science is some sort of doing science for a country is basically some sort of a marshmallow test for politicians. And so it means basically our struggle convincing the government, for example, our funding agencies how to increase their appetite for risk. So in our case, usually sometimes you see that disproportionality between the amount of funding that they give you and the restriction that they have. And it's ironic because sometimes you can see that these same institutions are capable of giving lots of money yet with less restriction. So in my case, I cannot see some sort of a model. I cannot think of maybe if you ask little, they give you more restriction. And there are people from the same population asking more with little restriction. Can you give some for some countries who are already doing this for a long time? Can maybe there's some sort of a sweet spot for balancing the risks and the amount of money. So maybe, do you have a trick or from your experience, how are you able to convince politicians that this is the right amount of risk? Well, so first of all, I mean, the quicker politicians are put out to the picture, the better for science. So if a country has the Ministry of Education deciding all the budgets every year, that's not the best situation. The best is when the money is given to a research council that is a bit less political and reports to the politicians, of course, but then has more freedom to set the research agenda and can listen to the scientists. And if you look to the countries in the West, most of them have these research councils. So they have a budget that doesn't change that much from year to year, and they can plan a bit longer. Your question about small funding programs and bigger ones, I've had your sensation myself many times that sometimes on the little funds, that there are so many rules and people will really go fussy about what you're doing with them, and then sometimes there are big funding schemes where there's a lot less control over what goes on and this is a bit crazy. I agree, it shouldn't happen that way. Sometimes when it's done right, the little funding is sometimes called pump priming. It should allow you to be more flexible, to have higher risk. That's the whole point of a smaller funding application that is shorter term, but should just allow you to explore. So perhaps when one can take inspiration about how programs are called, pump priming is a nice name. It sounds cool and it automatically gives the idea that you're going to explore. So one can look at how things have been called in other countries and then propose that similar schemes should be started. What you don't want is a small funding thing that has lots of rules and is difficult to get. I also have a colleague in the US who was an engineer and super organized. He has a system for whether it's going to be worth his time applying for a certain... So he makes really a calculation about how long it's going to take him to write the grant application or the funding application and how much money is on the table and what's the chance that he's going to get it. And he really systematically decides which things he's going to go for and which not. This is assuming that there's a system that's stable enough that you can make reasonable guesses for this and then you can optimize your funding approach. I haven't given you a solution for your life, but I think the only useful thing I've told you is there are countries where things have been working longer and one of the things is how you call the programs and if you have some freedom in your country to propose mechanisms, you can try to go and see what other countries are doing and propose similar things. Well, thank you for nice presentation. In your last slide, you showed the very career directions. I just want you to elaborate because once you get a PhD, you can either go in academia or industry. So what other options? Can you elaborate more? But I also mentioned education and research agencies. So agencies that advise the governments or agencies that do research, which is perhaps either for big companies or for governments, but that doesn't necessarily go into publications the way that we do as independent scientists. I mean, people also start up their own companies more and more, especially in the big data and software areas that has been a boom of new things that could really start almost from zero. What else can we do as PhDs? Have I missed big areas? Applications of big data are varied. So I have a student who's working in the insurance industry, but he's basically doing map map programming of big data science. So big data is really a revolution, I think. Almost every activity which is currently going on could now be optimized in ways that would have been impossible over five or ten years ago, and it's going to require clever thinking of a scientific type. And it would be a shame to leave all of this to computer scientists and to engineers. I mean, they obviously are naturally going into that direction because they have, or generally the optimization of industrial process is something that the engineers would tackle. But this goes way beyond me. You can think of a transport industry or a city that has to optimize traffic. Almost everything you think of that has lots of people in it, health systems, et cetera, now actually has big data that goes with it, and I think physics has a lot to say there. Both to help things work better but also to look at these big data sets and work out the bottlenecks and the physical mechanisms that are under that data. I think that's huge and it's really a piece of physics. Thank you very much. My concern is, as a young scientist coming up, how do you easily get funding for your work? As a young scientist, at what stage are you thinking? After PED, maybe you're trying to get some money to set up a lab or something. You don't have much experience to win big grants. So how do you start? In one of the western countries after the PhD, nobody would give you funding right away. You still have to do a postdoc where you apply, usually the first postdoc, a tenured professor person would have won a research project, so a contract to do research and then there's funding and they are looking to hire postdocs to actually carry out that research. So that would be the natural thing to do after a PhD. You go on our job website and you look at the projects on offer. At that moment you apply and you go to interview and you try to choose one where you fit well and that looks interesting. And then the moment of actually securing independent funding would come either after one or two postdocs and the details depend on which country you're in. So the US is a bit different from UK or from France but generally speaking after a few postdocs you either become a tenure-track person or already you get a permanent job or you get a long fellowship to do research. Any of these three things would have the money to start the lab and so people will give you money to start the lab the moment that they're investing in you a long term, so for at least five or six years. In terms of where to get that money, again it depends, usually this thing called start-up tends to come from the institution that hires you and it can be at very different levels depending on what country you are. But all of these things I'm saying are in the West if you're in a country that I don't know much about maybe you can say what you've seen happening around you and others can contribute. Thank you very much. I think in the West that's a perfect situation but for example I completed my PhD, came back, I'm lecturing in investing but it's quite difficult first of all to really translate what you did into your environment because you don't have the facilities that is one and then also getting that network people to work with sometimes it can be difficult because people are more to themselves than coming together to solve problems because sometimes you solve the problems and some politicians don't really appreciate what you are doing. They rather want to bring in an expatriate to come and solve a problem rather than hiring the local scientists to address the issues. So sometimes that becomes a bit of a problem and then also sources for funds. Other you go for outside funding maybe with the leader or dad or something then that has to do with some experience. If you don't have some experience you will not be given such funding. Locally in my country we have something called book and research allowance but that is about $1000 a year so that is just peanut. So to start up as a scientist is quite challenging unless of course you have an elderly professor who is already established and you want to team up with him and then work it out so that when you also get there you can also have your team and be working with them. That is what I have been doing I have some senior colleagues and I surround myself with them and try to get experience with them and then they then link me up to other people and then from a network it may not be locally but somebody is there another person is there here and there we try to pull some resources together if there is a need for us to go and do some work we go to another place to take the data and come back and all that we don't have that lab system where we have in the distance but if what you are doing you can do it elsewhere you move there you do it and then you come back and move on like that so that is what spitting is Thank you Mike I just want to follow up with you what you just said about so there are the traditional ways of funding but you know nowadays there are things like crowdsourcing so there is a website experiment.com where you can propose your scientific research project and propose an amount that you would like to have it funded at through that none of us have done I don't know has anyone done any of this crowdsource funding here we are planning to do this for getting additional funding here for the hands-on school so we will have I think it will also give us some experience on how that process works so we can communicate that but I will just mention that to be on the lookout for those sorts of let's say new opportunities that arise now that we have networking and crowdsourcing that sort of stuff which is very different than just a few years ago Sir you put it out there in the website and people will donate people elsewhere in the world that say this is a cool project again this is where communication comes in you have to communicate why is it important why would anybody care but if you can make the case for it then there are lots of people out there that would be new interesting cool science done so I would say to be on the lookout for those sorts of opportunities I have a question about postdoc I guess I have a problem that's such that in some countries it's easier to in my case I had when I didn't have a PhD yet I was already an assistant professor and in fact I was tenured already before I got my PhD so when I got my PhD I tried to apply postdoc to some positions that I like but immediately I was disqualified and I tried to explain that I am only an assistant professor because the qualifications in my institute in particular is low but they don't have a mechanism for recalibrating my case because I really want to go on a postdoc experience because if I'm content with being there and not trying to gain experience that would be okay but I really want to go on but the problem is my good fortune of getting already an early faculty position turns out to be a disadvantage I'm surprised in the systems that I know the fact that you were already a professor wouldn't have stopped you from getting a postdoc I mean but you also have to keep in mind in a good place when a postdoc is advertised there will probably be 40 applications and only one job so 39 people don't get it so I don't know were you really told that you weren't taken because you were already a professor okay well that's strange in the UK that wouldn't happen there aren't rigid rules but many decides who they want to take so I don't think that would disqualify you in general shouldn't I wanted to ask you because you said some maybe the process of hiding is going to change because I think in your countries is much better for example in Argentina you can just do the PhD the postdoc in the country go outside and then get a permanent position they only pay you the salary so for me for example I have already a permanent position but I don't have any like a large project they give you a small project but you can buy a couple of computers or something like that so it's a bit strange because they pay you because you are a good scientist or you can do good research but they don't give you the resources to do that so you have to be in a large group to survive but you can do independent things but it's not like in your countries where if they see you as a good scientist they give you their resources so for me that's the most difficult part for example in my country just to get your your own lab or your own group yeah so this is now a theme that's come out from two of you and I realize it's true also in also when we grew up in Italy that for most people the only way to progress was actually to join into a big group and be under the wings of a big group for quite a while but even if that's the way you have to do because currently that's the way your country works I would still go back to the idea of having a few eggs in your basket you can start a side project you can be ready for the moment that say you might want to take you could get the opportunity to say have a year here at ICTP or a year of sabbatical or somebody invites you because you meet them at the conference to go to their lab for a few months and that might be because of your side project not necessarily for the project that you have to do with the big team that's the only way to survive so in the end you want to be creative you don't want to spend your whole life doing the job of the big team unless that's really what you want to do but as scientists usually you want to have your ideas and you might want to change them every few years so you want to make a situation where that's possible within the constraints of how you have to work I want to ask you is there an age limit for career development I'm 47 and I feel like a pharaoh yeah so is there an age limit no I mean there shouldn't be an age limit in the legislation of many countries it's now illegal to put age limits on most things and in reality I mean I feel less able to learn stuff and I'm not 43 so I just find it difficult to say if somebody told me I have to learn this new computer language I would just kind of collapse I want to use my lab forever but if you feel that you can learn new things where are the age limits if you apply for another phd or postdoc or whatever they put like 40 years bearing in mind the students in the west who go straight in developing countries they have to work for so many years before going and then there is this marriage and having a family and so our year is not like your year so ok there's a mainstream of people who do mostly the same thing but there are many examples of people who've done phd's later in life Bruce are you here do you want to say something first comment is 43 is not old ok it's all computer languages no just got to keep working so I had two careers I was a social worker for 17 years I got an undergraduate in psychology and I worked a job got interested in science again I started as an engineering student ended up with a psychology degree did a very different kind of job and went back to science and the challenge of learning and I was very worried competing against all the young minds that I couldn't keep up and I'm not as fast as I once was if I was ever fast at all but I struggled through that and you do learn things maybe more slowly but I know that varies by country and for the US that I think Mattias Schroeder he made that comment that that's kind of unusual that we would just go try something and see how it worked out and I did and I was willing to fail and this is the comment that Kimbo from Cameroon made last year was that US seems to be a little bit different in our willingness to fail to fall on our face you know we try something if it doesn't work in an experiment okay what do we learn from that we move on we try to be objective about that and what can we take away and that's the way I view life too I'll try something if I succeed great if I don't that's okay I'm not worried about it but in US too we don't lose status and maybe that's a little bit different that in my lab if I tried something I wasn't able to complete a project I wouldn't no one would think poorly of me I wouldn't suffer social status wise as a result of that so I encourage you to do it and maybe change the way people think about things like that because I'm 53 to 52 something like that now just early in my career so we'll wrap up quite soon I was wondering whether we have been talking to you a lot this week I don't know if you have just some thoughts that you want to contribute briefly and we have interesting experiences that's why I am pointing you out so hi so maybe I got some experience about what Petro was saying actually after doing my PhD I went back home and the time I went back home it was unfortunate so many people had to leave the country I'm going somewhere else to get better jobs and better pay jobs so I was charged to be the head of my department I could see it unfortunate that I got very little experience to get the job and run the department I was not talking at all for most of the time because after four or five years I got very disappointed about how things are going actually in our countries most of the money is run by politicians it is very difficult to convince a politician to pay for a lab or to buy something for you and instead they usually buy guns or do some other crazy stuff things are very harsh it is not easy currently I am very disappointed I know you found some ways in which you work actually I was trained in my PhD as an astronomer when I went back home it was completely useless to do actually as an astronomer or anything like this it was very difficult for us also in the department actually to even run educational program for undergraduates you will be surprised that my budget for running educational program in my department is something like it sells a US dollar per year we have to survive with that actually I started as a kind of personal motive to start building some of the lab equipment that we actually need for undergraduate programs and I was doing that because I was faced with two challenges actually the first if you need to get good lab equipment then you usually have to buy it from the US or Europe and they are over charged we cannot afford that we also as Petro was telling me in my country we are aligned by the US as an axis of evil so even if we had the money we couldn't actually afford to buy things so I started something like a small lab back home trying to manufacture some of the lab equipment that we need I hope this is going to work actually I will be telling you that later on but the good things that it seems at the beginning I thought that I am in an isolated island I am doing this on my own but little bit later on I found out that so many people even in Europe they are actually doing things and they are happy to collaborate and do things together I hope thank you no more burning contributions I thank all of you for taking part in a very interesting discussion thank you and we go to the last