Moving on with your research | Engaging with new opportunities

[Sharing your research] is good because it makes you really think in depth about what it is that you are sharing. If you are telling somebody about something, it helps you to understand it more … you don’t want to share something and say, ‘Actually I was wrong about that’ so you really want to get it right.

Personally I have found that when I wanted to try and talk about my research with anybody there were occasions when it was, ‘What do you mean?’ … so obviously I was able to note in my brain, ‘This isn’t well explained, this needs more detail.’ Or where they have seemed bored I am able to think, ‘OK, too much detail there.’

Just say something about what you are doing in every setting that you can find. It may be the staff meeting. It may be the paper that you are putting into the newsletter. It may be spin-off questions about it. … My daughter, my son, I have spent time talking with them about this. It is not their work but I just want to see if what it is makes any sense to anybody else.

Be open to approaching people. There is a professor [in another country] who is one of the gods in my area of research. I just said, ‘OK, let me email him and tell him my ideas and let me hope he writes’, and now we have corresponded weekly about stuff.

I joined the association connected with [the key] journals [in my field] so I started to get lots of different mailings and information.

I have [submitted] a proposal for a project … If we get approval we will be … conducting my research on a mini-level within all the schools so that we can … see if we can make generalisations across [a wide area].

I just started a new project and online survey about [my research area] and I promoted it on LinkedIn … and now I have [many] schools that are working with me but it came out of nothing. It came just starting with an idea and then promoting on LinkedIn and I think it worked.

I use [social media] all the time, not necessarily for my research but certainly for disseminating articles … I get new followers most weeks so it is getting a wide collective field of people.

I don’t feel I have much idea of how to manage social media for research purposes at all so any support in that sense would be wonderful … I did try LinkedIn but I didn’t like it because they were too interfering.

I just really enjoy the research if I am honest. I am not working in a university so there is nowhere for me to go with more courses as such but I wouldn’t mind actually getting into doing research and moving my career into research. I would quite like that.

I would like to write rather more freely about some of the things that have also come up through the [research] … I don’t think I want to be somebody who just talks about the same research for many years. I am trying to work out … how you build on what you have found.