Welcome to this women in science master class, and
I'm going to be talking about pathways to
success in science and beyond. First I just
wanted to tell you a little bit about who I am,
I'm a professor in the Department of Cognitive
Science here at Macquarie University
and I'll tell you what cognitive science
means a little bit later. I'm a psychological
scientist so, my background is in psychology,
I have an Honours Degree in Psychology and
a PhD in Psychology and, again, I'll tell
you what that means as we go through.
So I work at the university and I'm an academic,
so I'll explain that, but I do research on
some pretty interesting topics and I'll
tell you about my research: I do research
on hypnosis, and I do research on memory, and
I also do some teaching and I do what we call
service and I'm going to explain all those
ideas a bit later. Also importantly for today,
I'm a wife and I'm a mother of two primary
school kids because one of the important jobs
that we have as scientists is to sort of balance
between doing our research, being a scientist
and also having a nice life, so I'll talk
about that towards the end.
So, let me start by telling you, I'm going
to tell you a little bit about my personal
journey through science, so I'll tell you
about what it was like for me growing up and
the choices that I made. So I'm one of five
kids, I'm the middle kid, you can see the
picture of me and my brothers and sisters
in our attractive outfits in the 1970s.
I'm the middle kid - I've got an older brother
and sister and a couple of younger brothers -
and I grew up out in a sort of semi-rural
area out at the base or the Blue Mountains
in a place called the Hawkesbury Valley. My
mum and dad didn’t go to university -
in fact very few if any of my family members
before me had ever gone to university, my
dad was a butcher, my mum was a bar maid -
so we came from a not very wealthy family,
but we spent a lot of time sort of out in
the world. So I spent a lot of time, my brothers
and sisters and I, we'd run around with
all different kind of weird ideas,
we'd build things to sort of float on the dam, or
we'd build cabby houses, we'd look
after the animals, we'd be out and about
pretty much all the time and that really influenced
the kind of things that I was interested in
as I thought more about science.
The other thing I spent a lot of time doing is reading,
I always had my nose in a book and although
my family didn’t have much money my mum
always made sure we had enough money to let
me a buy book at the, sort of the school book
club, every month or so. So I was always reading
and for me - because we didn’t have much 
money and we didn’t get to go out and about a lot -
I learned about the world by reading,
and at one point my parents bought us a set
of encyclopedias, because I grew up in a time
well before the internet when you couldn’t
just look stuff up on the internet, and so you would have to go to the library or read encyclopaedias.
So I was always reading, and
I just really want to emphasise that reading
is a really important thing, a way to learn
about the world, and I am not sure if you've
had a chance to study this book in school,
it’s a wonderful book by science fiction
writer Ray Bradbury, he's an American writer
and he wrote a really well known
book called Fahrenheit 451, and this book is
all about a government of the future that
sort of controls what everybody knows,
it controls the people by controlling their information,
so they believe that, you know, if people
have access to too much information then they
kind of get out of control. And that the way
they control people is by burning all the books.
So Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature
at which paper burns. So, at one point, one of
the characters describes to the protagonist,
Montag, he says the following things, which
I think is really neat, he says: "Most
of us can’t rush around, talking to everyone,
know all the cities of the world, we haven’t
time, money or that many friends.
The things that you're looking for... are in the world,
but the only way the average chap will ever
see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book."
And that is kind of what life was for me
growing up, learning about the world, learning about, thinking about what I might be when I grow up was all
about reading in books. So I went to school,
obviously, I went to pretty much no special
sorts of schools or fancy schools, I just went
to my local high schools. I went to three
different schools because my family moved
around a little bit.
I certainly wouldn’t have called myself a cool kind of a person back then, I was more a quirky kind,
but it’s funny when you look back on yourself
at school and you think, "What do you mean by
cool, and what's cool now?" And, I knew, about myself,
that when I really loved a subject I worked
harder at it, and I think that's a really
important thing to think about,
that you're going to do lots of different subjects while
you're at school and they might not all be
something that you feel completely passionate
about, but that's completely fine;
you'll find the thing that you love, and that you are passionate about, and you'll really get into it.
So, I think it’s tricky when people come to university
to study something, and they come perhaps because
someone's told them they should do it, or
because they got a particular mark and you
don’t want to waste the marks; you need
to come and do something that you love and
because university in life is really hard
work. So you want to be doing something that
you go home every night thinking, "This is awesome,
I'm loving what I am learning about."
The other thing I thought at school - and I'm
not sure if any of you have had this experience -
is I felt a lot of pressure not to be too
smart. I have a really clear memory of being
hit on the head by a boy in my class because
I got a higher mark than him in a maths class.
I got one of the highest marks. And so one
of the schools that I went to it wasn’t
cool for girls to be smart, and this is something
that I hope that you will completely reject!
Girls can be smart, and they are smart, and
they should be smart and shouldn’t be afraid
to talk about what you're interested in.
There's research that suggests that over time
certain environments can make it so that
girls talk less and contribute less because
they're feeling that external pressure. If
you're feeling those kinds of things, if you're
worried that others are feeling those
kind of things, I’d really encourage you
to read things like Amy Poehler's Smart Girls -
you might know Amy Poehler from Saturday Night
Live or Parks and Recreation, she's a really
funny comedian - or Sheryl Sandberg, she is
the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, and
she’s got a program called the Lean In Program.
So it’s really important for us girls and
women to know that we've got a voice and
we've got a chance to get out there and
say something.
So, when I was growing up, I wanted to be all
different kinds of things. Originally I called
this talk I Want To Be A Donkey because my
daughter had told me quite recently that when
she grew up she wanted to be a donkey; sometimes
she wants to be a dolphin, but mostly she wants
to be a vet, or she wants to be a zoologist,
she wants to work with animals and that’s
some pictures of her when we were in Africa
and she's spotting cheetahs, so she loves
animals and that's what she wants to be.
When I was growing up at first I was really,
I really wanted to be a medical doctor, because
when I was little I had spent time in hospitals,
so I really wanted to be a doctor, and I'm
not sure why I changed my mind about that,
I think maybe when I first saw blood I decided
yeah, maybe not for me. At one point I wanted
to be a teacher, but by the time I left high
school I was really keen to be a journalist,
and the reason was that I was completely inspired
by this very famous Australian journalist
named Jana Wendt who, when I was growing up,
she was one of the most influential women
journalists in the country, and used to do
these amazing interviews where she kind of
steamroll over all these very powerful world
leaders, she was amazing journalist.
So I wanted to be just like Jana when I left school.
So I had a chance to do work experience - and hopefully you get a chance to do that as well - so I went
out to a primary school to try and be a teacher,
and I went and worked on the Land Newspaper
to be a journalist as well. But the important
thing to know is that you're not going to
find out everything there is to know about a career,
and sometimes you kind of just have to wait
and see what jobs are going to be like, but
if you can do whatever you can do to close
that knowledge gap between what you think
a career is like and what it is actually
like by talking to people in the profession,
by reading things, by going to work places
if you have a chance. But I also want to really
encourage you to think that it’s okay
to wait and work it out as you go along, and I'm
going to come back to that theme again
and again, that it’s okay not to know exactly
right now or by the end of school what you
want to do, that you can work it out as you
go along and it’s going to be fine.
So I'm not sure what kind of subjects you're
studying at the moment but here are some
of the subjects that I studied and assuming
that I remembered them all. So, up to the time
that I was in year ten, I did all of the kind
of standard sort of subjects, and I pretty
much liked them all, and I did reasonably well
in all of them except art; I liked art but
I was terrible at it. I loved English, and
that's why I've put it in red, I really
loved English and I did well in that. And maths I did well
in as well. But when I went to high school, or when I
went to my HSC - I changed schools for my HSC - I decided, because I wanted to be a journalist, I thought
"Oh well, I should do more English,"
and I didn’t do as much maths and I didn’t
choose science, because they didn’t have chemistry
at the school that I went to, and I loved chemistry
and I didn’t really like physics so much.
So I kind of started to stream myself making
choices that were influenced by what I
thought a journalist would need to know.
As it turned out it still would've been
useful for me to keep doing some science
and doing other things. By the time you finish
high school the things you really need to
be thinking about is making sure you have
literacy in both English and mathematics,
these are important for university, and life,
and also strong writing skills and writing habits.
So one of the things some students
struggle with when they come to university
is kind of all that writing, the writing habits
and writing clearly or communicating clearly.
So if you're working on all those kind of
skills you're doing really well.
I want to point out, I've got French listed there
for the HSC, I had never done any French before,
I couldn’t speak any French at all, and I
just got it into my mind that I want to do
French for my HSC, and my parents told me it
was a terrible idea but I didn’t listen
to them, and I think the French teacher told me
it was a terrible idea as well.
But to their credit they let me make the mistakes that
I probably needed to make, I hated it and
I did really poorly in it, but it hasn’t
mattered in the long run. So again I just
want to emphasise for you that it’s going
to be okay to make choices that end up not
being the right ones, to do things and change
your mind and it will be fine in the end.
So that's what I did for my HSC and, looking
back now, I don’t know, thirty years or
something or more, about thirty years since
I left school, here are some things that
I really realised about being at high school.
Number one: it was really important to me that
I believed that I could do anything and my
dad who didn’t finish high school -
I'm not even sure he finished primary school because
he went to be an apprentice butcher -
he taught me, he said, "You can do anything that you want to be, you just have to work really hard,"
and he really encouraged me in that, and he never
told me that anything would stand in my way,
it wasn’t about, never mentioned anything,
"Well you are a girl, so you can only do this,"
he never said anything like that, he said, "You can do
whatever you want as long as you work hard enough.
So that's from my dad.
I also learned the value of a good work ethic;
I think, certainly as time has gone on, once
I got to university I developed an even better work ethic.
But the other thing that was important
is a good reading habit, because by the time
you get to university - and I hope you all do
get a chance to come to university - that you
end up reading a lot of material; so you're
reading stuff for courses, and if you love
to read and you should be reading not just
for work or school but reading for fun, reading
for the love of it, reading because you are learning about the world, and my mum really encouraged me in that.
Looking back now I
also realise that it’s enough sometimes
just to have one amazing teacher that can
inspire you, and I am pretty sure that you
probably have more than just one teacher inspiring
you, but I remember one teacher, my English
teacher, Mr. Reilly, who also told me, "You know,
you can do whatever you want, and I see you
at university, I see you being successful,"
and he kind of believed in me and really encouraged me.
There's lots of research that tells us
that one great teacher can be enough to be
a catalyst for people to go on, to have amazing
experiences, so I hope sometime you take the
chance to tell your teachers, "Thank you," because
they work hard to make sure that you do well,
and to be inspiring to their students. Looking
back now I also realised, as I mentioned before,
that there were kind of big gaps in what I
thought my dream jobs would be about,
what they would be like and what they are actually
like, and as I've said it’s important to try
and close that gap, if you can, but it’s also
fine, you're going to learn about what careers
are like as you go on and change your ideas
and I think changing your ideas is fine.
So that's high school. So, how did then I
go from high school to become a scientist?
The next thing I did obviously is I went to
university. As I mentioned to you I wanted
to be the next Jana Wendt, I wanted to be
a great journalist, so I came to Macquarie
University to study a Bachelor of Arts in
Communications, and this is the degree that
you needed to study to do journalism. At Macquarie
University, at that time, they had what is called
a generalist first year, so you didn’t
kind of launch into all your journalism subjects,
you needed to do a few things that were related
to that degree - so English and linguistics,
and you can see I've highlighted them in
red - but you also had to do a variety of other
things and I chose Middle English - I'm not
sure if you have studied any Chaucer yet,
that's kind of Chaucer - psychology, sociology
and politics. So in the first year you just
do a smorgasbord of things, and then the idea
is that you go on and you specialise in communications
or whatever it might be in the second year.
What I experienced when I came to university
is that the subjects and the kind of process of studying at university was really different to high school.
So in high school, as I mentioned
before, I loved English, I loved it. At university
it was a different experience, I'm not sure
why, I think it was just a much faster pace,
had to read a whole variety of things. In
high school - and I'm not sure if this is what
it’s like for you now - you've got to really
deep dive into books or into works, you know,
plays and things like that, and really swim around in it
and love it, but at university the pace was
really fast, and it, sort of, I found it a bit
uncomfortable. So it’s interesting that how things
go at high school are going to be slightly
different at university and you have to be
ready for that and ready to be flexible that
it’s going to be a bit different.
So university is a different kind of environment
and some of the things that I've learned,
of myself and from supervising lots and lots
of students, is that you have to be a person
who can manage your time, you have to be an
independent learner. At high school your teachers
will follow up with you if you don’t turn
up for class, if you're not handing in work,
if you're not keeping up; at university they
don’t do that, the lecturers don’t really,
they don’t care if you come to the lectures
or not, they're not keeping track of people,
if you don’t hand in an assignment they
don’t follow up with you, you just score
zero on the assignment. So you have to be
a very independent learner and somebody who
can manage your own progress through, and I've
certainly seen students - both when I was
a student and as I've become an academic -
who find that a reall struggle.
So if you're developing those independent skills now
you're going to be really set for university.
The other big lesson I kind of learned, mostly
from watching others, is you've got to be
careful not to get side-tracked by all the
fun on campus. So on one of the first days
you come to university, here at Macquarie
they set it up like a giant festival, so there
are all different campus clubs everywhere,
and they've got pillow fights going on,
they've got people running around in costumes
and there's barbeques happening.
So there's a lot of things that you can be focusing
on apart from actually going to classes and
keeping up with your work. For instance, when
I came from school and I came to university,
and there's is a bar on campus here at Macquarie,
and people can drink in the bar and they could
drink at lunch time if they wanted to. So
I certainly had some friends who would go
to the bar at lunch time, drink some alcohol,
and then go to their classes a bit the worse for wear.
So that wasn’t really my thing
but you need to be very careful, certainly
some of the students, some of my friends and
other people I have seen, sort of more had
a degree in the bar rather than ended up with
the degree that they came to get.
So balancing those things is really important. A lot of
students who come to university here at Macquarie
and other places also have to work; I mentioned
to you I came from a not well off family at all,
so to pay my way through university I
got a job in an RSL Club - so Returned Servicemen's
Leagues Club, where veterans come, you know, to have
a drink and a meal and things like that,
and there's poker machines - I worked every Friday,
Saturday, Sunday and Monday night from about five
o’clock every afternoon until two o’clock in the morning and that's how I paid my way through university.
So I had to work out how
to balance that work, which let me pay for
uni and let me pay for living, plus coming
to my classes and doing all my assignments
and that's an experience for lots of people.
So that's something that you can start thinking
about, how will you go doing those for those
of you who might have after school jobs,
if you're developing those skills now they'll
hold you in good stead.
So when I came to university, as I just mentioned
a moment ago, I didn’t enjoy English - I had
to do English as part of the major for communications
to become a journalist - but I didn’t really
like it at university, but I loved my psychology
course. I mentioned just a second ago that
I worked in an RSL Club, and my job there was
to be the change girl; so I gave money that
all the coins to the people who were coming
to play the poker machines. And so people would
come in and they'd come and get money
from me and then they'd go and put it in the
poker machines. And so I would watch for hours
and hours, week after week, month after month,
and I could not understand why people kept
putting money through these machines.
I'm not sure if you know this but poker machines
are set up inside the machine to only ever
pay back about eighty seven percent of what
gets put in, so you can never, over time,
make your money back, right? But sometimes people get wins, they get small wins, they get big wins,
and there's something that kind of sucks them into it, and I'd watch, and people would be really upset
sometimes at the end of the night, I remember one older lady saying to me, "I've just put my pension
cheque through the machines, I don’t know
how I am going to be able to pay my electricity bill."
And I'd think, "What is going on here?"
And at that time I went, I was going to psychology
classes, and psychology really helped me understand
how you might think about these problems of
gambling and how you might solve it.
So I changed my major to psychology.
Now psychology is the study, it's the scientific study of the mind and of behaviour. You might be kind of
familiar with the idea of psychology, for people
who are having psychological difficulties,
who might be experiencing anxiety or depression
or something like that, and that is one really
important part of psychology; but the other
important part is that we try to work out
what's going on in our mind: how do we remember,
how do we learn, how do we understand what
is going on in the world? And so how do little
kids develop, how do they know what things
are, how do they come to be who they are,
this is all psychology. So I wanted to change
my major to psychology - instead of doing journalism
I wanted to do psychology - but my parents,
even though they let me do French back in my HSC, they
are like, "But what are you going to become?"
They wanted to know what job I could get, and
I guess this is an important thing to be thinking
about when you're choosing university careers.
They thought "Oh, no, maybe you could be
a teacher instead," but I was adamant, I thought
psychology was fascinating so I changed my direction.
So, if you're not familiar with psychology,
psychology's a really popular course here
at university, so let me tell you about
the pathway for psychology. So a career in
psychology starts with a three year undergraduate
degree; so people come from high school and
then they can enrol in a three year undergraduate
degree and that's the box there you can see
on the left. Now, even a three year undergraduate
degree, you can use that for lots and lots
of careers, there are lots of things that
you understand, you understand people,
they way they think about things, the way
they behave, you can understand how to measure
different aspects of people.
So you can use a three year undergraduate psychology degree in a human resources career, or in market
research, in lots of different kinds of ways. But if
you want to become a psychologist, if you
want to be a clinical practitioner, then people
would go on to a fourth year in psychology.
So you can follow that pink arrow to the next
box, which says fourth year honours or post
graduate diploma, and that consists of some
more courses, more practical courses,
plus a research thesis, and on the basis of that
you can go and be registered as a psychologist
with some extra supervision and training.
Or you could go on and follow the pink arrow again
and you could go and do a post graduate master’s
degree. Now this is a degree where people
continue on to an extra two years of specialization.
So if they want to become a clinical psychologist,
or an organizational psychologist that works
in companies, or a counselling psychologist,
or a neuropsychologist, a neuropsychologist
who measures what happens to people when they've
had a brain injury or something like that.
Alternatively if you don’t want to be a
practicing psychologist you can sort of jump
over that post graduate master’s pathway
and you can do a PhD in psychology, and that
trains you to be a researcher, to be a scientist
or an academic. So you remember that I said
to you that I have an honours degree in psychology,
so I have what is in the second box, and then
I jumped over and I have a PhD in Psychology.
So many, many career pathways when you go to
university will look like this where you can
follow along, do undergraduate training and
then start to specialise or do a research career.
So scientists at university, most of them have
a PhD in whatever their degree might be
So if you're thinking about, "I want to be a psychologist
too, that sounds fantastic and I think I'd
like to do a PhD," where could you work?
Well, you can work like me in a university, you
can be an academic - and I'll tell you about
what an academic is in a moment - or you can
be an administrator, you can help academics
to do their job, do outreach things such as
Casey and others have been doing here.
If you didn’t want to work in a university
you could work in the private sector,
you could work in different companies, you could
be a part of consulting teams, you could help
to develop products or services, you could
be in human factors research like, "How are
people using my product, how can I improve
that?" Or perhaps you could do something like
coaching, professional development coaching
or life coaching. If that wasn’t for you
perhaps you'd like to work in the government,
the government employs, different levels of
government employ PhD people as policy advisors
or consultants in areas such as policing,
health areas, road safety. So psychologists have been responsible, for instance, for conducting the research
about how can we make sure people are wearing
their seatbelts, what kinds of advertising
campaigns could we use on the television or
in other media to increase the likelihood people
are wearing seatbelts or not driving
after they have been drinking.
So psychologists have had an important role to play there. If those things weren’t your cup of tea
perhaps you'd be in media, work in the
media as a science commentator or science
communicator and I think you might have heard
about science communication in the last presentation
as well. So lots of different opportunities
for psychologists, lots of different opportunities
for researchers. But, as I said, I'm an academic
and I basically do three kinds of things and
this graph shows you those three kinds of
things. So, in principal, about forty percent
of my time - the red part - is on research so
I build research teams, I gather good researchers
together, together we design and we run research
projects and I'm going to tell you about
these projects in a little bit. We train new
researchers, young people, to be better scientists,
we write books, we write papers and we go
to conferences either here in Australia or
overseas and I'll talk about that in a little
bit as well. The second thing that we do is
we teach, just like your wonderful teachers
in your school, we do very similar things but
just here at university so we give lectures,
we stand in front of big groups and we talk
about things, we might run smaller groups -
tutorials or practicals where people have
to do different tasks - we mark assignments,
we mark exams and we supervise people’s
projects, so pretty much exactly the same
as your teachers do in school.
The third component of our job, which is supposed to take about twenty percent of our time, is what we call
service, so we help run the university. So
we sit on committees making decisions about things,
trying to improve how the university
runs. If students come and they are not happy
with particular courses, they're finding it’s too confusing or it’s not what
we want then we would work on that to improve
those. So this is the kind of service.
We also contribute to the community whether by
talking to high school groups such as yourself,
or going to rotary clubs or to talking out
and about. And in the same way we're educating
people about science, maybe by writing things
for the paper or talking on the radio.
So, most academics that I work with, we do all
of these different kinds of things.
A lot of people think that we have, that when the
students go on holiday at university - and university
students do have quite a few holidays, I think
they have more than high school students -
that we're also on holiday, but just like your
teachers we're not on holidays when the students
are on holidays, we're still working, doing
all of these different types of things.
But you can see we get to do lots of really interesting
kinds of things.
So here's just an idea of my pathway, so
how long it took me to do these things.
So I left high school so long ago, in 1986, and
I started my four year Honours Degree in
Psychology here at Macquarie, and I graduated
four years later in 1991 and I started a PhD.
I graduated in 1996. After that I went over
to San Francisco, in the United States,
and I did what is called Postdoctoral training.
So it was about ten years of study from when
I left high school until I finished my PhD,
and including my Postdoctoral training it
was thirteen years. So for lots of careers
it takes a number of years to get to the point
that you want to be. After I came back from
San Francisco I worked as a research fellow
at the University of New South Wales. In
2004 my son Oliver was born and I took some
time off for him. I came back to Macquarie
in 2007 as an Associate Professor and then
in 2009 my daughter was born and I took a
whole year off because she never slept.
In 2014 I was promoted to Professor, which is
kind of like the senior grade of an academic.
So eighteen years after my PhD. So I've
been doing lots of different things over that time.
So looking back on my university career,
in the same way I kind of looked back at high
school, I realise now that university opened
my eyes to a broad world. I told you that
I came from a not very well off family and
I went to a school when there weren’t many
people from different kinds of backgrounds
but at university there were people from all
different places who have done all different
kinds of things. I was introduced to different
ideas, different political ideas, so many
kinds of things, so university was a real
eye opener for me. University, as I said,
also forced me to develop a really strong work
ethic, especially because I had to balance
paid employment and coming to university and,
this kind of work ethic, it just serves you
well all the way through your life. I also know now that having some passion for
the career path that you're taking for your
career is really crucial. Now I chose wrongly at first,
I chose to do journalism, but it
didn’t matter because I found the path that
I wanted to when I recognised what was really
interesting for me, and this might be your
experience as well, that it’s totally fine
to take some false starts, to go down one track
and to change and see what suits you. But I
think that it’s really important to choose
something that sings for you. I know some
people talk about, if you get a really high mark
on your HSC, don’t waste those marks, go and
do some particular kind of course that needs
those high marks; but you never going to waste
your high marks and your hard work if you're
doing something that you really care about,
and you go home - especially when you've got
a family and you're juggling things - if you
go home and you're not loving what you're
doing everyday it’s really hard to keep
going, so something that you're passionate about.
The final thing that I can tell you
now, looking back on my university career and
that I know from working here, is that independent,
self-motivated, resilient students do well,
in general, because, as I said, university is
a place where people aren’t looking after
you all the time in the sense of making sure
you are in the class, or making sure you've
finished things, or making sure you have handed
in. If you're the kind of person who can
do that yourself and bounce back from that then
you're going to do really well.
So let me tell you quickly about a day in
my life: I work here in the Australian Research
Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition
and its Disorders; we are a twenty one million
dollar research centre, we study cognition,
which is really just the mind and its disorders
and how to treat them. We have five programs
of research on memory, on belief, on language,
reading and person perception. So we're trying
to understand all different kinds of psychological
disorders and we work with different kinds
of, we work with patients and children and
do laboratory studies. I have two different
teams, the Macquarie Hypnosis and Delusions
Team and the Macquarie Collective Cognition
team. If we have a chance I'll come back
and tell you a bit more about that research.
So we use hypnosis to recreate clinical delusions,
which are false beliefs - and I'll come back
to that - and we also try to work out how to
improve and protect memory, especially with
older people because as older people age they
start to lose their ability to remember particular
things and we try to work out how to help them.
The other thing I've done a lot of
work on, you might be interested in, is looking
at whether hypnosis can help witnesses to
remember. So, if you are involved in a criminal setting,
a police officer might say to you, "Well you need to tell me what happened, tell
me the whole truth but nothing but the truth."
Now, just think about this: do you think that
human memory works like a video recorder that
records everything that we can see and review?
So sixty three percent of a lot of Americans
who were in a survey believed that,
but it's actually not true, they're not right; memory
isn’t like a video tape recorder and there's
lots of recent cases such as the Oscar
Pistorius trial or the Adnan Syed murder case
which you can hear about on the serial podcast
that talks about this.
So we've been doing a variety of research using hypnosis to see what happens to it.
In amongst all that research, what do I do every day? This kind of sketches out things that I do:
I drop my kids off; I come and I check what's happening; we have staff meetings or tea meetings;
I supervise my students, I have meetings with them about their projects; I might do some research or
reading on the internet; I'm writing papers
and I'm doing talks and I am doing admin.
So lots of different things while I'm sitting
at my desk, but I also get to do some more
unusual things every now and again, whether
it’s going out into the community and talking
to kids - that's my daughter at school - when
I might be doing some media work on the TV
or the radio or I might be doing some work
with the police or the courts.
I also get lots of chances to travel and here's some
of the places I have been to for conferences
and here's some pictures from conferences
in Denmark, London, that's in San Francisco -
that's my son and I, we were in Rotterdam in
the Netherlands - there's London again.
We didn’t have a conference at Lego Land but
we went there while we were going.
So as a scientist you get lots of chances to travel
around, so it’s a terrific lifestyle like that.
The good things about being an academic is
that you get a lot of independence, it’s
really challenging and you get a lot of flexibility
about your time, you can kind of work out
what your day looks like.
The other thing I really like is working with what I call
"good eggs", nice people, I think it’s really
important, working on important problems that
I'm really passionate about.
Some of the challenges is, in academia, there's not
much job security sometimes and it’s not a nine
to five job; you can be working long hours,
you can almost be working all the time so
you kind of have to manage that.
So let me finish with just some, a few points of
advice for you as you start thinking your
way to success in your careers.
I think it’s important for you to be open to the kind of
people that you're becoming as much as what
you are learning every day in school. We know
from research that, people your age, if you
start thinking about your journey through
life now, that that kind of thinking and reflection
really helps you to be more resilient later.
I want to encourage you also to be open to
opportunities; know that you can make it up
as you go along, you can change directions,
that will be fine, and search for the thing
that you are passionate about.
I want to remind you that life and work-life can be a real roller-coaster and you might hear some people
talk about their work and you think, "Wow, they're
so amazing," but kind of behind their story
there's a roller-coaster of times that things
went well and times when things didn’t go so well.
And in my group we talk about saving
the snaps for later, so when something good
happens to us we kind of all - this sounds
ridiculous doesn’t it? - we kind of snap and go,
"Yeay, we're so great," and we save that up
for the times when something gets knocked back,
or we have a failure or things aren’t going
so well. So we remind one another that not
every day is going to be an up day, so we
celebrate them when we can.
The final thing is surround yourself with good eggs, surround yourself with people who are supportive of
you and want you to succeed, and don’t be
distracted by naysayers, people who don’t want
you to succeed or who bring you down. I want
to remind you that you're going to be,
sometimes you might feel like you're a small fish or
a big fish; when I came from school to university
there were some people at my school who were
so successful, their scores were so amazing,
they just were off the charts. then they got
to university and then they realised,
"Gee, lots of people are smart here at university," there
always someone smarter. So you just have
to think, "There's different kinds of smart,
smartness isn’t everything," and just try
to control that feeling of competition because
it can be unhelpful to be always worrying
about where everybody else is and how you're
doing and being ultra-competitive.
I want people to be collegial, to be supportive and
celebrating everybody.
Finally, down the track, you will know, when
you're starting to think about family and work,
Sheryl Sandberg, again from Facebook,
tells us that we should chose friends and
partners and colleagues and others who support
the choices that we make, who are, you know, don't say,
"No! No! No! Women should be at home, they shouldn’t be working, they should be back in the kitchen."
No, no, no. You can do what you want to do and you surround yourself with people who support you in that.
When you become parents be whatever
kind of mum or dad works for you and your family,
don’t let other people tell you
"You can’t do it like that"; different families
work in different ways and you need to know
that little children, my kids, need to see
role models of happy, fulfilled adults following
their own passions.
And, finally, be grateful for the opportunities that we have even when things are challenging,
remember to stop and look around you and look to the future. That's pretty much it.
Absolutely! So there's academic advisors here
at the university, so if you're not sure of
the choices that you're making are the right
ones you can go and you can have meetings with them.
There is also counselling services,
and student support, and peer mentoring,
so other students here on the campus who are
a little bit further along who can support you.
So it’s not the case that once you're
here you just left to your own devices
and it’s like the Hunger Games or something,
it’s not like that, there are people to
support you but the most important thing is
that you need to know that you have to be
in charge of your own learning, you have to
be in charge of getting to class and doing
the work and managing it all. People will
help you if you go and ask for help but the
other thing is people won’t know that
you are necessarily struggling unless you
go and ask for help as well. So it’s a much
bigger place of course, there's many more
students than there are in high school, but
I know that students who come from schools where
you're already encouraged to be independent
are going to do really well when you get to university.
I worked out because I, in that first year of
university when I was doing English, which
I had to do for the journalism degree, I also
did psychology, I chose psychology and I just
loved the lectures, and as I said I was working
in an RSL Club where a lot of people were gambling
and I couldn’t understand why they would
keep losing money, why would they chose to do that.
And I remember sitting in a lecture
where they were describing what is called
Learning Theory, and this is the theory about,
sort of, punishments and rewards and why people
keep doing things even when they're not very
helpful things and how if you give people
a small reward like a poker machine paying
out how they might keep going.
And it just sort of struck me, "Man, psychology is something that helps me understand the world,"
and so it was that sort of being in a work place where
I could see real life problems and then being
in a university lecture where I could see
the answers to the problems, I thought,
"That's where I want to be, I want to go and follow
that direction," so that is why I chose psychology.
Absolutely! In my fourth year, which is the
Honours Degree in Psychology. So Honours in
Psychology, and Honours in many of these subjects,
you have to do a big research project,
and you also have to do some courses, and it’s
really quite intense and you're learning
new things about how to be a researcher, and
I remember halfway through that I went for
an interview to join the army. I went to the
army recruiting office down in Sydney and
I said "Oh, I think I want to come and join
the psychology corps in the army," because they
employ psychologists to just help assist people
who are in the army, so I actually went for
an interview. I thought, "I'm going to give
up this Honours because it’s so hard and
I'm really finding it a struggle, so I'll
go and do that," and I think it was the fact
that you'd have to wear green - and green doesn’t
really suit me, I wear navy - that probably turned
me off the army idea. So I don’t know, I
think it was then talking to other friends
and sharing the fact that I'm finding this
a struggle. So just like the student asked
before, "Who's around to support you?" And I
was talking to my peers and going and talking
to my supervisor and asking for the help that
I needed, as it turned out one of the reasons
why I was feeling really overwhelmed is that
I was still working in that RSL Club, I was
doing four night shifts a week, plus I was trying
to do my Honours Degree, and it was just so much.
So my supervisor offered me a part time
research job so I could give up that night time work.
So yeah it was looking around for solutions and there's people here who will help you with solutions.
Not so much in undergraduate. In the English
course that I did there was a lot of reading
and that's why I sort of suggested that if
you're a reader now in high school that it
really pays off later. When I really loved
the subjects I didn’t find the workload
difficult so in second year I majored in psychology,
so I started doing more psychology subjects,
and in third year. And so, no, I found the workload
manageable because I really, really loved it.
So once I chose the thing that was easier,
the workload wasn’t too bad. You had to
be consistent and I'm a memory researcher,
so I know from memory research that it’s really
ineffective to cram for exams right
before the exams. So you have to be somebody
who is quite organised and you're preparing
for your exams and you're studying overtime
but once I sort of had those strategies it
was quite manageable, it was okay.
One solution is to have a job where you can
kind of do all those multiple things. So, remember,
I told you originally I wanted to be a teacher
and I wanted to be a journalist,
well I'm an academic now but I do some teaching. So I teach undergraduate students and post graduate
students, I get to do some lectures with them.
I also do some journalism kind of things,
I do things on the radio, I occasionally do
TV things or I write for newspapers.
So you could find a job that lets you do aspects
or elements of the thing that you really like.
Another way to choose would be I guess to try
out those different things. Now I guess it
just depends on what kind of training you
need for them and how similar they are or
try one first. So here at Macquarie University
we have a lot of students who come back,
we call them mature age students, who might have
tried one career path and then they have decided,
"No, I think I'd really be passionate about
this other thing," and they go back and try
something else and they do a second degree
or they retrain in another area and I think
that is fine too. So there's a couple of
different ways you could try all the different
things that you might like.
Thanks everyone.
