A few weeks ago I mentioned the academic brand and how it was pointed out to me that my brand is a little… haphazard. While a lack of brand or a confusingly vague brand is an external problem — others in the field may not think of you as a subject expert in anything specific — it is also an internal problem. I don’t necessarily have my brand entirely figured out but I have been thinking a lot about where I want to see a change, what I can do to bring about that change and ultimately what I want to be known for in the wider world.
What is an academic brand?
John Tregoning was writing about this very subject in 2016, where he described the brand as ‘selling yourself’. He sums it up nicely stating:
This brand comes into play when meeting potential collaborators, conference organisers and funders. Interactions with other academics tend to have three levels: an entry-level overview of your work to check you are in the same field, followed by a description of a specific piece of work and, if you really click, detailed dissection of experimental design. There is no space for English modesty: don’t say “you know, this and that, some stuff on respiratory infections”. Do define your brand and develop a snappy single-line pitch that summarises what you do, backed up with an exciting case study. You are pitching this brand so that when other academics need someone with a particular skill set they think of you.
The article continues to articulate clear advice about the brand – craft the brand by publishing and network so that the world realises who you are. This is excellent advice, but these are all external factors for creating a brand. An ECR coming out of the PhD doesn’t necessarily know who they want to be when they grow into senior lecturers, especially in a noisy academic world.
A graduating PhD has to face a plethora of issues, issues that were not as prominent in the academic job market 10 years ago. The job market is incredibly competitive, and while establishing a brand may help to get a job, in reality most ECRs are willing to try anything to get their foot in the door. Atma Ivancevic in 2017 wrote a huge list of things to help survive the ECR period of an academic life. Included were travelling, entering competitions, writing, networking both live and online, talking to people, taking advice, creating an online presence, maintaining a personal life, exercising and avoiding overwhelm. Whew! I was overwhelmed just reading the list and teaching, funding and building a brand weren’t even on it!
Then there is the real possibility that the brand the ECR wants to build doesn’t exist or isn’t easily fundable. What to do then? Build a different brand? What if there are no jobs in the area an ECR wants to work in? Do they press on with who they want to be albeit jobless? Do they pay their dues and hope that once they have a job they can manipulate it to suit their brand? Or what if they are interested in a lot of areas and need time to figure out how it all fits? That is certainly my problem, and while I am slowly narrowing down my specific area, it physically hurts to have to give up other activities I genuinely enjoy exploring.
Most of these articles explore external factors for establishing a brand, but what about internal factors?
I am speaking about personal motivations. The physical and mental reasons why a brand is important. This became really obvious to me at the end of the summer and I spoke about it a couple of posts ago. An academic brand gives focus, purpose and prevents a person taking on projects that sits out with their area (not necessarily their area of interest, but their brand). I have so many things I like to work on and because my expertise are in a broad area I justified to myself that I could make it all fit. Well, it doesn’t and it can’t. I never want to have a summer like I did this year and while I still have ‘off-brand’ projects I need to finish, thereafter I need to really focus.
So, who am I as an academic?
Well, that is the $64,000 question. Even as I write this post I am a little scared to admit it, but I shouldn’t be. It’s irrational to hide behind other topics all the while privately hoarding research data that centres on a true passion. So, here we go…
I love singers and singing, I love looking at treatises and I love historically informed performance. I have been working on all three areas for about 10 years, but not necessarily a the same time or in the same project. I was really inspired to write my thesis topic because I wanted to know how 18th-century teachers taught their students, but I realised the treatises alone were not enough to tell me how they did this. In fact, the treatises can’t really be fully understood without have a wider interdisciplinary knowledge of the cultural context (I did say my area is really big and I can justify looking at prety much anything!). This is why I (alongside another colleague) came up with the Eighteenth-century Arts Education Research Network — it’s aim was to bring practitioners and researchers together to explore these issues, and while the network has been really useful it brought up several other issues that got me off track. Singing treatises is actually what I want to explore in more detail. To figure out what parts of the treatise were used in lessons, what parts were idealised versions if a lesson created by the teacher, and what parts relate to the wider context. I truly believe that a more contextualised, interdisciplinary examination of treatises will help us understand historical vocal training, but will also dispell myths still passed down from teacher to student today. That’s who I want to be when I grow up… Oh yeah, I’m already grown up… So, let’s do this!