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[Music] [Music] my name's joe berman i'm a senior lecturer at canterbury christchurch university i've been doing that full-time now for about eight years um but i've been in academia a little bit longer than that um i also run a small business a mushroom growing business called edible kingdom limited and that's been going for two years now so in terms of academic experience i've got quite a bit in terms of business experience i'm quite new to it but i'm learning as i go along um on a normal day um well a normal day can be anything really for for a lecturer um obviously we spend a lot of time teaching and different universities have different um different makeups of what your responsibilities are as a lecturer so at christchurch we have quite heavy teaching responsibility and a small amount of research so those are kind of the two hats that you wear as a lecturer so a lot of my time spent teaching and teaching isn't just standing up in front of people giving lectures it's also doing practicals it's also supervising students when they're doing their independent work whether it's independent research work in a laboratory or even in the field at the moment i've got a student currently in scotland who i'm constantly talking to because he's um he's doing some research work in the field and i'm trying to make sure he keeps on track so there's there's an element of you know direct teaching and there's also an element of admin so there's a lot of administrator uh administrative work everything from um marking work marking exams writing content of course i suppose that could count as administrative work so writing lectures um creating content that people can learn from creating assessments you also do a lot of um work keeping track of marks um making sure to go to exam boards where we check marks and we um we make sure everything is completely in order so a lot of a lot of the behind the scenes work that students don't see um is actually something we spend quite a lot of time uh doing and preparing for um the and the the other thing that in the sort of teaching realm that i think is really important that maybe a lot of people don't know about is that there's a there's a pastoral element to being a university lecturer so um you're you're there to teach people and to sort of guide them academically but you're also there kind of to make sure that they're okay and that their their life is balanced in the way that it should be um it's a difficult it's a difficult time sometimes for students they're often away from their family it may be the first time they've been away from home uh often they're on their own sometimes people struggle to make friends make new friends even at university um and people come to us with all sorts of different backgrounds we have people who are um straight out of school in which case they might be struggling just with the you know the very basics of getting their house sorted and making sure it can be paid for or getting work and holding down a job um they might be mature students who've got families um and other commitments and and the job um and there's a lot of pressures involved in all of those things and often we're there to to help people with some of those issues so people will come to us because they're having financial difficulty people will come to us because they've had a mental health issue or a breakdown or are feeling suicidal um and actually that's one of the most difficult parts of the job it was the bit that no one really tells you about when you get into the job you think you're going to be teaching people sure you're going to be doing research stuff sure but um but helping people get through their their emotional and personal issues as well is is something they haven't told me about and that that's it's one of the most challenging bits but it's also probably the most rewarding part as well yeah so we're involved in in making sure that health and safety requirements are met particularly in laboratories or when do when doing field work we're also responsible for the journey either side of university so we do quite a lot of work making sure that students are encouraged to come to our university so we do outreach with schools we do and some of that is just to engage with schools for this because it's a good thing to do um and but also open days open open events where people will come to university and see if they want to study and where they want to study so we we spend quite a lot of time arranging sort of on the recruitment before people get to university but we also spend time on what people do at the end of university so i i still spend time with students giving them job advice and giving them job references and and that's not just graduates who've left us in the last you know year two years um you know now i've been in in the job for quite a few years i've you know i i still speak to students and give students advice from five six seven years ago when i was teaching them so um it's it's really quite you know it's quite broad in terms of the scope that we have to do for teaching um in terms of research so research is as i said is a smaller part of my job description but research involves um well a whole bunch of things there's a lot of pressure around research first of all you have to get the money to do it so we spend quite a bit of time searching for pots of money and that means writing grant proposals so we we spend a lot of time writing sometimes to professional bodies government organizations charities to try and convince them that first of all our research is good and second of all that it's feasible and and useful for them to to fund it um once we've got that money we spend a lot of time managing that research and doing that research you know whatever that research project is so that often for me um i'm a i spend a very small amount of time in the laboratory and quite a lot of time uh out in the field so i'm interested in studying insects and um ecology so i spend a lot of time in scotland um in in sort of the the hebrides uh and and sort of in the wild in general so uh yeah it involves a little bit of camping um a little bit of being outside being bitten by insects uh quite often and a lot of traveling so we do the research we carry out the experiments we design them we get the equipment sorted we carry out the the risk assessments the health and safety requirements that we need to do and then we have to bring that research back and analyze data we spend a lot of time analyzing and then writing up results so when you're an academic you're expected to publish on a regular basis um whether it's a small part of your job description or a large part you're expected to publish papers a lot and really that is the um that's the the crux of being a researcher is to to create and produce academic papers of a good quality yes so two years ago now i started a business with a person who i who before um before that i hadn't ever met um it was he approached me with an opportunity because we both had a passing casual interest in growing mushrooms um i'm interested i'm a biologist i'm interested in living things in general um and i quite like eating you can you can't probably see much of my tummy at the moment but uh i like food and i've always been interested in the agricult agricultural sciences and i have a training in that my phd was in in an agricultural science in biological pest control of of insect pests so i'm interested in agriculture and i'd done this work working for planet earth for three years um as a research consultant and seeing how tomatoes are grown and you know most people think that tomatoes are grown by an old lady wearing wellies um in her little tiny greenhouse at the end of her garden and people just you know dig them out with a spade and go for it in reality it's a very very technical process that involves high levels of automation in terms of climate control and and climate management it involves a huge amount of variety in terms of the products they produce and how much analysis goes into those products so every chemical flavor compound in a tomato has been tested to see how sweet it is how salty it is you know what what the flavor profile is and uh even the labor force and and the the way in which these things are grown is highly technical so it involves uh often uh robotics is becoming quite common in in agricultural growing now so people will use robots to predict um to take pictures of crops and predict crop yield they'll use robots to to pick the crops and so there's a high level of automation there's also um a large amount of biology of course so there's the the biology of the plant and it's nutrition there are uh there's a lot of pathology that needs to be understood to understand how disease happens because if you've got several million pounds worth of tomato plants growing in a glass house for nine months you've got to make sure that they stay healthy so controlling diseases understanding the biology of the pest insects it's a very complicated process um which i found really fascinating when i started learning about it and i think it also working as a consultant gave me a perspective on the on the true business side of these of these sectors and i'm not i'm not from a business background i don't have any you know training in business i didn't do even a business um a level so understanding how marketing works how um how cash flow is is regulated and how to deal with customers um how to make sure that you can produce things is uh was a really neat challenge for me and we started a mushroom farm in um 2018 uh called edible kingdom and that that was set up in order to grow a relatively low tech um but to grow gourmet mushrooms for the local market so we try to do it sustainably using as little energy as possible and to do it from waste materials so things like waste wood waste cereal products and then we we sell those to uh to customers we sell them either direct to people uh to farm shops to restaurants uh wholesalers uh and that's been really interesting for me because i've not only been able to apply some of the biological knowledge i i um know so i know about fungi i know how fungi grow i know what requirements they have in terms of climate in terms of their um their nutritional requirements um how they fruit i understand or all of the processes that go on um but what we had to to work out was you know how to do that efficiently uh cheaply and how to do it in such a way that we could consistently produce a product that made enough money so you know it's it's taught me lots of new skills like marketing like uh how to deal with customers how to um how to do financing uh finance i i'm used to working with the budgets of big projects big research projects for example but i've never had to do tax returns um on a small business and so that has its challenges um you know so there are a lot of things that i've learned from it and it's been something that's given me a lot of it's been very worthwhile because it's something that i did you know it was just myself and my business partner we've set this up and made this a thing um and i think it's good to have a perspective on not just you know the academic world which people often think is quite you know up your brain is up in the clouds and you know you're you're just a a clever clogs in there um in an office somewhere i think it's nice to have that perspective but also understand how the quote unquote real world works and some of the pressures involved with it so it's been it's been quite a challenge so far so i did a bsc in biosciences at canterbury christchurch and never regretted it actually it was probably the best decision i made it was very very difficult my daughter when i started in september that year my daughter was three months old um so i did a phd i chose to do a phd in biocontrol um it was a fantastic thing to do i was studying a tiny little insect predator which is found in um in asia all across across asia that we've imported into the uk and as part of that i got to do loads of cool stuff so got to work for 18 months um doing plant sampling at um q botanical gardens in london which is a fantastic place to work i worked for about a month or so at the natural history museum in london working with geneticists um primarily the geneticists i was working with were mosquito geneticists um a a specialist called dr yvonne linton who i think is now in washington working for the smithsonian university uh or sorry smithsonian institute um and she taught me about the the genetics of insects and um i was looking at the insect populations um of these this little biocontrol predator i learned some um some skills in chemical ecology so for a form of analytical chemistry in in living organisms um i i learned how to do mass spectrometry um in the university of lisbon i was there for about a month um so it was a very broad range ranging project so as well as getting a phd which is one of the things you want to do you want to get doctor before your name um you also spend a lot of time building up the skill sets that you think you might need so those were some of the research skills that i needed during my phd at some point i also built up some of my my teaching skills and some phds will come up come with an expectancy that you do some teaching to fulfill your contract so often a small amount a moderate amount maybe 50 hours a year um and i and i did that so i was initially given a few modules to teach i taught some anatomy um and eventually when i got towards the end of my phd i had an extension i had an extension on the phd because our labs had been closed down and moved right in the middle of them and unfortunately my stipend ran out but my phd was extended so i had to make some money and i did that again by by doing some teaching so i was very kindly offered to to do some teaching and was dropped in the deep end really didn't know what i was doing at first didn't think i would enjoy it at all i was not interested in teaching either as an undergraduate or a phd student but ended up doing it and ended up loving it and really enjoying it and and i felt it was something i was good at with it you know without sounding too arrogant about it i felt it was something i could do i had a lot to learn clearly but it was something i was quite good at um good at doing so um yeah so i built up some teaching experience when i did my phd i then um so this is kind of the the standard academic route i then applied for a postdoctoral research position once i completed my phd i applied for a research position and many people will do post docs post doctoral research positions just meaning after you've done your phd they'll do them for years so sometimes they're a year contract sometimes they're three four years and some people will do several three or four year chunks for 10 15 years in some cases building up a level of research building up research papers and building up collaborators and colleagues that you can work with in the future and then they can apply for an academic position at a university and i actually did relatively little of that so i did about a year and a half of post-doc experience i applied for a job to work at the swedish agricultural university at the slu and there are several several campuses but i i was at i was at alnap which is the southernmost campus very close to malmo malmo people call it in this country um just over the bridge from copenhagen near to denmark and i um and i did an ecology project there where i was studying um insect pheromones so expanding on the uh analytical chemistry stuff that i'd done as a phd student i was doing a lot more of this to to look at insect pheromones for the monitoring and conservation of rare species some of the rarest species in europe actually and that meant that i would live in sweden i took my family to sweden i learned swedish some swedish and spent particularly the summers traveling all around sweden studying insect populations and putting out hundreds and hundreds of insect traps and you know going to conferences that's one thing i didn't mention about the research job one of the perks of being researcher is you get to go to research conferences which are partly an excu excuse to get drunk but also an excuse to meet new people and collaborators and to disseminate your research to other people and they're they're a really fun thing to do and they're an opportunity often to travel so i i did a lot of um research conferences i did research conferences in sweden i've done research conferences in turkey in italy in germany across the uk um so yeah so i was very very lucky and and obviously got to travel travel to scandinavia which is a fantastic opportunity and um at the end of that post-doc um i was again the contract ended i didn't know what what to do and we had the option of either trying to stay in sweden and pick up another contract uh or getting a full-time or the potential for a permanent contract in the uk actually back at christchurch so i came full circle now there was a point at which and actually when when i applied for the job the job that i have now um i was applying for a postdoc in um in the university of lund and was really really excited actually and and keen to to try and get the job in lund so there was that was a kind of fork in the road if you like i could have stayed in research and done more post-doc research or i could have gone into academia um and it was a very very close decision but ultimately one that ended up with us moving back to the uk and settling into a permanent job that i've now been in for eight years um i i don't like to necessarily make long-term plans that are going to be too rigid so i can see myself being an academic in five ten years time you know that that um that famous interview question where do you see yourself um but similarly i i think you should take any opportunities that come around and if it's something that that fits your your life and fits where you are in your career and something that excites you and you can see yourself being good at then i think you should throw yourself at it so whether that in for me whether that ends up being an academic role either at christchurch uh or at other universities where where i can um change what i'm doing to to fit into a different system or even moving out of academia and moving more into the business sectors working with um industry um i could see that happening as well and um i'm not one to predict what what those things will be and i don't like to think too hard about it but i think you should always take those opportunities