Episode 10 - Dr. Natalie Garrett, Private Secretary to the Chief Scientist at the Met Office

Welcome to the Beyond Your Research Degree podcast from the University of Exeter Doctoral College! The podcast about non-academic careers and all the opportunities available to you... beyond your research degree!  In this episode Kelly Preece, Researcher Development Manager talks to Dr. Natalie Garrett, Private Secretary to the Chief Scientist at the Met Office. You can find out more about Natalie on the Met Office website, and the British Federation of Women Graduates scholarships.

 

Music from https://filmmusic.io ’Cheery Monday’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses

 

Podcast transcript

 

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Hello and welcome to the Beyond Your Research Degree podcast by the University of Exeter Doctoral College

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Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Beyond Your Research Degree.

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I'm your host, Kelly Preece, and today I'm going to be talking to Dr. Natalie Garrett.

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Natalie currently works as a private secretary to the Met Office chief scientist.

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So, Natalie, are you happy to introduce yourself? My name is Natalie Garrett.

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I work at the Met office as the private secretary to our chief scientist.

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I've been in this role since January of this year.

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So more than half my time in this position has now been spent working from home, which has been an interesting kind of journey like before January.

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I was working in the international climate services team still at the Met office,

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and I had been in that position for, I think, the best part of four years.

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And the purpose of that role was essentially to manage a project that was all

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about translating climate science into actionable information for decision makers.

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But prior to all of that, I was a postdoc at the University of Exeter working in the Biomedical Physics Group.

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And you might notice that there's a bit of a Segway there from biomedical physics to climate and weather science.

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And it's not necessarily immediately apparent what exactly unifies those two areas.

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But broadly, what motivates me at work is to do something that's meaningful and that will have a positive impact on society.

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So the work I did at the university was primarily translating biomedical advances into kind of taking physical interpretations of them.

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So one of the major projects I worked on my role was to provide mechanistic validation for the claims that were being made in patents for novel

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nano medicines that were aimed to treat things like alzhiemers and brain cancer.

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And having lost a family member to brain cancer, that was obviously an area that was very close to my heart.

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So sometimes I feel like my career has been a little bit of a random walk.

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But ultimately, I've always done what I thought sounded interesting,

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and I perhaps naively assumed that job opportunities would make themselves apparent to me along the way.

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And I've been very fortunate and privileged that that has worked out for me.

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That's brilliant and really interesting to hear about that.

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That from kind of being a postdoc in researching inside inside a university to moving outside.

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I wondered if you could talk a little bit about your experience of that transition.

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So what it was like kind of moving to applying for jobs outside of academia and and how you

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find how different you find working in it in a different kind of research environment is.

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So I had been working as a postdoc at the University of Exeter since late 2009.

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And by the time I left, it was January 2016.

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So that is quite a substantial chunk of my professional career was spent working,

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doing the whole postdoc merry go round where you go from contract to contract without much job security.

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I think a lot of people in academia can empathise with that kind of situation.

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You don't have much job security. You're trying really hard to set yourself apart from your peer group to improve your

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chances of perhaps getting a lectureship or getting a fellowship or a grant and.

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I was in a situation where leaving Exeter wasn't really an option for me.

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So I was thinking about how I could give myself the best chances of securing a lectureship.

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at Exeter University and a lectureship position came up in my research group working for different P.I. and I went for it.

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And although I scored highest at interview and my presentation, I was told that I couldn't bring added value because I was already there.

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And that was quite a bitter pill to swallow at the time that I can see what they mean in hindsight.

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And if I had applied to other universities for lectureships it may have been more feasible for me to negotiate or leverage contract at the university.

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At any rate, I was encouraged to apply for fellowships and I was given the opportunity of a tenured position at the end.

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If I were successful in that. But ultimately I started looking at other opportunities.

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I saw a job at the Met office. Now, my background did not involve coding.

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It did not really involve modelling. So I was quite surprised when I saw a job advert that I felt I could apply for.

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Hence, this role was titled Senior European Climate Service Coordinator.

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This is quite a mouthful. The skills they were looking for those the usual planning organisation,

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time management, which if you have a PhD and you've actually managed to complete it.

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You have that in spades. But it also specifically said that they needed good interpersonal skills with evidence of communicating with and developing

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productive working relationships with a range of stakeholders and also communicating complex information into plain English.

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Now, interestingly, during my PhD, I had been very, very keen as an outreach ambassador of the university.

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I was in the STEM network and I participated in things like I'm a scientist get me out of here.

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And soapbox, science and three minute wonder pretty much any scientific outreach competition that you could engage in.

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I had a go at and I was very passionate about scientific outreach.

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In fact, the Institute of Physics had me as a guest lecturer and I was travelling all around the south west of the UK giving talks to some.

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I think in total it was about two thousand schoolchildren talking about my research.

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So this is something that was very, very passionate, was very passionate about.

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But my boss had said to me, you only need to do one piece of outreach a year for it to count on your CV.

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And at that point, you should stop and focus your efforts elsewhere.

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I didn't really listen to him and I just carried on doing what I wanted to, to do what I was passionate about.

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And in the end, because of that, it put me in a really good position to apply for this job at the Met office.

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Additionally, what I was doing, my postdoc,

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I founded the early career researcher network within the college and that was bringing together early career scientists

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and helping people work together to improve the quality of the jobs to improve their chances of securing funding.

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We had career workshops. We had the guest lecturers come in and give seminars.

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We had occasions where we bought pizza and blitzed the Internet trying to find funding opportunities.

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Because I built that network, I had experience of network management.

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I had experience of engagement. And I'd set up a social media channel for that, too.

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So I had all these communication stakeholder network management skills, which made me the ideal candidate for this job.

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And this is all stuff that was done in the margins. I was discouraged from doing so.

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Yeah, it's an interesting one. I don't know if it would always work out that way. But ultimately, do things that matter to you?

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Is that what I would say if you're considering academia?

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Ultimately, you may not find yourself in a position where you have a science communication job,

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but the skills you gain doing science communication, are massively transferable outside of academia.

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So I was surprised when I was offered the job at the Met office.

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I'm always quite negative about my performance in interview.

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But actually, my new boss said that it was one of the best interviews he's ever sat in on.

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So I think that might be typical of academics.

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I think we are quite hard on ourselves and our performance and always focus on

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what we could do better and not necessarily so much of what we've done well.

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I think that's an area that I'm trying to work on in terms of personal confidence and that feeling of imposter syndrome.

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Moving from academia to the civil service, because the Met office is where within the civil service was very different.

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And my first day on the job, I got on an aeroplane to go to Paris for the Kick-Off meeting for the project and had an overnight stay.

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And it was lovely meeting all these wonderful people that are very passionate about their work.

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And the next day we came back to Exeter and they said, well, you've had quite a busy day.

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You should probably take some time off in lieu. This is not a concept that usually gets in academia.

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The actual contracted hours. So my second day on the job, I came home mid-afternoon and ran myself a bubble bath with the blessing, nay the

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It was it was pretty great. It was pretty great. And to be honest, that feeling that you should be working, you should be writing.

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More that you should be doing. It took a while for me to get over that.

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And I think about two months into my job, I was walking through town one day and I glanced up.

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If you've been in Exeter High Street and you look up the hill to streatham campus at the university, you can see the physics tower.

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You can see it from everywhere, in Exeter You can never get away from its shadow.

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If you feel like, oh, I should be working on my paper, I should be working on my thesis. That's the first time that I looked up at that.

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This has no power over me. No, I'm allowed to have fun.

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I'm allowed to have a work life balance because there's so much in there that I think is really,

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really important about, you know, feelings of imposter syndrome and work life balance.

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And I think of somebody as well that used to be an academic and admittedly is in an academic related role.

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There's something about different roles that are kind of more amenable, perhaps, or more easily to to a better work life balance.

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Well, having you know, you said about going from kind of contract.

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So you've obviously had a few kind of applications and interviews for academic or academic research roles,

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as well as the Met office was the application and interview process, particularly different to your experience in academia.

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So although I have had multiple postdoc posts at the university,

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they were all working for the same PI because the work I was doing was so specialised.

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So I did have to apply and go through the interview process that given that there were

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basically at the time a handful of people in the world that could do that job.

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I didn't feel that worried. So, yeah, that was pretty straightforward.

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So the Met office interview was quite nerve wracking by comparison.

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I mean, they were very lovely. They did everything they could to make me feel at ease.

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But I think from a very young age, I've always been thrown into the mix with a variety of different people,

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different ages, and just encouraged to socialise.

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My father was very active in local politics and I was kind of co-opted into helping him out, handing out kind of things at events.

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So the idea of talking to strangers, I just lost all fear of that and talking to thousands and thousands of people about my science,

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a kind of public speaking becomes second nature when you do that enough.

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So interviews didn't have the same kind of effect on me.

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And I've discovered a tip, a trick. If you convince yourself that you're excited rather than afraid, then it becomes a lot more manageable.

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And then you can actually enjoy it. So if you ever have a public speaking engagement and you feel nervous, you go, Oh, I'm so excited.

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Imagine it's like a roller coaster or something. So, yeah, the Met office interview

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I was massively overprepared. I identified the area that I was weakest up and that was in my climates where

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the science knowledge and I did an online free training course beforehand.

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And I printed off my certificates and I brought with me a folder with all kinds of things,

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like copies of papers that published copies of my reference letters.

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There's a whole range, a barrage of information. And none of it came out of my briefcase during the meeting, during the interview.

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But it was there and it helped me feel prepared. That's what I was going to ask because I do something similar.

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When I prepare for interviews, I do. I prepare and I have this kind of folder of lots of stuff that I never refer to.

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But it's it's not necessarily about the kind of using that knowledge I need to be, but the feeling of it's kind of like psychological armour.

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Yes. Yes. I think a lot of my life I've just expected there to be gatekeepers.

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So I've never been able to consider myself to be an artist or a photographer.

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But now I've had experience writing poetry to explain climate change with community groups,

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and I've had prizes for the photographs that I've created myself.

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So I know once said to me, hey, go, here's an award, here's a certificate.

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Here's an exam that you've passed. Therefore, you can call yourself a photographer, you can call yourself a poet or an artist.

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And because I've been so used to gatekeeping, because academia is all about gatekeeping,

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I think it's that does foster the whole imposter syndrome mentality.

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If you take yourself out of that headspace and realise, oh, maybe I can actually do these other things too, maybe I don't need someone's permission.

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What's your experience of that, working in the civil service? Does it still have that sense of gatekeeping or does it feel a little open?

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It's interesting this so well, I guess there's a lot of bureaucracy in academia that my experience in academia was.

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It's very much the academics were doing everything they could to avoid, bureaucracy, as far as possible.

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Whereas my experience of the civil service? Is that bureaucracy is sort of embedded in the ways of working, and sometimes that's for good reasons.

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And other times it's just because that's how it's always been done and people haven't questioned it.

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So it makes change quite difficult at a corporate level.

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If you have people's ways of working and mindset so embedded in a particular way of working.

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Like my boss, the chief scientist was keen to get my impressions of the job within my first six months because he said, you come with fresh eyes.

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You can tell us all the things that we're doing stupid or that don't make sense or that could be optimised.

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But once you're in the six months and you stop questioning stuff.

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Yeah. I completely yes, I can completely understand, we're saying.

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So the. The job that you do now as a as a P.A, isn't it, to the chief scientist?

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Is that right? So it's a weird one. It's called private secretary.

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And so it's just to academics. They focus on the secretary and think that it's an administrative job.

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Whereas if so, my boss is the head of the chief scientist at the Met office.

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He is also the head of the science and engineering profession at the met office.

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That's said. And that comes under something called government, science and engineering profession.

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And he's also on the chief scientific adviser at the CSA network with Patrick Vallance as its head.

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So. So Patrick Vallance is one of my boss's bosses, if you like,

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and I regularly attend meetings to represent the met office at the chief scientific adviser network meetings.

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So the purpose of these is to make sure that all the science within the civil service within the UK is all joined up.

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So you'll see these quite regularly with UK. All right.

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It's it's baffling how many connections and how many partners and how many stakeholders there were that the met office is involved with.

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A large part of my job is liasing with government and the government office, the science.

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I'm translating quite complex requests with very short deadlines.

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Finding the right people within the met office to answer those questions.

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Summarising the information into a briefing, giving it to the chief scientist.

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And then. Asking him what he wants, what action he wants to be taken from it.

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So, for instance, I've seen in the news the Academy of Medical Sciences report that was that was created at the request of the Patrick

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Vallance and Chris Whitty for looking at what's the reasonable worst case scenario would be for COVID this winter.

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So the Met office fed in regarding seasonal forecasting and air quality and aspects that relate to met office expertise.

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So I was involved in helping to coordinate our input to that report.

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And my boss was also present at the sage meeting where this was being discussed.

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So I had to help coordinate minutes and taking and so on.

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So it's that's just one aspect of the roles I take. I also produce regular scientific updates for within the Met office that we produce quarterly

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briefings for all of us scientists we have in the region of six hundred scientists at the Met office.

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And my boss is kind of at the head of that that up triangle.

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And so we have to try to provide updates to everybody on a regular basis.

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And it's just incredibly varied. I think about 50 percent of my my job is reactive.

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So I never know what's going to come into my inbox.

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We might have a request coming straight from government asking us to provide a briefing on a particular topic,

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or it might be just regular normal work that's just going along,

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producing minutes for scientific management committees or for met office board meetings.

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So it's what I enjoy most about this role. Is that because I'm the private secretary to the chief scientist, people just answer my email straightaway?

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I think when I leave this job, that probably won't be the case anymore.

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So another point to mention is that the private secretary roles aren't typically what you would expect as a lifetime position.

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The half life is between two and four years. It's a developmental opportunity.

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So you get loads of opportunities to showcase your skills, which then enable you to better apply for a management position.

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That's the aim of the role anyway. That's really interesting and it's really interesting to have that kind of.

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Clear sense of. Clear sense of progression and direction, I guess, and I'm not saying that that,

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you know, there was a clear kind of promotion route in academia, but it's not.

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I think it looks like it's very clear cut.

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In fact, is not, I think well by, to be honest when I say so, I'm going to backtrack a it when I applied to the Met office.

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I tried to use all of the skills that I had been sort of instilled in me from the doctoral training college at the university.

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Like, you need to negotiate your salary. You need to do this. You need to do that.

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I went and tried this out with the civil service and now you can try and negotiate your salary.

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But this is as far as we can go. That's just not.

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It's so different to maybe applying for the private sector, you know, going to a business and trying to negotiate.

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You probably have a lot more leeway that the civil service is so tied down they cannot make exceptions.

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The met office doesn't have the flexibility to change the pay deal for new people coming.

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And that has to be everything has to be auditable and fair and fair enough.

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You know, it's it's taxpayers money. So I tried to negotiate my salary and completely failed.

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I said, well, how about this? You offer a relocation bursary.

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And I didn't have to relocate. Could you give me that instead? Is it? No, because that's all provided  onreceipts.

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OK. So I had to manage my expectations a little bit. Essentially, I took a 20 percent pay cut.

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Wow. To join the met office Yes. It was the very low end of what I was prepared to accept.

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Which was sort of annoying. But the compensation package was also really good.

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And it was a permanent job. So it was it's a tricky one.

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And it's not necessarily the right choice for everybody. But I've managed to it's quite competitive getting promotion within the met office.

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And it's a competitive. So depending on the year, if people who are regularly publishing scientific output in science and nature are up against you,

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you may not stand a chance of actually getting information because it's judged based on merit and output and everything's graded.

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So it's quite challenging compared with academia where it felt like you progress up the spine points and it's relatively straightforward.

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I mean, that was my experience of it as postdoc. It's not everybody's.

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So there seemed to be a lot of, you know,

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things coming out that are quite different about the working environment and the kind of work that you're doing and the kind of.

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What the similarities were. What really kind of carries across from your experience as a as a researcher at a university into the role you're in now?

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So the biggest similarity is the passion that people have for the work that they do.

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The Met office. It's just so lovely to log on and every day and locg on

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We have a platform online where people can discuss variety of topics is not quite social media,

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but people share things from, for instance, the pictures of their cats.

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We have a cat appreciation forum and we've also got weather photographs and people asking questions about science and technology.

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People are just so keen to help each other and they're so keen to share their enthusiasm.

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And you can end up going down rabbit holes. And it's really lovely that I think academia, you get paid essentially to think a lot of the time.

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This is how I've seen it.

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And there aren't necessarily that many jobs in the world where you get that freedom to just pursue an idea and see where it takes you.

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And we have a certain amount of time, I think, to add up to 20 percent of our time is for development.

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So if you agree with your line manager that you want to learn a skill in a completely

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different area that might one day align with where you ultimately want to go in your career.

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You have the freedom to do that. And that kind of freedom to learn and to develop and share your enthusiasm and.

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I guess it's peer to peer learning that that's very similar to academia.

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One big difference I've noticed is I've not seen so many examples of that kind of toxic.

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Relationship where some people appear to be friendly, and then we'll take your idea and then publish before you.

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I've not seen that at the Met office. I'm not saying it doesn't necessarily happen,

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but my experience has been that people are in it together for the group benefit rather than their own individual benefit.

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Perhaps that's naive. Perhaps I've just said a sheltered experience.

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But as a for instance, at one point I had a handover between two managers because one was leaving alone, was taking me on,

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and I was sat in a room and these two people were not quite arguing, but they were just very, very focussed.

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And trying to discover the best ways for me to develop in the direction that I wanted to develop.

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And I feel I've never had this before. I've never felt so and nurtured.

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I had a line manager is trying to find opportunities for me because before it felt

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like I was doing things whenever I found an opportunity that I knew would benefit me,

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but not my line manager in academia.

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I had to do the other stuff kind of behind his back because I knew that he would never give me the go ahead for it.

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And in fact, there was one occasion when I got a travel grant from the Royal Society to do some independent research in Australia,

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and my P.I. turned around and said, well, that doesn't benefit me, so you're going to have to do it.

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on your annual leave. Wow. And I naively thought that he was allowed to make that call

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But a few years later, I was talking to the head of school and mentioned this, and he said, well, that that's not OK.

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You should come to me about that. But I naively thought, well, he wouldn't tell me something that wasn't true.

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So another another top tip.

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A don't assume that your line manager necessarily has your best interests at heart or B knows what is best or what can be done for you.

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So do ask around to ask other people.

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And it's it's amazing that in spite of that pushback, you still continued with the outreach work and the ECR network,

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which actually became so fundamental to help you move forward.

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I was wondering what other things you did, maybe as part of your research, but also, you know, on the fringes,

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let that have been really important or formative in kind of helping you move forward with your career.

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So instead of procrastinating in the traditional sense, I used to just look for competitions and awards and things that I could.

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It felt like it was wasting my time because I've been indoctrinated in the idea that if I'm not actively working on a paper in some way,

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then I'm not doing anything productive, which is quite a toxic one set in itself.

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So, for instance, I discovered the British Federation of Women graduates.

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Is that something you've heard of? No, never say I've never heard of it before until I was Googling for opportunities.

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So they offer scholarships for academic excellence and they also offer hardship bursaries.

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Now, I haven't actually checked that they still offer these. But in 2009,

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they sent me to it and I managed to secure myself five and a half thousand pounds for academic

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excellence as part of the Women British Federation of Women Graduates Academic Awards in 2009.

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And if you have experience of securing grant money, even if it's a competition like that, then that's always going to look good on your CV.

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And as I said, I got a international travel grant to go to Australia.

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So I went to Melbourne and I was looking at malaria.

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I'm trying to detect it using spectroscopy and weirdly using butterfly wings as a substrate for doing this.

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So that was quite a bizarre. When people say, explain what you did for your PhD, I kind of go hmmmm the experience of the early career researcher network.

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It also gave me the opportunity to apply for funding from within the university.

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And then I also ran competitions for outreach activities and online poster competitions.

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So I was then able to get experience of managing sort of grant funding so I could say that I've had that kind of experience,

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depending on where you want spend up.

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If you think I want to be able to tick various boxes for different types of job, I've these opportunities enabled me to do that.

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And in kind of roundabout way, even though my main main job didn't.

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I was also part of the working group for the Athena Swan Initiative at the School of Physics.

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So equality and diversity has always been very important to me to.

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And I think it's, you know, really interesting as several of the things you've said, like you said early on, about,

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you know, if you've done a research degree, you've got time management and project management and everything in spades.

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But actually, you know,

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there's other fundamental skills which in some ways you just do need to go outside of that initial kind of bubble of your research to develop that.

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And absolutely and it's really interesting to hear you talk about actually the motivation for that for you was just a follow.

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Follow your interests. Yeah, the things that mattered to me most.

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I think another thing that helped me was going to conferences by myself.

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And not with my research group and not with anybody else from the university, because it forces you to stop talking to the same people.

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Because conferences are massive networking opportunity. But it's so hard to make inroads.

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I struggled a bit initially because it felt very cliquey and it's hard as an outsider just to essentially barge in on someone's conversations.

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Hi. Can I introduce myself?

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But it was some it was because of going to a conference by myself that I met Baden Wood of Monash University in Melbourne.

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And he was the one that suggested I apply for Royal Society travel grant

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which is why I was then able to demonstrate some independent research and have

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a first solo publication without my P.I. from University of Exeter on it.

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So these chance meetings are so important.

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And if you're able to I know socialising at conferences can be really uncomfortable for those people.

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And perhaps the current situation,

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the current pandemic is therefore opening more doors for people who find it challenging to do face to face networking.

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I hope so. I know not all conferences are offering the opportunity for a career networking, but it's a good idea if,

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if, if, if anyone listening is involved in organising workshops or seminars or conferences,

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do allow specific time for early career people to engage in network and have an invite

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to come as coffee breaks because that's where the important conversations happen.

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That's where the next big collaboration starts to form.

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That's really, really.

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Yeah, that's really, really great, because they're all of the things that I think sometimes in in the kind of in the Doctoral College

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that kind of central well, we're kind of going on and on about all the time,

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you know, how important the networking is and how important doing stuff outside of the research degree is,

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because it's it's the stuff that builds your experience and builds your skill, your skill base.

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But I think sometimes people think, oh, no. You know. I wouldn't think about that just now.

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Oh, it can't have that much. It's easy to yeah, it's easy to put it off because it's not something that will immediately provide a tangible benefit.

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Something that's a slow burner and learning how to use LinkedIn and Twitter.

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And it's not for everybody. But if you figure out how to use these platforms, then it can leverage more opportunities in the future.

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What advice would you give to somebody who's looking at making that transition from a, you know,

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a research career or a postdoc into a role outside academia, but particularly thinking about moving into a civil service role?

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I would say. Sure, well, you may have people within your current network who all people that work within

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the civil service or who are working in a kind of field you'd like to go to.

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Always, always talk to people who you already connected with.

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We can give you insight, especially if they're working closely with an area that you want to work in,

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because there may be subjects, specific skills that you need to work on in order to be a viable candidate.

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But more generally, it's a numbers game.

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And do be prepared for failure. People in academia especially don't tend to talk about the grants.

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They didn't get or the papers they've never managed to get accepted in a journal

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or all the things that they tried and didn't work out or the experiments that failed.

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Because why would you why would you talk about that? So it's all about self promotion.

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It's all about creating and curating this successful persona.

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It's all about your H index and trying to find metrics that show off your skills?

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The truth is, unless you apply for dozens and dozens and dozens of things, you're not going to get the one that really matters.

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And that takes so much time and resilience.

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And it can annoy the people that you've put your references for you, especially if they get contacted by every single one.

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So that's another tip. Talk to the people here.

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You've put down as your references to make sure they know that these things are coming out,

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because honestly, they do sometimes get contacted out of the blue before you even get shortlisted.

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So prepare them for that. So, yeah, it's a numbers game.

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And women especially are more likely to not apply for jobs if they don't feel that they fulfil all the criteria.

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And there's been research that's showing that whether you meet 50 percent of the criteria or 90 percent of the criteria,

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the chances of getting an interview roughly the same. So you might as well just apply for the thing.

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And at worst, you're going to get feedback that you can use to improve your next application.

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So you have to treat applying for jobs as a job, put time aside for it, do it regularly, try and sign up to jobs that ask around.

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A lot of jobs come up and it's word of mouth. So put in those cold calling emails to people saying, I love what you do, I'd love to work with you.

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one day if I was to. Can you give me any advice on my current CV?

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What things you'd be looking for? That totally an out. It feels like cheating, but it's part of networking.

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And certainly in my experience as well, people actually quite a quite receptive.

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And, you know, more often than not, willing to help. Absolutely.

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It reminds me of when I was an undergraduate.

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The professors would make time for the students who genuinely wanted to understand and would say, can I talk to you about this particular integrals?

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I can't solve. And the professors would sit and make the time thing.

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So, yeah, ultimately, people are in that job for a reason.

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And if I care about it and if they want to share the enthusiasm with other people, then of course they can go help.

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That's brilliant. And one thing I wanted to pick up on is this thing about resilience and failure.

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How what advice do you have for. For dealing with that, I guess, for dealing with that.

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That sense of failure or rejection, which which is just common in the drug market, is common.

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I think. It's a difficult one, personally.

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It's not always been easy to accept failure and rejection.

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But the thing that I found that's helped the most is if I reframe it and instead of

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feeling like if I don't get to interview that I failed in the application process.

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What I've done is I've succeeded at submitting application.

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And if I don't get past the interview stage, then what I've done is I've succeeded in getting to interview.

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So, yeah. You haven't managed to get the thing that might have been the ultimate goal that you have done.

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The really difficult steps in getting there. And each time you get to interview, each time you'll almost shortlisted.

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You're improving your skills. And it is a skill. And to improve.

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You have to practise. So I would say definitely apply to things that.

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Maybe hit 70 percent of the things you're looking for because at least you don't get it.

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You don't feel like it's such high stakes and apply for the things that might not

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necessarily excite you so much initially just so that you get that experience.

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Thanks to Natalie for that really interesting conversation, thinking about the move from postdoc to civil service application processes,

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the importance of networking and building that wider skill base outside of your immediate research project.

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And that's it for this episode. Join us next time when we'll be talking to another researcher about their career beyond their research degree.