Evidence to Policy
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Academia and policy: bridging the gap
“Imagine you’ve just walked into a lift. The doors open and inside is a policymaker. You’ve got thirty seconds to convince them that your research is important. Go!” This exercise, from a recent training course in Southampton, triggered more than a few nervous glances around the room. The world of policy can seem a long way away from day-to-day PhD life in the lab or the library. Yet as funding bodies increasingly try to align research with societal needs and policymakers are ever more eager to keep up to date with the latest academic developments, the interface between academia and public policy is becoming increasingly porous. I’m interested in learning more about the interactions between these two worlds, so when I heard about the Research Councils UK (RCUK) Policy Internship scheme, I jumped at the opportunity to apply. In this blog post I will be discussing my motivations and aims for my upcoming internship at the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP) in Cambridge, as well as giving some insight into the application process.
Academia and policy: bridging the gap
On the surface, the worlds of PhD students and policymakers look very different. A PhD is intrinsically highly specialist and focused on a niche area of human knowledge, while the world of policy focuses on a comparatively broad issues and the wider needs of society. As a PhD student, how do we even begin to understand what is important for policymakers, never mind learning how to communicate the importance of our own research to them?
While some PhD projects produce direct policy recommendations – projects with results advocating specific policy action, for example, ways to make government health policy more effective or to improve teaching methods in schools – many of us are conducting ‘policy-relevant’ research. This research is relevant to policymakers, but in a way that is trickier to pin down. The results of this ‘policy-relevant’ research are often compiled in reports made with policymakers in mind (for example my own field, climate change in Earth’s geologic past, has a chapter in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report . But how else can PhD students and early career researchers interact with policymakers? This is what I hope to find out during my internship.
RCUK Policy Internships: Application process
The RCUK policy internship scheme is open to anyone whose PhD is funded by one of the UK research councils. Prestigious names abound in the range of internship host organizations that applicants can choose from, such as the Royal Society, the Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology and the Home Office.
A key part of the initial application form involves writing a two-page policy briefing, in the style of ‘POSTnotes’ written to advise MPs about the latest policy-relevant developments. This is a great chance to practise gathering information about a field outside your own and summarizing it for a non-specialist audience. A few weeks after submitting the application form, I then visited my first-choice host organization (CSaP) for an interview. I found that outreach activities (for example my participation in the STEM ambassador scheme) and examples of public communication of my research were particularly useful talking points.
Internship goals
What am I aiming to get out of the next three months? I can’t wait to learn from a whole range of people from the worlds of policy, academia and everything in between – especially in these turbulent times for British politics. I hope that when I return to my PhD studies, I go back with a much better idea of both the world of public policy and the policy relevance of academic research. And finally, I hope I’ll be prepared for whoever is standing behind the doors of that lift!
Richard Smith
Richard is a postgraduate research student within Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre Southampton at the University of Southampton. His PhD focuses on climate change in Earth's geological past, using sediments drilled from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean in order to further our understanding of the climate system.