• Question: How do you respond to negative criticism or responses to do with your research?

    Asked by 449prtb42 to Jackie, Michele, Oliver, Vicky, Yelong on 13 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Oliver Brown

      Oliver Brown answered on 13 Mar 2015:

      It can be difficult when someone simply doesn’t think your research is interesting, or worthwhile. The trick is to try to make it constructive, get them to explain why they feel the way they do — if they’re right then they might be saving you a lot of time and effort! Of course, if they’re not able to give you any real reason for thinking it’s rubbish then it’s quite likely their claims have no merit. If that’s the case you should ignore and go do some really great research!

    • Photo: Jaclyn Bell

      Jaclyn Bell answered on 13 Mar 2015:

      Part of doing research is going around and giving talks about your work. Sometimes people ask a lot of questions and you might realise theres something you haven’t thought about before – but this only helps you understand your research even more. It might seem like people seem to respond negatively by asking questions or challenging your methods – but most of the time they are genuinely interested and just want to learn more about what you have done. Sometimes you will get a negative response and people will disagree with what you have done, but it has happened to all the greats – Einstein, Stephen Hawking and even Copernicus just to name a few! If you are confident in your work then you have to keep your head up and carry on. If you get feedback and you realise you may have overlooked something then it gives you something to work on when you get back to your computer 🙂 Not everyone is going to agree with you – but thats like anything in life really – you would deal with it in the same way – constructively.

    • Photo: Michele Faucci Giannelli

      Michele Faucci Giannelli answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      It is always hard and difficult to be the target of criticism. Part of getting a PhD is all about being able to defend your ideas, after all during the final viva you DEFEND your thesis.
      In general keeping calm and been able to describe your work from the motivation to the end is the key to defend your work. Part of being a scientist is also being honest and open to suggestion, so often the best way to reply to some critics is to say something like “good point, I will consider it for my next update”. Then more often than not you will not do it, but it is not a bad way to escape a difficult confrontation 🙂

    • Photo: Vicky Bayliss

      Vicky Bayliss answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Feedback is a gift! It can be great to get negative criticism – imagine if you answered questions at school/in homework and no one ever told you if it was right or wrong. its only by receiving feedback that we know how we are progressing.

      Of course, like Ollie said, you have to consider feedback properly – if a primary school child told me my work was all rubbish – I would probably assume that they were having a tantrum rather than I needed to re-do my calculations.

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