CYGNA: End of 2024 celebration - ABC of research careers, Christmas carols and more...

Reports on our 62nd CYGNA meeting - two hours filled with learning and fun

Anne-Wil Harzing - Wed 22 Jan 2025 15:17 (updated Sat 21 Dec 2024 14:35)

In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we ran a Christmas meeting for our CYGNA network to cheer up our members during a time when we were all starved of positive interactions. It was so well-received that it has become a regular feature of our CYGNA meeting year. So we ran it for the 5th time in December 2024. Links to our four prior meetings are below.

• CYGNA: Our 4th Christmas meeting - failure & fun (2023)
• CYGNA @50 and Christmas celebration 2022 (2022)
• CYGNA: Secret Santa at the 2nd pandemic Christmas (2021)
• CYGNA: REF and Christmas during a pandemic (2020)

This year we had a record number of 46 participants, 45 of whom are shown above; the last one could only make the second hour. We had participants from Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iran, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, and the UK. Our three participants from Australia deserve a special commendation as the meeting ended at midnight for them.

This year's Christmas meeting was expertly organised by Satkeen Azizzadeh (part of our UK/Europe team) and volunteer Dan Ha Le (University of Turku, Finland). They had prepared a great mix of informal interactions that simply made the two hours fly by. Here is the wonderful invitation flyer prepared by Dan Ha, joined by a flyer that one of the break-out groups created of their academic Christmas carol.

The ABC of research across career stages

We are academics, so of course we couldn't just have a 2-hour social meeting. So we started out with a short semi-serious part of the meeting (CYGNA meetings are never 100% serious!). In previous years we have had presentations about the REF (Research Excellence Framework) (REF and Christmas during a pandemic) and recovering from journal rejections (Our 4th Christmas meeting - failure & fun)

This year, we focused on the intersection between research and career stages. We all know that research - whether disciplinary or pedagogical - is a crucial element of our academic careers. But what we are often less clear about is how this plays out across the various career stages. So, in this presentation, Anne-Wil took a bird’s eye view on what mindsets are needed to navigate research in different academic career stages. You can download the slides of the full presentation here.

Mentoring, coaching, and sponsoring

In my presentation I mentioned that at the mid-career phase you should be seeking sponsoring in addition to mentoring. This led to questions about the difference between mentoring, coaching, and sponsoring. Tatiana Andreeva shared an interesting LinkedIn post by Alexis Fink which outlines the difference very well. I also found a great visualisation of a paper by Professor Marieke van den Brink on sponsorship in academia. Both are repoduced below.

Academic Christmas carols

With the serious part of the meeting done, the first fun activity that Satkeen and Dan Ha had conjured up  for us was creating academic Christmas carols in six break-out rooms. They had to be based on popular Christmas songs and we were offered a choice of "Twelve days of Christmas", "All I want for Christmas", and "Last Christmas" by Wham.

"All I want for Christmas" was the clear favourite, with three of the six groups creating a carol based on this. One of the three versions is shown in the poster above. A ChatGPT-assisted full-blown masterpiece is at the end of the post. 

Here is another one that - as our group spokesperson said - was "entirely created by humans" in a process that was tortuous and flawed. However, it definitely got the participants discussing their ideas about academia and led us to emphasise the collective nature of their wishes, changing the "I don't want" to "We don't want". 

It is interesting that both this and the first iteration of "all I want for Christmas" above centered around the need for time. Time is indeed the scarcest resource of all in academia.

Twelve days of Christmas

Another group spent most of their time getting to know each other and then created their carol in the last few minutes. I think they got their priorities right :-). The result was not just a short, but very evocative Christmas carol, but also strengthened bonds and connections between CYGNA members.

🎵12 paper rejections, 11 revise and resubmits, 10 PhD Theses to evaluate, 9 committee meetings, 8 research grant applications, 7 hours of lectures, 6 weeks of marking, 5 student references, 4 papers for reviewing, 3 hours of sleeping, 2 student meltdowns, and a day to rest ourselves!! 🎵

Last Christmas

This group was inspired by Wham's mournlful ballad on relationships. They created an equally mournful ballad about the journal submission, rejection, and revision process. You can really see how hearfelt their sentiments are.

Jingle bells

This group deserves the first prize for having the bravery to not stick to the rules and picked another song to work with: jingle bells. They created a very nice two-parter with a front end that was GPT generated and a back end capturing the human diversity in this particular break-out room.

ChatGTPs Christmas carol

The last group definitely came up with the most impressive effort. They managed to creat an academic version of the entire "All I want for Christmas song" with three verses, two choruses, bridge and outro. However, they readily acknowledged they had quite a bit of assistance from Santa's helper: ChatGPT.

Hats off ladies for the excellent prompt engineering, it really has everything in there, though strangely enough not time. I particularly liked the bridge, final chorus, and outro, focusing on academic interactions and research impact. I am sure you also had a lot of fun in the process! However, I can't help feeling a little bit uneasy about the use of AI for such a personal collaborative task.

But maybe that's just the view of someone who completed her first and a large part of her second degree using a mechanical and then electric typewriter? I even started working in academia without access to email and pretty much did my PhD without the internet (here is a time capsule of my decidedly analog PhD survey). So I fear that AI might be one technology too far for me; I have huge concerns that - just like our muscles waste if we don't exercise them - our brains will atrophy if we start relying too much on AI.

Whimsical questions and reflections

The last part of our meeting was spent discussing our answers to Dan Ha's wonderful whimsical Winter questions (see below), with discussions about Christmas traditions, the history of Christmas, and the role that end of year reflections play in our lives. It was a perfect reflective end to a wonderful meeting.

• What is the strangest Christmas present you ever received?
• If you could ask Santa one questions, what would it be? 
• What is your favourite meal to eat during the holidays? 
• What behaviour might earn a lump of coal this year? 
• What have you done this year to earn a spot on Santa's good list?

Don't compare yourself to others

One of the participants made an insightful comment that really struck a chord with me. As a doctoral student, she felt overwhelmed when looking at all the things I (Anne-Wil) have done in my career. But she was very inspired to see an ECR (Christa Sathish) run several CYGNA initiatives: a WhatsApp group and a weekly silent writing session.

As I have mentioned in a few others blogposts, remember that I have been working in academia in some capacity since 1988, and I have been very fortunate in the level of institutional and personal support I have had in my career.

So please don't compare yourself to me or other senior academics, but instead take inspiration from people who are a few years ahead of you. They may leave you much more empowered about what you can do at your career stage. Here is some posts that might be helpful reflecting on this a bit more.

• IB Frontline interview: mentoring section
• Proactive academia (1): On proactiveness in academia
• How do you find the time to do all of this?

And remember: Once, some 30 years ago, I was a naive doctoral student with no clue what to do. Here you can find a short video where I reminisce about the doctoral consortium I attended in Warsaw in 1994. I was overawed at meeting famous International Business academics such as John Dunning, Jean-Francois Hennart, Danny van den Bulcke, and Stephen Young. It was also the conference at which I became a (złoty) millionnaire by winning the best thesis award :-). 

Related blog posts

• CYGNA: REF and Christmas during a pandemic
• Why academia can still be a great career?
• This little girl: message to my younger self
• How to prevent burn-out? About staying sane in academia
• How to create a sustainable academic career
• Changing academic culture: one email at a time...
• Readings and inspirations for (female) academics

cygna academia behind the scenes work-life balance women in academia gender networking mentoring

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