How to expand your career horizons

These steps were used by the interns to identify people whose research links into many areas of related work.

Initial Research

• Start with departmental websites to identify areas of interest, with the aim of identifying those where researchers work in a collaborative manner across disciplines (a range of social and health areas).
  • If you have a social science background, you might start with:
    https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/; https://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/; https://www.spi.ox.ac.uk/home.html; https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/home
  • If you have a bio or medical science background, you might start with: https://www.ndm.ox.ac.uk; https://www.tropicalmedicine.ox.ac.uk; https://www.ndph.ox.ac.uk; https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk; https://www.wrh.ox.ac.uk; https://www.ndcn.ox.ac.uk; https://www.medsci.ox.ac.uk
• Browse through the news page on the departmental website to find areas that interest you. If there are no obvious related headlines, begin typing key terms into the website’s search bar.
  • E.g. typing ‘health’ into the School of Anthropology’s website yields 230 results on various topics.
  • If you have specific interests, tailor your search by typing terms such as ‘maternal health’ or ‘malnutrition’.
• Once you have identified some interesting articles or events, these tend to signal projects currently underway at Oxford university, often in collaboration with partner organisations that intersect the worlds of policy, services and business.

Identifying Contacts

• Locate senior researchers on these projects – as listed within the article – and find their departmental pages which will tell you about their backgrounds and experiences.
  • LinkedIn can be very useful here: the senior researchers may also be involved in projects beyond those listed on their departmental page, alongside their work for the university.
  • When looking at profiles, try not to become overwhelmed! Senior researchers are often involved in many large-scale impressive collaborations, meaning their profiles can feel quite daunting…
• To find profiles of those at an earlier stage in their careers in the same area, look on the senior researcher profiles for lists of previous and current students or research colleagues (e.g. postdocs, research assistants).
• This isn’t always easy because some researchers do not include this information on their departmental page, especially if they lead a large research group which takes on many doctoral students.
• Many previous students will now be working as post-doc researchers in similar fields at other universities or organisations operating in governance, business or the third sector (e.g. NGOs).
• Identifying PhD students currently working with the lead researcher can shed light on what people in that field do to develop their career in its early stages.

Reaching Out to People

• To find out more, you may wish to contact these early career researchers via email, LinkedIn or Twitter.
  • To maximise your chance of a reply, look at the individual’s profiles on all social media platforms to see where they are most active.
• Whilst the 300-character limit of the ‘cold’ contact request message system on LinkedIn can be off-putting, it is an easy way to connect with people in the field. Try writing a message that includes a hook to explain why you’re interested in speaking to them and that you are aware of the work they are doing in the field. For an example of a LinkedIn contact message, see the template below.

“Hi [Name], I would love to connect to be able to ask you some questions about your career and present role. I’m currently interning/working/studying at [place], where I am [outline your interest].”

• If possible, mention some mutual connections you may have, and be complimentary about their work!

Thinking Laterally

• Another route in is to identify organisations with whom researchers have worked as project partners. These tend to have stronger links to policy and governance than the individual themselves; and demonstrate the range of roles available at the intersection between social science, health science, policy and practice.
  • Some organisations may even have graduate schemes for those not wishing to pursue further study; see the resource list below for where to start.
• Whether you have a social or health science background and wish to work in policy or service provision, it is worth exploring roles in these organisations related to communication, investment and public engagement.
  • Your studies will have given you a strong set of transferable key skills you can apply in roles outside research.
• Once you are working in an organisation, opportunities for progression into other roles arise, both within that organisation and in related ones.

For useful tips, read our briefing on Networking.

What could your future involve? 

The interns who led this research found the following projects that have grown from Oxford interdisciplinary collaborations and generated a range of previously un-anticipated working roles. Read the following case studies to learn about how they found them, and what they discovered. 

Lucie is a Professor of Child and Family Social Work at the University of Oxford’s Department of Social Policy and Intervention. As an undergraduate, Lucie studied Classics at the University of Cambridge. She then undertook an MSc in Applied Social Studies and a Diploma in Social Work at the University of Oxford, where she completed a thesis in child poverty and child well-being in South Africa, followed by an MSc in Social Policy, in which she researched the psychological well-being of AIDS orphans in South Africa. In 2007 she completed her DPhil in Social Policy and Intervention.

She works with various governmental and non-governmental organisations to provide evidence that can improve the lives of children and adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her work provides a clear example of how academia can be bridged into practice, with her research informing international and national policy-making and the creation of intervention programmes to prevent child violence. 

As co-lead of the Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) Initiative, Lucie provides evidence-based child violence prevention programmes for lower-middle income countries. The PLH team has developed and tested programmes in randomised controlled trials in Southern Africa, Eastern Europe, the Philippines and Thailand, which are now being scaled up in 25 countries.

PLH’s implementation partners are many and examples include Clowns Without Borders South Africa, UNICEF, The Keiskamma Trust, and the Children’s Early Intervention Trust (Wales).

Roles within the project include Co-Lead, Steering Committee Member, Research Director, Senior Research Project Manager, Technical Programme Specialist, Research Assistant, Digital Project Manager.

Interview extracts

The interns interviewed Dr Jamie M. Lachman who works with Lucie Cluver. Here are some extracts:

Jamie is a Research Officer at the Centre for Evidence-Based Intervention at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford https://www.spi.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-jamie-lachman. He has over 16 years’ worth of experience developing, implementing and evaluating social interventions for vulnerable children and their caregivers in low- and middle-income countries. His professional experience includes being a Co-Founder of the Parenting for Lifelong Health Initiative (PLH), for which he now holds a position on the Steering Committee, and being the Founder of Clowns Without Borders South Africa, which aims to improve the psychosocial wellbeing of children and communities affected by crisis. He also holds a degree from the Dell’Arte International School for Physical Theatre.

What steps did you take between your undergraduate studies and MSc to develop an interest in public health and policy, and what were your first experiences in the field? 

My career path was not straightforward. I worked as an actor and drama teacher in NYC and California for a number of years before starting Clowns Without Borders South Africa. Most of our work focused on providing psychosocial support to children affected by HIV/AIDS, poverty, and violence in Southern Africa, though we also did some work around humanitarian relief further afield.

What motivated you to found Clowns Without Borders South Africa and how do you think your background in theatre has informed your work on public health and policy? 

It was a desire to have an impact on the lives of children and families in my home country of South Africa that I left at an early age due to the Apartheid regime. I was trained as a physical theatre creator and clown so CWBSA was a great way of bringing together humanitarian community-based work and the arts. My background in theatre has taught me to consider the audience (i.e., beneficiaries) as the most important aspect of the work and to continually look for ways to improve what we do using innovative approaches.

Creating theatre is an iterative process very similar to evidence-based research and policymaking that is grounded in participatory and collaborative approaches, whether it is working with government agencies or community-based organisations.

What does your role on the PLH programme entail and do you see the academic work you do for projects, such as RISE, having a real-world impact? 

I am a co-developer and co-founder of the PLH initiative which is focused on developing, testing, and taking to scale a suite of open-source parenting programmes and resources in low- and middle-income countries. My academic work is very much committed to supporting a global parenting strategy that aims at reducing violence against children and supporting child wellbeing with interventions that are adaptive, evidence-based, cost-effective, and scalable. This means using the most rigorous methods of establishing real-world evidence like factorial experiments and randomised controlled trials, as well as making sure that the research is applicable to policymakers, implementing agencies, practitioners, and families.

What advice would you give to students and young professionals who are considering pursuing careers in public health and policy? 

It is very important to get real world experience in the field as well as the necessary academic skills to conduct rigorous research. I also think that collaboration is critical to success. Academia can sometimes seem hyper competitive but the more one learns to share and work together within one’s own field and across fields the better.

Are there any skills, roles or areas of expertise you think there needs to be more of in public health and policy? 

We need to do better at knowledge transfer and making research more accessible to policymakers in public health.