Focus, discipline, and passion were the three traits Vice-Chancellor Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng highlighted as crucial to constructing a worthwhile career in academia in her address to University of Cape Town (UCT) postgraduate students.
From across the college, the students assembled in the Baxter Theatre’s’ Concert Hall on Saturday, August 3, to listen Phakeng share wisdom and insights from her career.
She took a warm, mild-hearted approach to a topic that frequently weighs closely on the shoulders of aspirant academics, and her target audience responded with laughter and pleasure.
Many grabbed the opportunity to ask a few heartfelt questions—from how to cope with negativity and grievance to whether or not to pursue further research abroad or plow know-how back into the area people.
Some had long passed the proverbial mile to wait for this special lecture.
Able Benson Lungu, finishing his MSc in task management, was travelling all the way from Mafikeng in the North West for the weekend.
“It’s’ exciting to have any such passionate vice-chancellor who enjoys being attractive and interacting with college students,” Lungu stated.
“She’s’ an excellent orator, and I love to pay attention to her speeches online. I discover her to be very inspiring and relatable. So, once I heard this lecture, I made a factor to attend.”
Career versus task
Phakeng started her lecture by advising the scholars on the price of making a clear differentiation between their profession and the various positions in which they’ll discover themselves working during their lifetime.
“There is a massive distinction between a profession and an activity: A job is what you do for someone else. A career you do for yourself,” she stated.
“A profession is a whole lot bigger than your process. If you’re lucky, your job is a subset of your career.”
She delivered that it’s more useful to think about the two as current as concentric, intersecting, or maybe separate circles – as long as it’s’ viable to differentiate between them.
Having a clear vision of what students would love to acquire in their careers will help them make some of their most critical lifestyle choices: which possibilities to accept, which to turn down, and for what they ought to sacrifice their own assets.
“At the instant, I’m’ Vice-Chancellor. It’s’ a 5-year contract. In my view, this is my activity,” Phakeng said.
“But my dream changed into now not to be a VC. It turned into to be the top education in my area. That’s’ my profession.”
Your profession is your business.
She advised her target audience that the difficult work begins once they have mapped out what they’d’ like their careers to look like.
“If you move into academia, don’t’ anticipate this stuff to be organized with the aid of someone else,” she warned.
“If you’re going to have a career, it’s your enterprise. You take the fee and need to be the only one doing the paintings.”
Phakeng added that even though academia requires long hours and lots of multitasking—dividing time among teaching, studies, management, and many others—it is also one of the most profitable careers for everybody with a curious mind.
“Here, we’ve got an open area of thought. For me, that became the enchantment to academia: being able to pursue the questions you are passionate about and [which] are of precise significance to society.”
Setting essential benchmarks
Measuring private development—or lack thereof—is of the utmost importance in carving out a successful profession. To do that, she said, every younger instructional needs to have a fixed set of private benchmarks.
She indexed the following as the benchmarks she used to a degree of her growth:
Achieving a PhD.
Getting published in superb journals.
Successfully applying for studies presents.
Supervising master’s and PhD college students.
Affecting network, training, and improvement.
Invitations to give keynote or plenary lectures.
Research awards.
She emphasized that each younger academic’s’ benchmarks must be crafted in line with their non-public career desires instead of being informed or limited through any out-of-door expectancies.
She noted that many humans would consider receiving a name such as “senior lecturer” or “professor” as a benchmark. However, they can be misleading because there are no familiar standards for bestowing these titles at universities.
“Be positive to focus on benchmarks that aren’t depending on your group.”
