Globaldev careers: The researcher

LONDON — Early in her career, Nilima Gulrajani faced a choice: Take a job at the World Bank following a master’s degree, or study for a doctorate at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholarship candidate. Eventually she chose the latter, starting her off on a career as a researcher specializing in the governance and management of foreign aid — although she still ended up working at the World Bank for a while. She is currently a senior research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, a London-based think tank, having previously held an academic posting at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gulrajani’s expertise recently came to the fore when the United Kingdom government suddenly announced a merger between the former Department for International Development and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, an issue she had studied before. As a result, she was asked to rapidly produce a policy paper and handle requests from the media. She spoke to Devex about life as a researcher in the global development field and what opportunities there are for aspiring researchers in the sector. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. What does your day-to-day look like as a researcher? There’s great flexibility in being a researcher because you can work at your own pace and [often] at your own location as well, so being flexible about your work-life balance and when you do your work, that’s been great. “The decision to go down this path is a bold one. In the current environment, you have to be a risk taker. That is probably the single most important barrier to getting more diversity in the sector.” --— Nilima Gulrajani, senior research fellow, Overseas Development Institute [I start with] a meeting or two in the morning, which will [cover] what research products the people at ODI want to publish and ... discussions with the communications department to understand the process by which the publication can be made accessible ... [to engage] those within the political sphere. There will often be a seminar to attend or to listen to online. The great thing about ODI is that there are always interesting speakers. There’s some discussion inevitably at a think tank about fundraising and how one raises money to be able to do the research that one wants to do. There will be client meetings … There’s [often] some request from the media [to do an interview] … And then there’s the research itself! Often, at the end of the day, you realize you’ve been in so many meetings and conversations that actually the research hasn’t been done, so that’s for [the evening] or the weekend. The flip side of having so much flexibility is that … it can spill over into pockets of time that you might want to protect for other things. But these are projects of passion for most people, so people don’t necessarily resent that. What opportunities are there to do this kind of work in the sector? I think the first thing to say is that [people graduating with] Ph.D.s today are facing a very difficult job market and so most academic researchers coming out of graduate school are looking for opportunities outside of academia, just by virtue of the fact that there are so few jobs. In terms of where the jobs are for researchers [outside of academia], there are policy shops in many of the large civil society organizations [and] multilateral bodies that are doing world-class research. They often have access to data that no other organizations have and so they’re able to use that data and mine it to produce innovative findings. The think tank world is the [other place where there are jobs]. Their whole raison d’être really is to do applied policy research. Is it possible to get these kinds of jobs without a Ph.D.? Yes … particularly at the junior end [of the job market], it’s more open to non-Ph.D.s … At the senior research level, the sense I get is that [either you need] a PhD or [you need] a tremendous amount of work experience to compensate. My advice is to start early. I think if you can be flexible about not minding doing some of the grunt work, which many of the more senior people don’t want to do, that can also give you a good foundation for data manipulation, for example … if you feel that a Ph.D. is something that you should have but you don’t have the means or the desire to pursue. How do you see the impact of your work? For me, impact is about getting people to see the world slightly differently … [For example], harnessing comparative data to inform the DFID merger question and looking cross-nationally at what other countries do, might steer what the U.K. chooses to do. [My research] allows policymakers and decision-makers to see things slightly differently. What would you say are the key skills that you need for this kind of work? Technical excellence, quantitative and qualitative research skills are important, but those are tools to aid something else, and I think it really is about building relationships. That isn’t a skill that comes naturally to many researchers. I think the other skill that probably matters is communications or marketing. The way you sell yourself and your ideas matters much more than it did at the start of my career, just because of the way social media operates … Right now, [the quantity of] information is not the problem. [But] understanding the implications of that information and getting into the right hands is really a communications challenge. Have there been any unexpected challenges in this line of work? The thing I probably didn’t recognize is, particularly for a think tank, how much of the money has to be raised to be able to do the research … The pressures for funding can be significant and I suppose one of the unexpected challenges is that your performance can partly be assessed on the back of not just your ideas and your research productivity but also ... how much money you can bring in. That’s a little bit different from academia … You are part researcher, part fundraiser, part marketer, and balancing those roles can sometimes be tricky. Aside from flexibility, what are the great things about a career in research? You get to work with ideas. That’s a real luxury. You get to bounce them around with other people who enjoy and are motivated by ideas … [And particularly] in a think tank, because it's so linked to real world problems and decisions that need to be made imminently, for me there’s an added satisfaction to working with those ideas … There’s a sense of contributing to something bigger than yourself. What advice would you have for people who might be looking to go down this path? Try to get work experience as early as you can in your career. Don’t necessarily fall into the trap of thinking that a Ph.D. is the single route to this type of career because I think work experience counts for a lot. That work experience can be [found] in unusual places — it doesn’t necessarily require three gap years somewhere remote … [or going] to the corporate sector either. Just be passionate about what you do and seek out that experience. The decision to go down this path is a bold one. In the current environment, you have to be a risk taker. That is probably the single most important barrier to getting more diversity in the sector, because to be able to take on the risk of not having a permanent job — it’s harder for people who come from different backgrounds where there are financial pressures or other peer pressures to go down a certain route … The sector as a whole has to reflect a little more carefully on what kind of diversity it wants and how to remove those barriers. Find the latest research opportunities on Devex’s jobs board.