Holiday Edition with Sarah McLusky (Episode 67) | A behind-the-scenes update from Sarah
As this episode of the Research Adjacent podcast will be coming out just after the UK Easter holiday weekend it’s a solo episode with just Sarah. It’s a general update for regular listeners on what’s been happening behind the scenes.
Sarah talks about
- The recent Challenges miniseries
- Upcoming episodes and future guests, including a special collaboration with Papa PhD
- The Research Adjacent Community for freelancers and the Research Adjacent Directory
- What she does when she’s not podcasting and her Gathering with Purpose research events newsletter
Find out more
- Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn or send an email
- Find out more about the Research Adjacent Community
- Sign up for Gathering with Purpose, Sarah’s research events newsletter
- Fill out the Research Adjacent careers quiz
- Suggest a guest for the podcast
Theme music by Lemon Music Studios from Pixabay
Episode Transcript
Sarah McLusky 00:04
Hello there. I’m Sarah McLusky, and this is Research Adjacent. Each episode, I talk to amazing research-adjacent professionals about what they do and why it makes a difference. Keep listening to find out why we think the research adjacent space is where the real magic happens.
Sarah McLusky 00:25
Hello there, and welcome to the Research Adjacent podcast. I’m your host, Sarah McLusky, and this is a solo episode today, and that’s because this episode will be coming out on the day after the Easter Bank Holiday Monday in the UK, and regular listeners will know that I don’t really like having a guest on when it’s the holiday period, especially because when this comes out, I’m actually going to be on holiday myself as well. So I feel like I can’t promote it as I would like to, but I like to take these opportunities to just give you a bit of a general update on where I’m at, what’s been going on with the podcast, what we’ve got coming up soon, what I’ve been working on behind the scenes, and today, also, I’m going to tell you a bit about what I do, and I’m not podcasting and an email newsletter that you might be interested in signing up for.
Sarah McLusky 01:16
So thinking back then the last time I did one of these solo episodes. It was the one that came out in just in the new year. So I think it came out on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day or something like that. It really was like right around New Year. And in that episode, I told you about some of the things that were coming up for 2025 and some of those things have happened already. Some of those things are still to come.
Sarah McLusky 01:41
So one of the things that has happened already is the challenges series that I did where I had four episodes looking at some of the regular challenges that come up for people working in research-adjacent roles, so we covered imposter syndrome, well, imposter moments, as we are now calling them thanks to Jenny Brady. We covered finding community with Jeni Smith. I had Orla Kelly and Joanna Royle in talking about influence. And I also had Andrew Millar talking about navigating change all things that are really relevant, no matter what kind of research adjacent work you do, I’m so I really enjoyed creating that little series episodes, and I really hope that you did as well. I think what was particularly interesting for me is that I usually just interview people about their careers. And I really love that I really am really interested in people, which is exactly why I started the podcast in the first place. And I always love hearing about people. Hearing about people’s stories, but we don’t often get to go really deep into a particular topic. And so what I really enjoyed about those episodes that we could really focus on digging in to that specific thing that we were talking about. And I’d love to do future episodes like that. So if there are particular things that you would like me to do an episode on, then please do let me know. Always in the show notes for any podcast episode, you’ll find a link to email me or it’s also hello@researchadjacent.com you can also leave a little audio message via something called Speakpipe, where you just go and you can just record 90 second audio, or you can just leave comments on social media as well. And it would be great to hear about some of the things that you would like me to cover that you feel I haven’t covered already.
Sarah McLusky 03:34
One of the other things that I said at New Year I would cover was an episode about me and my career. I’m going to tell you a little bit about that today, a little bit about what I do when I’m not podcasting later on today. So do stay tuned for that. But also, in a couple of weeks time, there’s going to be a really exciting double episode, which I’ve done in collaboration with the Papa PhD Beyond the Thesis podcast. So in that I go into a lot about about me and what I do, not the full story, but, um, certainly, but how I came to do the podcast. So if you’re interested in me, make sure you stay tuned for that one. Um, it’s going to be a really different format for me. So it’s quite exciting. And I am, at the moment lining up some of the future guests. So if you would like to be a guest on the podcast, if you know somebody that you think would make a great guest for the podcast again, please do get in touch. There is actually a form on the website that you can just fill in to suggest guests. So you could do it that way, or just drop me an email or anything like that as well. And I’m particularly always really interested to hear from people who’ve got an unusual story or maybe an unusual job title, something that we haven’t already covered on the podcast, is always fantastic. But I think that, as I say, I think everybody’s got an interesting story. So if you fancy being involved, please do get in touch. Obviously, I can’t always have everybody on who applies, because I need to sort of balance the content and things like that, but you can always throw your hat in the ring. So yeah, get in touch if you or somebody you know would like to be a guest on the podcast.
Sarah McLusky 05:23
In the update episode in January, December, whenever it was. There were other things that I told you about that was going on behind the scenes. One of them is updating the website and making it easier to search the archive. That’s proving a little bit trickier than I expected. So it is still ongoing, but I’m getting some technical support with that, so hopefully that will be available soon. The research-adjacent careers quiz, though, is live, so if you haven’t taken it yet, make sure you pop along there and give it a go. It’s specifically designed at people who are not currently in a research adjacent role, but are thinking about it. And what it will do is it asks you a few questions, a bit about who you like, what sorts of things you like to do at work, basically. And then it will give you some suggestions for podcast episodes to listen to for a bit of inspiration. So do go and have a look at the quiz if you haven’t done it already. It is just researchadjacent.com/quiz. And another thing that I’ve been working on on the website, it isn’t quite ready to publicly launch it, although the page is live. And that is, I have been creating a directory of research adjacent self employed people and freelancers. So once I started to get into this role, and I started to meet lots of other freelancers who do similar kind of work, who would describe themselves as research adjacent, we discovered that there is no place on the internet, anywhere that you can go and find a list of these people. And I know that a lot of you listening are self employed or freelance. I also know there’s a lot of people listening who work in places like universities, research organizations, learned societies, charities, places like that, who will be looking for freelancers to help them with specific roles. And so I’m putting together this directory. If you’re not currently on it, it’s something that you would like to be on. Then I’ll tell you a bit more about that in a moment. But yeah, if you are somebody who might be interested in employing freelancers in the future, and then, yeah, stay tuned. You can have a look at it as it stands now. It’s researchadjacent.com/directory. We’re not quite there yet. The bones of it are there. It’s a little bit empty just now, but we’re working on getting that filled up, so hopefully that’s going to be a really valuable resource.
Sarah McLusky 07:45
So speaking of, as I said, people who are self employed, and if you’re listening to this as somebody who’s self employed, or, you know, somebody who is self employed, who would consider themselves research adjacent, or I have heard, I mean, it’s sad about the state of affairs currently, in particularly higher education, that there are a few people who’ve been made redundant recently who are then thinking of becoming self employed after that. So if that is you, I’m really sorry, and that’s a really well, unless you’ve taken it by choice, but I’m really sorry that’s happened to you, but if you are going into self employment, then there is help out there. And one of the help, the sources of help that is out there is the Research Adjacent Community. Now this is a private online community that I have set up following a few initial conversations and meetings that I organized back in 2024 so we’ve created a little fledgling community in a private space called cCircle. Although we don’t just stay in Circle, we have actually had real life meetups as well, which have been fabulous. And the community is there to provide support. There’s a private discussion board. There are little videos, little bits of learning to help you figure out how to navigate things like university finance systems or what to do if people don’t pay you on time, or all sorts of stuff like that. So we’ve got little videos and things there. We have a monthly online catch up call, and if you are in the community, you also get listing in the Research Adjacent directory. So that public directory that I was just talking about, which you can anybody can go and search to help them find people. So I’m hoping that will help the self employed community get more work, which would be fantastic, and also make sure that people who are in employed research adjacent roles can get really fantastic support, and they can get people to come and support their projects who really understand research and not rather than just being a sort of more non-specialist freelancer. So if that sounds like you’re somebody that you know, then come along and check out the Research Adjacent Community. If you go to researchadjacent.com/community you will find all the information there and a link to come and join us, and it would be fantastic to see you there.
Sarah McLusky 10:25
The final thing that I wanted to talk to you about today is the a little bit about what I do when I’m not doing the podcast, because the podcast is far from my only job. It’s not my job at all. I don’t get paid to do it. So what I have to do the rest of the time is other stuff to help pay the bills. And I think I’ve previously said that I specialize in doing broadly research communications, which is what I used to say. But actually I have been going through, I got a little bit of business development government grant funding to get some a bit of rebranding done and to get a bit of work done on my website. And actually what doing going through that process has really made me understand is that what I do that’s really special and unique to me is that I help people to gather. And by gather I mean everything from meetings to events to workshops, whether it’s research teams coming together, whether it’s an academic conference, whether it is a co creation workshop, working with people in a public involvement type context, I help people to make the most of the time that they have together. So whether that is helping them to speak the same language and effectively communicate with each other, whether it’s helping them to co-create something new, whether it’s just helping people to meet other people, that is the thing that that really lights me up, and the thing that I’m really good at. So this, when it comes to a little bit of the the backstory of what I did, I didn’t even quite realize how far it went back until I started doing this work with the the people who were helping me redevelop the website. And I realized that I organized, like when I was 16, I organized a bus to take people to my birthday party in a nightclub in another town. So I’ve been organizing events since I was 16. When I was a student, I worked in the student union and I organized things. There were crazy events where we’d get a marquee and put it in a field and we’d have to get, like, outdoor drink licenses and all kinds of stuff. So it really is something that has a real golden thread that has run through everything that I have done throughout my whole career, and even now that one of the other jobs I do is as a yoga teacher. And I think each each one of them is like a little event in itself, and you have to create that safe space for people to come and get what they need. So I’ve realized that that is my special talent, and as a result, I have kind of rebranded my main business newsletter to now be called Gathering with Purpose. And so what that is, is I’ve been doing a fortnightly newsletter for a little while. It was very broadly research communication. It’s now going to be a bit more focused on events, although there will be still be communication in there, because obviously great communication is a huge part of gathering well and gathering with purpose, but it’s all going to be about tips on how to make the most of the time that you have together with people, so that you everybody gets they need to out of that opportunity. So if that sounds like something you would be interested in, you can go and sign up. This is on my my other website, which is sarahmclusky.com/gathering-with-purpose. I’m pretty sure that’s the right link. Um, I will put a link in the show notes for this as well, so you can go and find that and then, yeah, that’s a little bit about what I do when I am not doing the research adjacent podcast. So that might just be interesting as well from that point of view.
Sarah McLusky 14:31
So that is everything I wanted to cover in this just little short update episode today. Um, as I’ve said, check the links in the show notes. There. You can find the social media links. You can come and find me there. You can drop me an email hello@research adjacent.com. On social media, it’s @researchadjacent, pretty much everywhere. But the only place that I really hang out to any amount of time is on LinkedIn. So come and find us there. And. And do the quiz. Sign up for Gathering with Purpose. Join the Research Adjacent Community if they sound like they might be the right things for you. And yeah, keep sending me any questions or suggestions. I love to hear about who’s listening and any kind of ripples that the podcast is creating out in the world. I recently loved it when guest Joanna Royle went off and wrote a blog post based on her experience in the podcast. And I absolutely love it when stuff like that happens. Makes me so happy. And so, yeah, if you’re listening to this in real time, I’m well done, because this is, like, these kind of I don’t know if anybody listens to these solo episodes. I feel like it’s just me talking to myself. Thank you for listening. I hope you had a lovely long weekend. And yeah, we’ll be back on the next episode with next guest coming up is Laura Evans-Hill from Nifty Fox creative. So that is a really fantastic conversation. So tune in that one. But for now, bye.
Sarah McLusky 16:05
Thanks for listening to Research Adjacent. If you’re listening in a podcast app, please check you’re subscribed and then use the links in the episode description to find full show notes and follow the podcast on LinkedIn or Instagram. You can also find all the links and other episodes at www.researchadjacent.com. Research Adjacent is presented and produced by Sarah McLusky, and the theme music is by Lemon Music Studios on Pixabay. And you, yesyou, get a big gold star for listening right to the end, see you next time.
