Is a weekly vlog or a PhD more exhausting?
A chat with Simon Clark
Watching the countless hours of content produced by creatives on Youtube is something we all love to do. It’s become the modern day television with a million and one easy to watch channels.
One such channel is that of Simon Clark, he showcases his life and his work each week as he goes along the process of completing a PhD. He’s well known for documenting the countless details involved in completing a degree in Physics and on applying and studying at the University of Oxford.
His life isn’t all academia however, and that’s part of the appeal of the channel. Most of us realise we won’t be a working towards a PhD anytime soon, but Simon is able to make the whole process seem a little more normal. With the weekly vlogs highlighting loads of normal everyday activities you can’t imagine academics do when working towards a PhD.
Simon’s PhD is all about atmospheric physics at the University of Exeter but his channel is definitely much more than this. Take a look at his channel trailer to the left to find out a little more if you haven’t come across Simon before.
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When did you realise you wanted to go down the road of a PhD?
My first inkling of wanting to do a PhD was in my third year of undergrad at Oxford when I first encountered geophysical fluid mechanics. For some reason this really resonated with me, and I pursued this with a summer research project. After a summer of working with code and solving problems independently I knew that I wanted to do a PhD.
You must be one of, if not the first to document a PhD, documenting is similar to creating in this day and age. Would you recommend documenting for those that can’t show off what they’re creating all the time?
I think if I’m being honest it takes a certain kind of weirdo to document what they’re doing with their life as publicly as I do on the internet!
Doing a vlog or a blog or any kind of self-documenting project is a weird confluence of skills and disciplines. It takes a certain amount of artistry to make it interesting (though as my success makes clear, this is very much optional), the technical know-how to actually make it real, and a lot of discipline to stay motivated. Doing a weekly vlog is just so exhausting — you’re always thinking about whether you should be filming or not! As a format though it certainly works very well for me, it gives me a creative outlet without being a huge drain on my time resources (and is achievable without very expensive kit).
We know you’re working on building up Crash Course, what are the plans for the near future?
Crash course is the current big project alongside the vlog, the PhD, and various standalone videos.
I have a whole bunch of plans for the future though! I’d love to do a more interactive followup to crash course where the audience codes a climate model with me. In particular though I’d love to do more work with other YouTubers, in series form where possible. Currently I’m looking at setting up a collective of YouTubers with a science background to pool resources and work on bigger projects, though that’s all very much a project for ‘post-PhD Simon’.
In the next few months I’m looking at making more documentary style videos, thinking more about narrative structure — some videos I’m editing include reflections on a week spent in YouTube NextUp, a retrospective on my last chapel choir tour to Malta, and a video about the most violent event in the atmosphere (what I research).
How do you think science has benefitted from the increased amount of sharing on social media, do people often dumb it down now?
I worry that ‘true’ science and social media are kind of incompatible, as the latter is defined by bitesize chunks of information that people consume on a very short attention span.
Science is all about deep understanding, requiring long attention spans and just sitting and thinking — the antithesis of how people use social media! So to combat this of course people have to pull the bare minimum facts, the conclusions, the bare essentials of the methodology, and try to fit that into 140 characters. As a result I don’t see much value in promoting science in social media unless you can go into greater depth — as I try to in my videos, which is more suited to the subject as a format — or you encourage people to look further, and click the link to the study, or do research on the area themselves.
As a researcher myself this is how I react to seeing science reported on my twitter, for instance, but I question how many civilians do the same. That all being said, it is still definitely to the benefit of the awareness of science that people share stuff on social media, and that is to the benefit of science as a whole provided that institutions don’t let the dumbed-down perception of research impact how they do that research in the first place.
PhD study doesn’t seem to bad judging by this little photo on Instagram Simon sent out recently.
Tell us what you’re planning after the PhD, we seem to remember you mentioned moving on after your PhD how will this affect the channel?
So as I mentioned above I’m looking at working with a bunch of science-oriented YouTubers, as I’ll be leaving the world of academia to focus on being a self-employed content creator. In the short term that’s going to mean spending a full work week on the channel every week, rather than just the few hours I can glean in evenings here and there, and getting more complex videos out there.
I have a document with about a hundred video ideas that I would love to make, it’s just a question of time!
In the longer term I’m also looking to move into presenting for other companies, events, and productions — having had some success with this during the PhD — and potentially moving into other media such as writing. Again I have several projects that I’m itching to complete, including a book preparing students to study physics at university, a guide to solo-shooter video making, and a science book for younger children. The dream would be to combine all of the above with working with a team of other YouTubers and creatives, all trying to inform and entertain people about their specialist area, be that climate, engineering, biology, chemistry, maths, or whatever. So that’s what I want to try and do in the next five years!
