Research – Excellence + Culture = Open-minded
What do junior scientists at ETH think about the proposed cultural values? AVETH has developed an exercise that depicts each value as a fictive team member. This blogpost explains the results from the 66 participating groups and the meaning of the formula in the headline.
Discussions about values often remain vague. To stimulate the discussion about the five cultural values of ETH – diversity, openness, responsibility, team spirit, and excellence – members of AVETH have designed an exercise that describes each value as a fictional character. Ms. Offenheit for example keeps an open detailed Outlook calendar for everyone in her group and shares her thoughts, including criticism.
In April and May 2021 all research teams were asked via e-mail to meet and to discuss how they felt about each of these fictional people. The exercise attracted considerable interest: Already 66 teams (as of December 2021) took part.
A first analysis of the results show that many research teams favor the characters representing team spirit, responsibility and diversity. Excellence was viewed more skeptically, with many teams being worried about the fit to their group.
In the next part of the exercise, all teams had to describe the ideal personality of a new team member. The most frequently used words were “team”, “person”, “open”, “curious”, and “group”, mirroring the importance of team spirit and an open mindset.
To analyze this data not only by word frequencies – destroying the relations between the words – the AVETH members used an unsupervised machine learning model named GloVe (Global Vector) word embedding.
The idea of GloVe word embedding is to extract semantic meaning from word co-occurrences. Words that co-occur are assumed to be related to each other. With these relations we can form some kind of formula. A very famous example is "King - man + woman = queen". This formula means that if we would subtract the relation to “man” from “king”, and instead add the relation to “woman”, the most similar word in terms of semantic meaning is “queen”.
With regard to the description of the ideal team member, this formula emerged: Research – Excellence + Culture = Open-minded. This indicates that if we would subtract “excellence” from the “research” aspect that a candidate obviously needs to bring, and instead add the relation to “culture” we end up with an “open-minded” candidate. In a similar vein as the results from the mere word frequency, again openness or open-mindedness seems to play a central role for many research teams.
The rETHink project is still in progress. AVETH is curious which other relations this exercise can reveal when more teams participate. If you have not yet taken the AVETH exercise with your team, forward this blogpost to your professor, organize a meeting, and gather your colleagues to deal with this fun little external page exercise.
About the authors
Christian Thurn (right) recently defended his PhD thesis on conceptual change in physics learning. He is president of the Association of Scientific Staff @DGESS and set the ball rolling for the LunchLottery with a blogpost in October 2020.
Konstantinos Voulpiotis (left) is a structural engineer completing his PhD on the robustness of tall buildings made with timber. He is trying to balance his technical work with essential distractions such as cultural development activities, philosophy, and winter swimming.
Charles Ledoux’s (middle) PhD thesis is an agent-based model to predict bone treatment effects in high fracture risk patients. He is communications coordinator for AVETH and a member of the scientific staff association at D-HEST.