4/11/2023 0 Comments Spectrum hoursWhen I work at home, I try to structure it so I don’t waste those good hours on emails or things like that. I normally have three or four good hours where I can really focus and produce things. I’m generally at my best first thing in the morning. WM: The one tip I give to anyone looking to do an academic career is you must work from home on a regular basis, and that’s where I do all of my writing and thinking. S: When and where are you most productive? I’ve certainly learned quite a lot about the Vikings in the past couple of weeks that I wouldn’t have known otherwise. I’ve really quite enjoyed the experience of taking more of a role in my children’s education. It’s about kind of balancing a whole load of meetings on Microsoft Teams and Zoom with trying to keep one’s research going, but also looking after and educating the kids. She’s definitely become the head teacher and I seem to be the maths teacher. Now, during the pandemic, there’s normally a negotiation that goes on with my wife in the morning about who’s going to do what elements of schooling. And then it’s back on the folding bike, back across London, back to Paddington and back on the train, and then that very nice feeling of stepping off the train into a nice, pleasant village and leaving the hustle and bustle of London behind. students and helping them think through what they’re going to do next or problem-solve around what they’re doing. Often my favorite bit is meeting with Ph.D. I work not just in autism research but also in helping to train clinical psychologists, so often my day is spent in meetings about running a course. WM: I live a little bit outside of London but work in London, so my normal, pre-coronavirus day started with a train ride and me sitting there with my laptop, tapping away at the keyboard, trying to answer as many emails as possible before my train gets to Paddington Station, at which point I get on my folding bicycle and cycle across London to where I work at University College London. There’s growing evidence from our group and from others that autistic people who camouflage more also tend to have higher rates of mental health difficulties, so we’re really intrigued as to whether there’s any kind of causal relationship there and whether we could use insights from camouflaging to develop interventions that allow autistic people to live happier, more satisfying lives. We’re interested in why that is and hoping to use the insights we gain from that, maybe five years down the line, to start developing better services for autistic women with serious eating problems.Īnother thing that came out of our interest in sex and gender differences was camouflaging - this idea that many autistic people often feel compelled to develop a whole range of strategies to mask their autism. There’s growing evidence that autistic women compared with non-autistic women have an elevated risk of developing anorexia. We’re really interested in whether there are important differences in the experiences and characteristics of autistic girls and women compared with autistic boys and men, and thinking about how that plays out in terms of their lives, their needs and so on.įor example, that’s led us into becoming interested in the overlap between autism and anorexia nervosa. Will iam Mandy: The main thing I and my collaborators and my group are working on is various questions focused around autism and sex and gender. Spectrum : What are you working on right now? Spectrum spoke with Mandy about the golden hours for writing and why - when there isn’t a pandemic - he likes attending conferences in new parts of the world. When a problem gets particularly thorny, he says, one strategy remains nearly foolproof: a walk in the woods with his dog. Now Mandy splits his time between teaching math and history to his 6- and 9-year-old children and managing his research team remotely, meaning life is both simpler and more complicated than before. Mandy, a clinical psychologist and professor of clinical psychology at University College London, works in the United Kingdom’s most populous city but endures a train-bike-walk commute each day so that he can live in a quieter place - or at least he did pre-pandemic. Whether they mean to or not, just about everyone these days is taking William Mandy’s advice for a successful academic career: Find time to work from home.
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