By 
Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh
https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/chris-cummins
Tel: +44 (0)131 650 6858 c.r.cummins@gmail.com
For me, the Scottish Crucible programme was both a fascinating opportunity to engage with fellow researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and a valuable step in my own academic development. It’s a very effective way of building a community of people who are dealing with many of the same practical issues in our working lives even while addressing seemingly very different research goals. And I found it a great help in overcoming the inertia that would have kept me doing the same kind of work within my own narrow field, rather than taking on some of the challenging but exciting prospects in the wider world of research and beyond.
In practical terms, Crucible equipped me with the confidence to tackle those challenges, and a lot of very useful advice about how to approach them. For instance, I currently co-supervise a PhD project on communication in emergency-response medical teams, which we hope has the potential to go considerably further, and ultimately help improve patient outcomes. I’ve also recently started a Leverhulme Trust-funded project on the effect of bilingualism on cognitive bias. Both these projects involve trying to translate the insights from one field into potentially impactful outcomes in another, and thus require interdisciplinary work, awareness of the various stakeholders and their needs, and potentially an understanding of how to use academic research to inform policy. I feel that the experience of Scottish Crucible has stood me in good stead in all these respects and more, and I consider myself very fortunate to be able to draw on that experience.
