![]() ![]() These are not as difficult as those encountered later in the recruitment process, are usually taken online, and last about 20 to 25 minutes. Some will expect everyone to sit a numerical test as part of the online application process. If you were to truly embrace your internal academic storm chaser, what would you do courageously today? Go now.Banks will test your numeracy, logical and verbal reasoning skills from the initial application stage through to the final hurdle at their assessment centres, especially in EMEA and Asia-Pacific.ĭifferent banks use various tactics when setting psychometric tests. A glimpse and a glimmer in the history of time. Courage comes out of this fear not despite it, and, taking lessons from storm chasers, there’s lots we can do to navigate our storms with courage and confidence. Embrace and face those aspects of yourself that also bring you fear. ![]() And know too-that which scares you can’t just be about others, that in itself is a red flag. How do you choose comfort over courage in your work? What frightening aspects of your academic work do you know, deep down, you need to run towards? Remember: feeling fear tells you that you’re getting closer to where you should go. Even if you have faced similar fearful situations before, reflect and prepare as much as you can, so you can feel confident in the face of all eventualities. Accept that which is uncertain and work around it deliberatively. Harness your past experience and transferable skills. Academia, as we have often written, can benefit from a vast panoply of knowledge from different fields to overcome work challenges. To navigate safely, as with the chasers, draw on both empirical and self-knowledge to help guide you. Consciously reflect on how acts of courage look different to acts of comfort in your conduct. But prepare yourself best to go into the storm by focusing on learning and staying curious. Like storm chasers, to face your storm, feel the fear. It would be tempting but mistaken to think we should get aggressive or self-protective to overcome fears in academia. In their actions, storm chasers show us: courage is not the absence of fear but is a response to fear. But it is their responses to this fear, driven by their desire to learn, to draw on their experience and stay curious, that defines their conduct. Researcher Paul Zunkel found that chasers in the United States run towards storms not because of their overpowering adrenaline or by dismissing their fear. How can we act with courage in our own fearful situations? We can learn a lot from storm chasers. As Brené Brown reminds us, we can have comfort or we can have courage, but we cannot have both. Yet reacting well to fear is challenging because fear and the vulnerability that comes with it feels viscerally horrible. Reflecting on choices between comfort and fear, remember: our reactions to fear matter far more than fear itself. ![]() Can we park our ego to truly listen and be open to others who hold different values to ours? Can we recognize that our perennial over-criticism of others is actually about our own insecurity? Can we acknowledge that our actions can perpetuate racial or gender inequalities and marginalize or hurt others? In academia, even not being or appearing perfect can be the most frightening of places. ![]() Or perhaps what is most fearful to us is that which is least visible to us: challenges to our deep and long-held biases, prejudices, and identities. Too many stay miserable yet certain in the university that they know yet resent, rejecting the opportunity to embrace the perilous uncertainty of moving to a new workplace or sector. It’s tough to stand up to those who bully and it’s tempting to disengage from workplaces rather than work together to improve them. Our most personal fears often arise from the interpersonal. Choices between comfort and fear come in many forms: Do we mix up our student assessment with innovation or stay safe in the end-of-term proctored final exam? Do we embrace the most challenging job offer or lofty research aspiration which intimidates us to the core, or take what seems like the easier road in the moment? In academia, our fears can also be intense – and the pull of comfort is endlessly alluring given the intensity and complexity of our work and workplaces. But chasers know the risks are real and act despite them. Their choice is supremely counter-intuitive to the very human instinct to seek comfort: to run away or for cover when faced with the truly frightening. Storm chasers stare into the eye of the most ferocious storms – then run, not away, but towards the ire. ![]()
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