117 Letter from Filipa Brandão
Dear future women tourism researcher,
I was asked to write a letter to future female tourism researchers, one that could include some important reflections about my career and that could contribute to the way you will develop your professional path. I tried to think about my own path in the last years, about the advice I would have liked to be given along the way, and that I try to give to my students. Here they are:
Invest in yourself and have fun learning! I decided that I wanted to pursue an academic career in tourism when I concluded my undergraduate degree. I immediately applied to a Master programme in Tourism Management and Planning and, after its conclusion, I enrolled in a PhD in Tourism. At the time, I applied to a very competitive research grant from the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation, and I was very fortunate to receive it. This allowed me to dedicate exclusively to my PhD research. Not being involved in other professional activities provided the necessary conditions for me to study and to learn a lot during those four years. And it also taught me that a PhD is so much more than a thesis… it is a moment in time when we can invest in ourselves and increase our knowledge pool in many different areas of expertise. So here is my first advice: have fun learning and exploring many different types and areas of knowledge while doing research. Good research topics, paths and ideas often come from the intersection of distinct and eventually unrelated areas.
Be passionate about research and about what you research. This doesn’t need much explanation, right? Research is hard, it is time consuming, demanding, it means moving forward and backwards many times. When you are doing research, you are extremely involved in a specific topic, and you will see related things everywhere. It is not a nine-to-five job; it is a way of life! So first, you must be very passionate about doing research, and second, you should be very passionate about what you research about. This is fundamental for you to be happy with your choice.
Cooperate and establish solid and productive networks. Despite loving research, there will be many times when you will not be able to do it alone. Hopefully, you will not do research alone after completing your PhD. For you to thrive and to build a solid career, you will need to establish or be involved in collaboration with your students, with colleagues from your institution, from other institutions, or from other countries. It is proved that highly visible research outputs are the ones resulting from cooperation, so select a few colleagues and/or students in your field with which you like to work with and create a solid network for the future. Make sure that they are competent and, above all, good people!
Change the world! Nowadays, research only makes sense if it has a strong social impact. Contributions to science ate obviously always present and mandatory, but social contributions are in