Curious at Prolific: A Growing Team
Prolific’s team is constantly growing - which provides us with the great opportunity to talk to Jim Lumsden, who has joined Prolific full-time at the end of July - which makes him a rather experienced team member!
What did you do before joining Prolific?
Jim: I have spent a stupidly long time at university. First doing an undergraduate degree in computer science, and then a masters in computer science. I was then tempted to the 'dark side’ to do a masters in psychological research methods followed by a PhD. My PhD explored whether gamification (the process of making mundane activities more like video-games) was a suitable tool for increasing engagement with psychological tests. Current psychological tests tend to be pretty boring, and though researchers are keen to run online, longitudinal studies, high levels of participant attrition are common. We thought gamification might be the silver bullet for psychological engagement problems…. but, it turns out it isn’t. So a fairly typical PhD outcome there :P
How did you get to work with Prolific?
Jim: Over the course of my PhD I ran several studies using Prolific. I’m sure you can appreciate that for a researcher investigating engagement and attrition in online, longitudinal studies: Prolific was a godsend. I conducted five longitudinal studies during my 3 year PhD, some of them with hundreds of participants. As a result, I became very familiar with Prolific as a recruitment tool, had a fair amount of support interaction with the team (Jim, Phelim, Katia), and generally became quite fond of the company and the product.
So, when I saw them advertising for a job back in January… it was the best present I could have asked for (my interview was on my Birthday 🎂 ).
What is your role at Prolific, and how does a typical work day look like for you?
Jim: So, I’m the data analyst, but I’ll probably also grow into a bit of a swing role because it’s a small team and we all need to be pretty versatile. I’m only two weeks in, and although we have a lot of ongoing analysis projects, my current focus is on understanding growth.
We have tons of active participants on our platform (18k), and I’m exploring their patterns of behaviour. My goal is to understand the crucial moments that determine whether they’ll stick around for months, or disappear after a week or two. The same applies for researchers: what can we do to meet their needs better? What combinations of prescreeners are common? How successful is our referral scheme? These are all the kinds of questions I’m trying to answer.
Why did you choose Prolific over an academic career? Is this even the case, or do you want to combine both?
Jim: I was considering an academic career even when I applied to Prolific, and so I don’t feel I made a deliberate choice of one over the other. Ultimately, I am not a fan of the short-term contracts and high emphasis on individual (rather than team) performance in Academia. I also love the ‘applied’ nature of business and the chance to try move fast and iterate quickly!
I am not ruling out returning to academia. However, having spent the last four years half way between Psychology and Computer Science, I have learned that I am happy between-worlds. Working at Prolific demands a combination of academic rigour and a splash of entrepreneurialism: and that suits me just fine.
So far, what is your favorite part about working at Prolific?
Jim: Prolific has a strong work-life balance ethic: I think that’s fundamental. When the pressure’s on, we all chip in together. Equally, no one will bat an eyelid at you working flexible hours, working from home, taking days off, etc. I would say ‘work hard play hard’. But I think it’s more ‘work hard sleep lots’.
What are you looking forward to in the future? Job-wise, but also regarding Prolific’s future plans?
Jim: I’m super excited about the future of Prolific. We have a huge and dedicated pool of participants, that is growing all the time; and hundreds of researchers doing great science in collaboration with them. Feature-wise, there’s so much we can do (and are doing) to make the platform better: increasing trustworthiness, better supporting longitudinal studies, providing representative samples, and much more. I really hope that we can drive a revolution in research practices by allowing bigger and better studies to be conducted online, at costs researchers can afford.
And job wise? Well, I hope to be involved with the above. Obviously :P
