Category: Miscellany

It’s the end of the month. Holidays are over and the kids are back at school. It’s not all bad though – at least the January Thesis Whisperer newsletter is out…

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Hello! You are probably not used to hearing from me on the weekend, but I thought I would let you know I have started a new monthly newsletter to capture some of the great links I find on Twitter. Think of this as my version of the Saturday paper, except you know – not as …continue reading.

If you are preparing to undertake your fieldwork for your PhD, have been on a field trip for your PhD or maybe you are in the middle of fieldwork right now, either way this post is for you. And it has the distintion of being our first post to contain an original poem 🙂

In case you missed the news on Twitter or Facebook, I am leaving RMIT University and taking up the position of Director of Research Training at the Australian National University (ANU)…

Some time ago I wrote a post called “The Valley of Shit”, which has become one of the most popular posts ever. Briefly, the Valley of Shit is a state of mind where your thesis seems terrible, awful, bad. Walking though the Valley of Shit is a ghastly business because, well – it smells. But every Valley has an end, as I pointed out in the post, and eventually you will emerge from the towering walls of brown stuff, hopefully with a PhD in your hand.

Do you sometimes think about giving up? Should you entertain this notion seriously, or ignore it? When is it right to walk away?

It’s an important issue which we haven’t really tackled much on the blog to date, which is why I was pleased when B.J. Epstein, a lecturer in literature and translation at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England offered to write a post on the topic.

Last time we met my friend, PhD student and working academic ‘Dave’ he was walking through the Valley of Shit. Dave emerged from the deathly valley soon after I published that post, but he has now hit the last phase of PhD study, which I call “PhD detachment”. Dave, somewhat more colourfully, calls this phase “Screw you thesis!”. He tells us why in this post, but caution – there’s some strong language!

At a dinner not so long ago I got into an interesting conversation with a third generation academic. She complained about her father giving her advice on how to do her PhD. I joked that this was bound to be Thesis Whisperer Jnr’s fate, but I couldn’t help contrasting her stories with my own experience.

My father was sincerely impressed when I started my PhD and pleased as punch when I completed, but he would never have dreamed of giving me advice on how to do it. You see, I’m a first generation academic. An academic migrant.

On Wednesday the whole doctoral education community was saddened to hear of the death of Professor Alison Lee.

Alison was a fine academic of the best kind: a huge intellect coupled with a generous heart.