Category: Your Career
How to stop your ideas from being ‘stolen’
Academics are always worried about having their ideas ‘stolen’. This deep cultural anxiety affects PhD students more than almost any other member of the community. There’s a good reason why PhD students should be anxious about protecting their ideas – examination. A PhD is meant to be a signal that you’re fit to be a …continue reading.
What are your post PhD job prospects, 2 years into the pandemic?
As regular readers will know, I am a working researcher with an interest in post PhD employability. For nearly 10 years now my research focus has been on job advertisements for researchers. this post is a detailed update on the academic and non-academic job market, 2 years into the pandemic. If you don’t want to …continue reading.
Will you get a job after Covid has wrecked Higher Education?
I started the Thesis Whisperer to help PhD students finish. In the last five years I’ve extended that mission to helping people get jobs after they graduate. It’s my firm belief that, although the world has 99 problems right now, research can fix a lot of them. Therefore researchers need to be able to put …continue reading.
Do you need clown shoes? Finding a research job during Covid lockdowns
The other day I had an actual 3D, face to face lunch with a colleague, let’s call him Simon. After months of 2D Zoom catch ups, it was lovely to be in an actual cafe on campus, eating steaming hot noodles. Simon and I were meant to be discussing business, but of course the conversation …continue reading.
Rich academic, poor academic? Making an academic living in Covid times
I put this post on ice in February this year when the great Covid crisis hit. The post is about how to supplement your sessional teaching income with academic flavoured ‘side hustles’. Back in March everything was going to hell and it just didn’t seem that… relevant? Now, at the start of semester two in …continue reading.
Where I call bullshit on the way we do the PhD
There’s a looming economic crisis in higher education. Perhaps you have lost work already and you’re wondering how you will support yourself (I’m really sorry). It’s hard to know if you’ll get more or less teaching next semester and what form it will take. Will it be online? Or face to face? Maybe your courses …continue reading.
Should you quit (go part time or pause) your PhD during Covid-19?
Some of you might have noticed I recently put the blog on ‘pause’ – for the first time in ten years. I am not a week by week blogger. I like to make space for creative inspiration to strike. For this reason, I always have at least six months of content ‘in the pipe’, waiting to …continue reading.
A big list of academic job interview questions (and how to answer them)
Academic life has seasons, as Les Back so eloquently pointed out in his lovely book The Academic Diary. At the moment it seems to be the season of job interviews, at least for some recent graduates in my immediate circle. I’ve been doing some challenging emotional work assisting with preparation of job applications and interviews, …continue reading.
Should you leave your PhD off your CV?
A couple of weeks ago I shared some of the research I have been doing with my colleagues Associate Professor Hanna Suominen and Dr Will Grant about recruiter’s attitudes to PhD graduates. I recommend you read the previous post on anti-PhD attitudes before this one, but briefly: our research concerns recruiters, who are important gate …continue reading.
What is this ‘anti-PhD’ attitude about?
Lately, more and more students want a non-academic job when they finish their PhD. Anecdotally, some graduates seem to be experiencing the PhD as a barrier to employment, not an enabler. In fact, I’ve heard so much negative talk about how employers react to PhD holders over the years that it seemed important to start …continue reading.