Category: Your Career

The other day I was reading a paper called “The crisis in Doctoral education: a sociological analysis” by Gavin Kendall which talks about how doctoral education has come to be seen as being in a perpetual state of crisis – even if this is not strictly true. Debate flies thick and fast in the literature …continue reading.

This post is by Dr Judy Robertson who is a senior lecturer in computer science at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland and Chief Cat Herder for the undergraduate computer science programme there. Judy is a blogger as well as a contributing author to the amusing collaborative internet novel in progress “Granite University”. My academic ego is …continue reading.

As regular readers of the Whisperer will know, last year I published a small book called Tame your PhD. Last week I published a review of Dr Nathan Ryder’s ebook, so I thought I would catch you up on how mine is going. In 8 months I have sold 1022 ebooks on Amazon and 90 …continue reading.

Two of my favourite people in the academic world are my friends Rachael Pitt (aka @thefellowette) and Nigel Palmer. Whenever we have a catch up, which is sadly rare, we have a fine old time talking shop over beer and chips (well lemonade in my case, but you get the picture). Some time ago ago …continue reading.

This post developed out of a conversation on Twitter about the difficulties of socialising at academic conferences, particularly at the dinner. I was thrilled when Julio sent me this post which is a comprehensive set of advice which anyone, scientist or not, can benefit from. Take it away Julio!

I have a friend, let’s call him Peter…

This is another great post from PhD student, full time gallery worker and mother, Evelyn Tsitsas … who decided a while back to do 3 conference papers just 8 months out from submission. She is now questioning the wisdom of her decision! It seemed like a good idea at the time. Somewhere, among the photocopied …continue reading.

This post is by Dr Alex Hope, a Lecturer in Sustainable Development and Project Management at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom and was originally post on his blog. Alex is also on Twitter where he tweets about sustainability, academia, PhD advice and life. I hope you will head on over there and check out what he has to say!

Over the weeks between the first and second post, two other people took the time to write posts reflecting on their own dressing practices. I thought I would publish these pieces together in this slightly longer post as the have different ways of talking about similar feelings. Both these contributions highlight how complex this issue of ‘dressing the part’ is…

How do you get an academic job? Much of the advice out there boils down to one statement: “publish early, publish often”. However, after reading Jen’s post last week I think we should approach this advice to ‘just publish’ with caution. Jen’s figures showed clearly that being ‘one dimensional’, i.e. just a researcher or just a teacher, was the surest road to marginal employment. Academics in permanent positions tend to do teaching and research.