Category: Your Career

This post, written by a PhD student, who wishes to stay anonymous, was sent to me late last year. Due to my new job, it’s taken me a long time to edit it down and make sure it doesn’t identify the student or their supervisor. I think you will find it an interesting story that …continue reading.

This post is written by Karina Quinn, a scholarly and creative writer working in queer theory, fictocriticism, and post-structuralist and feminist theories of the body, subjectivity, and self. She writes fictocriticism, short fiction, poetry, and also does the odd spoken word performance. Karina is currently writing her PhD titled ‘this body, written’ at La Trobe …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”. In this post Judy …continue reading.

This post is by Hedda Ransan-Cooper who is currently a PhD Candidate, School of Sociology at the ANU. She doesn’t (yet) have a blog but you can find her on twitter: @hedda_r Perhaps you’re one of those people who have always known exactly what you wanted to study. I suspect, though, a lot of researchers …continue reading.

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…