Category: Your Career

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.

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.

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.

How should you present yourself as an academic on the internet? It’s a vexed question. There are just so many options for making a ‘place’ where people can find out more about you that it can be hard to make a decision. I’ve been thinking about this since Blair wrote to me with a question: …continue reading.

Do you have trouble asking for what you really want? This post is by Brittany Amell and Lisa Armstrong, who are both PhD students in the School of Linguistics and Language Studies at Carleton University, Canada. Brittany’s research interests include the research, theory and pedagogy of teaching writing (particularly doctoral writing), and how these areas intersect with …continue reading.

Podcasts are still hot hot hot! I love listening to them when I drive, exercise and cook. I want to draw your attention to a new podcast specifically for PhD graduates by Elizabeth Lam, a chemist and science writer. Elizabeth is doing a new podcast about PhD graduates finding employment outside academia and tells you …continue reading.

I’ve guided many a person into a PhD candidature, both at ANU and to other places, so I know how confusing it can be. The process of making an application to an Australian University is frustratingly opaque for many, especially people who do not have ‘connections’. This post by Madeline Taylor will be useful to …continue reading.

The Thesis Whisperer blog has gone from strength to strength over the years. Visibility is a form of currency in academia. A rolling stone gathers moss as the proverb goes (edit: well – actually it doesn’t! That should be a rolling snowball or something? Anyway…) and in my case moss = opportunities. Because of my …continue reading.

What happens after all the dust is settled and you start to pusue this thing called ‘an academic career’? This post is by Dr Pippa Yeoman, who has started what is beginning to be called the ‘post-post-post doc’ stage of the academic career. Pippa is an ethnographer of socio-technical innovations in learning, who is coming …continue reading.

This post is by Anna Wilkinson. Anna is a Research Fellow at Cancer Council Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Anna has an extensive clinical background having previously worked as a nurse in diverse settings, including in rural and remote Australia and in the UK. This clinical work provided a foundation for further training in public health and …continue reading.