Category: Your Career

Do you identify as ‘introvert’? Many PhD students do. If you are less comfortable with social spaces, the networking part of academia might be painful. To tell you the truth, I don’t really buy the ‘introvert/extrovert’ spectrum as I don’t identify as either. I’m always uncomfortable with such absolute descriptions as people are very complex, …continue reading.

Interdisciplinary research. So hot right now… or is it? To be clear – I’m a super fan of interdisciplinary work. I’m happily ‘post-disciplinary’ myself. My PhD was interdisciplinary, and my current job is transdisciplinary. I work with all kinds of research students, from physics to fine art; education to chemistry, I embrace you all! While …continue reading.

In Australia, enrolling in a Masters by research (or ‘MPhil’) it is a relatively common pathway to a PhD, but how hard is it to achieve the ‘upgrade’? This post is by Jonathan O’Donnell, who has spent most of his career in universities, helping academics to find funding for their research. His doctoral research looks …continue reading.

Have you given up a great full time job to do your PhD? Some of you might have done this fairly recently – what changes can you expect? Jo Khoo is currently enrolled in a PhD at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research focuses on health services use and financing, particularly related to service …continue reading.

Good advice on how NOT to be an academic when you finish your PhD is pretty thin on the ground. Many supervisors have never done anything else, and/or are not well enough connected with industry to know what is ‘hot’. Careers centres at universities tend to shape their offerings around the huge undergraduate cohort, who …continue reading.

Genevieve sent me this post about a year ago – such is the queue for the blog now it’s taken this long for it to appear, but in this case, the wait is probably a good thing, as you will see… In 2016 Genevieve Simpson completed her PhD, which examined community, industry and government perceptions …continue reading.

This post is by Owain Johnstone. Owain recently submitted his PhD thesis in Socio-Legal Studies at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford University. His research explores the role of the British state in influencing the social construction of ‘human trafficking’ since the first English law was introduced on the topic in the early 2000s. He …continue reading.

About 30% of my work week is classified as ‘service’: work that supports others in the community, such as sitting on committees, writing reviews and references, consulting on problems and so on. As a result of this higher than usual level of service work, the sheer number and range of things I do in a …continue reading.

This post was originally published on the All things Linguistic blog about a year ago by Gretchen McCulloch. Gretchen started blogging as a linguistics grad student at McGill University, but is now a full-time pop linguist, bridging the gap between linguistics and the general public. She writes pop linguistics articles for various places and is currently writing a book about …continue reading.

I’m an advocate for blogging, obviously, but should you blog during your PhD? Will you have time? Will it be a distraction? I find it hard to answer those questions, but a growing number of people are doing it and I’m lucky enough that Gaia Cantelli wrote in to share her experience of blogging, which …continue reading.