Category: Your Career

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.

Content warning – this post contains details and discussion of sexual assault and harassment. For more information and services, please visit the ANU Respectful relationships page. Yesterday we got a damning report on sexual harrassment and assault in Australian universities.  It’s truly harrowing reading. I’m not going to recap the report, you should read it …continue reading.

This is the second post Dr Katie Linder has written for us on Podcasting. In Part One she discussed some of the benefits of being a researcher/podcast. In this post she lays out a pratical strartegy for starting. I think I might have to give it a go! If you haven’ t listened to Katie’s …continue reading.

Competition is like the background radiation of academia – ever present, but rarely visible. Here’s a field guide to some common forms of competition amongst research students and some useful ways to think about it. If just to prove that competition does not have to be a way of life, this post has three authors: …continue reading.

My sister is fond of reminding me that, in 1992, after returning from my first overseas trip to Europe, I told her I wanted a career where I could “get on and off planes and talk to people for a living”. It’s appropriate then, that I write this post while flying high above the red …continue reading.