Category: Your Career

This post is by Associate Prof Martin Davies Principal Fellow in Higher Education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne, and a Senior Learning Advisor at Federation University Australia. His most recent work (with Ron Barnett) is an edited collection entitled Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education (forthcoming, 2015).  …continue reading.

In a recent post on her blog “100 days to the doctorate and beyond” Dr Evelyn Tsitas reflects on her post PhD experience. Like many part time doctoral candidates, Evelyn was working full time throughout her doctorate and, after it was done, finds herself, at least temporarily, back where she started, doing the same job …continue reading.

This piece was written by am experienced supervisor in science who has a lot of experience in working on industry projects. The supervisor wished to remain anonymous, for reasons that will become obvious as you read on… Working on an industry funded PhD project can be a hugely beneficial experience. Not only is there the …continue reading.

In a recent lecture at ANU, the esteemed research education expert Dr Margaret Kiley claimed that if we set out to design the Australian PhD from scratch we wouldn’t start from here. The PhD assessment (in most cases, a long form thesis), she argued, does not not necessarily develop the full panoply of skills we …continue reading.

This piece was written by Ben from the Literature Review HQ. Ben describes his blog as a “Literature review how to – from beginning to end”. In this post Ben reflects on his own PhD journey now he has some distance from it. You can find a permanent link to the Lit Review HQ on …continue reading.

There is a tendency for academics to talk about jobs on the ‘outside’ as a kind of compromise – or even failure. This has annoyed me for a long time, so I was glad when Paula Hanasz sent me this post. Paula is currently writing a thesis on the geopolitics of water security in South …continue reading.

This post, by Robin May of Melbourne University, is on a matter close to my own heart – casual teaching. Sessional lecturers, or  ‘adjuncts’ as they are sometimes called in the United States, are an increasingly common feature of the Higher Education workforce worldwide. I was a sessional lecturer for 11 years. While some of …continue reading.

This post was written by Jonathan Downie, a PhD student, conference interpreter, public speaker and translator based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He co-edits LifeinLINCS the unofficial blog of the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies at Heriot-Watt University. He is married with two children. His newest blog Rock Your Talk aims to help people keep on …continue reading.

Since completing her PhD 5 years ago, Nilam Ashra-McGrath has been running workshops on The Ups and Downs of PhD Research. She begins the workshop by sharing her PhD journey using a timeline, and has finally put some of this into a Prezi format. In this guest post, she explains some of her thinking and …continue reading.

This post is by Ben Wilkie who is a (nearly finished!) PhD candidate at Monash University in Melbourne. His research has been focused on Scottish migrants in Australia during the 19th and 20th centuries. He also lectures in Australian Studies at Deakin University in Warrnambool. Ben blogs occasionally at The Scottish Australian and you can find …continue reading.