Where I attempt to answer a difficult question: what is theory and how can you include ‘more’ in your thesis?

I’ve occassionally written about parenting through a PhD and some of the perils of PhD parenting. Since the average age of those studying for a PhD is 37 most of you will have some kind of family commitment, and yes – pets count. I find it mystifying that so many of the ‘how to get a PhD’ books offer precious little advice on how to cope.

This post was written by my fellow blogger Dr Geof Hill a.k.a The Research Supervisor’s friend. This post was written to help supervisors give better feedback, but I asked Geof if I could publish it here. Complaints about quality of feedback from supervisors are common. If your supervisor could do with some pointers, perhaps you could print this out and accidentally on purpose leave it lying in their office…

This post is by Dr Alex Hope, a Lecturer in Sustainable Development and Project Management at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom and was originally post on his blog. Alex is also on Twitter where he tweets about sustainability, academia, PhD advice and life. I hope you will head on over there and check out what he has to say!

If work is invisible, Star argues, it can come to be de-valued. This concept of articulation work is powerful because, by naming it, we recognise all kinds of work which might otherwise remain invisible – or not be seen as a legitimate use of time.

A student finds a novel solution to the ‘pain’ of doing a PhD – hire someone.

Every month a plastic wrapped wad of paper, sometimes 300 sheets thick, used to land on my desk. This wad contained the ethics committee paperwork, usually around 20 applications and supporting documents, for me to review.

This pile of paper drove me nuts.

This post is by Judy Redman who is a Uniting Church minister and, as part of her role as a university chaplain, has been minister of religion on the human research ethics committees of three different Australian universities. She has qualifications in Agricultural Science and Human Nutrition as well as Theology and is currently working …continue reading.

Over the weeks between the first and second post, two other people took the time to write posts reflecting on their own dressing practices. I thought I would publish these pieces together in this slightly longer post as the have different ways of talking about similar feelings. Both these contributions highlight how complex this issue of ‘dressing the part’ is…

How do you get an academic job? Much of the advice out there boils down to one statement: “publish early, publish often”. However, after reading Jen’s post last week I think we should approach this advice to ‘just publish’ with caution. Jen’s figures showed clearly that being ‘one dimensional’, i.e. just a researcher or just a teacher, was the surest road to marginal employment. Academics in permanent positions tend to do teaching and research.