The Valley of Shit is that period of your PhD, however brief, when you lose perspective and therefore confidence and belief in yourself…

The Thesis Whisperer is off to the UK – but she needs some packing advice!

What exactly does one wear when giving a Keynote Lecture?

Deciding what to wear is not easy when you are an academic; we don’t have the luxury of suit-as-uniform like our counterparts in the corporate world. We often have to front classrooms full of people barely out of puberty and then go to a committee meeting….

Becoming a writer is also a bit like becoming a parent. It’s not until you have walked the floor with a screaming infant at 4am that you can truly understand what all the talk about ‘tiredness’ is about. But there are many aspects of parenting that no one tells you – or doesn’t think to mention. Here are some of them.

Here in Australia we eat chocolate eggs and take a rather long break for Easter. The Thesis Whisperer will resume transmission on Thursday, by which time blood sugar levels will hopefully have returned to normal!    

“I can’t believe you are doing a PhD in something that doesn’t even exist!” she yelled.

This book has become my ultimate authority on everything thesis writing related. My copy is now well thumbed – but I have still not read every page…

A perverse pastime of mine is to Google the well known and creatively successful who have made it to a PhD – and dropped out, only to find fame elsewhere. Californication’s David Duchovny (the title of his uncompleted doctoral thesis – Magic and Technology in Contemporary Poetry and Prose); The Offspring’s Bryan “Dexter” Holland (Molecular Biology)…

One thing I have learned over the years is, although the problems might be similar, no two research students are alike. What works for one person may not work for another. For this reason I have developed a habit of ‘reverse advice’ lists…

While, superficially, the thesis rules seem simple, they do not really help you make a lot of the decisions you need to make an acceptable scholarly text. This is where a lot of the trouble starts.