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The Thesis Whisperer is now over 10 years old! An older blog is a big, confusing attic full of content. On this page you’ll find a selection of low cost books created from the blog content – and a few other surprises. All sales help me sustain the blog. Take a look!

The uneven U

Publishers often send me academic writing books to review. I happily look through every book, but if I think I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it, I just don’t write a review. I don’t want to crush a fellow author’s soul. The rejected titles sit sadly, in small piles of guilt, on the bottom of one of ...continue reading.

Latest articles

September 16, 2010

5 ways to make your supervisor happy

Sometimes it’s the little things that count

16 Comments
September 14, 2010

How to win (academic) friends and influence people

It is well known that professors can have favourite students, which usually irritates the heck out of the students who finally work out that they are not on the list. Being the favourite student can carry a lot of power – like access to the supervisor’s time and resources (in a perfect world, of course,continue reading.

13 Comments
September 8, 2010

Top 5 phone apps for researchers

Looking for an excuse to buy that smart phone? Here’s five.

7 Comments
September 6, 2010

On life in the lab and failure

What I found out about science during a nice trip to the country

2 Comments
August 31, 2010

Social media and your PhD

A blog can be an archive of reflections about what it means to do a PhD. It can be a placeholder for the vignettes that build to become arguments in the thesis and, unlike a personal journal, the thoughts and arguments are open for scrutiny and feedback.

17 Comments
August 24, 2010

The dead hand of the thesis genre?

Is your writing mannered and your ideas disappearing in a maze of fancy academic language? Perhaps you are being pressed under the dead hand of the thesis genre!

13 Comments
August 19, 2010

In memory of Maria Cugnetto

Today I received some sad news that Maria Cugnetto, one of our PhD students here at RMIT had passed away. We are all diminished by her loss. I always enjoyed her company and wish I had time to get to know her better. This obituary is written by Angela Di Pasquale, another RMIT PhD student,continue reading.

5 Comments
August 16, 2010

What are you learning while you do your PhD? (maybe not what you expected!)

You might be learning all kinds of unexpected things while doing your PhD – some of these ‘other’ things might help you get a job later on.

8 Comments
August 9, 2010

PhD rage

This is a picture of one of the rather nice glass doors in my apartment. If you look closely you will notice there’s a big crack in it, right next to the handle. I blame this crack on Chapter five of my PhD. To this day I don’t know how it happened, but I managedcontinue reading.

15 Comments
August 4, 2010

Voices from the front line

Our first PhD student piece – professional brain?

3 Comments