Tag: career

This post is by Lilia Mantai who completed her teaching degree at Georg-August University of Goettingen, Germany. She has been teaching at Macquarie University, Australia, and working as a Research Assistant at the Learning and Teaching Centre for several years. She is currently conducting PhD research on the role of social practices and researcher development …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.

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.

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 Evelyn Tsitas, who is, amongst other things, completing a PhD at RMIT about werewolves, vampires and the nature of being human (yes, I have Topic Envy). The idea for this post emerged when we were having lunch one day and I complained that some of my academic colleagues didn’t like blogs …continue reading.

Earlier this week I published a review of a new book by Dr Richard Hil called “Whackademia”. The book makes a pointed critique of the Australian Higher Education system for an excessively casualised workforce. A couple of months ago Jen Tsen Kwok, a PhD student at the University of Queensland and a Policy and Research Officer at the National Education Tertiary Union (NTEU) joined us in a live #phdchat on Twitter to talk about just this topic.

I asked Jen if he would like to put some of the data he talked about in a post as a lot of people expressed interest in the figures. This post is twice as long as usual, but I thought it was important to give sufficient space to sketch out the issues – knowledge is power after all! I want to thank Jen for taking the time to write this for us.