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PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: 20 gift ideas for academics

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This post is part of the series PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: posts written for the Dutch academic career network AcademicTransfer , your go-to resource for all research positions in the Netherlands. These posts are sponsored by AcademicTransfer, and tailored to those of you interested in pursuing a research position in the Netherlands. If these posts raise your interest in working as a researcher in the Netherlands, even better - and feel free to fire away any questions you might have on this topic! Today, I present you the Christmas-edition of the PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer posts. With the holidays around the corner, you may wonder what to give to an academic, or you may wonder which gift to suggest your family buys for you. Here are 20 ideas of gifts that can make your favorite academic happy. 1. Notebooks In need of a nice notebook for your notes for the laboratory, for a course you will be teaching, or for a new research project you are setting up? A beautiful notebook with st...
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PhD Defenses around the world: I passed and you will too

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Today, Dr. Shoshanah Jacobs shares her experience of the PhD Defense. Dr. Jacobs is a professor of biology at Guelph University with research interests in seabird foraging ecology and biology education. Seated around the table was the cast of the comedy of errors that would become the chorus of years’ worth of restless night. Jester A hadn’t read my thesis; I could tell because the highlighting stopped abruptly at page 40. Jester B had sent his regrets and accepted the thesis as is but had been located, publically embarrassed, and brought against his will to my defense. Jester C, was a committee member who had been undermining my work for years and would continue to afterwards. “ I’ve got your back”, he said, putting on a sheep’s costume, after we realized that the Graduate School had forgotten to invite my supervisor to the defense. The Chair of the department and my external examiner were also there. I felt bad for them. They were kind, prepared, and looking forward to a positive di...
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I am Diogo Aguiam, and This is How I Work

Today, I am interviewing Dr. Diogo Aguiam in the "How I Work" series. Current Job : In between jobs in research Current Location : Braga, Portugal Current mobile device : Nexus 5x Current computer : Macbook Pro (Mid 2012) Can you briefly explain your current situation and research to us? Nuclear fusion occurs naturally in stars. Two light atoms fuse together to form a heavier atom, while releasing energy. If we could control this reaction here on Earth, we would be able to produce electricity from the excess energy! But this is very hard to do... We must heat a plasma to millions of degrees to get the conditions required for the fusion reaction. We can do this using special donut-shaped devices called tokamaks, which use strong magnetic fields to confine the plasma without touching the walls. Still, getting more energy out of the reaction than what we use to get it going is still a few decades away. My research is focused on developing radar-like diagnostics to measure the d...
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First person in academic writing

I recently ran a poll on Twitter on the use of first person in academic writing. This poll was by large the most-voted poll I've ever organized, and the discussion was lively as well. The majority of the people that voted in the poll use "I" in their academic writing. For me, this fact is rather surprising. In my field, it's quite uncommon to use first person in our writing. I tend to use it in some of my reports, to emphasize that I did the calculations, but in most cases (as you may have noticed from the abstract that I've published on this blog) I leave myself out of my writing. Perhaps it's related to my type of work as well - it's quite clear to write something like "The bridge has a length of XX m". Here's the poll and its wake:
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Career paths post-PhD

I recently ran a poll on Twitter to learn more about the most common career paths after the PhD. While three of the options that I listed are perhaps the textbook options (postdoc, assistant prof - directly assistant prof - postdoc, industry), I learned that there are a variety of options out there. As a result, 1/3rd of all correspondents selected the "other" option. Some clicked on other because they just wanted to see the results, but the majority explained the different career path they followed. I also learned that in the humanities, postdocs are much less common. Here you can find the wake of this poll:
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Papers in ACI SP-323: Evaluation of Concrete Bridge Behavior through Load Testing – International Perspectives

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My colleagues and I published two papers in the recent ACI SP-323 "Evaluation of Concrete Bridge Behavior through Load Testing – International Perspectives", of which Dr. Pinar Okumus and myself were coeditors. The two papers are: SP-323—1: ASSESSMENT OF SLAB BRIDGES THROUGH PROOF LOADING IN THE NETHERLANDS Eva O. L. Lantsoght, Cor van der Veen, Ane de Boer and Dick A. Hordijk Abstract A large subset of the Dutch bridge stock consists of reinforced concrete slab bridges, for which assessment often results in low ratings. To prioritize the efforts of the bridge owner, more suitable assessment methods for slab bridges are necessary. Research efforts over the past years resulted in the development of several methods, at levels requiring increasing costs, time, and effort for increasing accuracy. The last option, when an analytical assessment is not possible due to uncertainties, is to use proof load testing to evaluate the bridge directly. To develop recommendations for the proo...
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Average word count of a dissertation

For some reason, I always thought a doctoral thesis is about 100,000 words in length (and I've taken that number as a reference for my book as well). However, I wanted to test this assumption, so I ran a poll about the topic. From the comments, I learned that word count limits are common in the UK (mostly), and that they differ across disciplines. You can find the poll and its wake here:
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