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Today I welcome Dr. Amber Davis as a guest author. Amber is a political scientist and PhD coach, who studied at the London School of Economics and Leiden University, and holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. She teaches stress-management and productivity seminars for PhD students and created the The Stress-Free PhD to help you increase your productivity, re-ignite your inspiration and lower your stress levels. She is currently hosting a giveaway for this program . Check out her blog for more of her writing. What if you could sit down at your computer every morning, click open your documents, and have your work simply flow? Ah, how wonderful would that be? Maybe academic work can’t be quite that effortless, but there are simple things you can do to increase the odds of focus and flow happening. First point to note is that focus doesn’t happen spontaneously. It requires the right conditions. Ironically, academic culture with its insistence on working long (and...

Some time ago, I ran a poll on Twitter about how often academics work from home. Slightly more than half of all have a designated work-from-home day, I learned from this poll. Some parents work a split shift (myself included): adding a few hours of work after the kid(s) are asleep at night. During baby's first year, I was working 6 hours daily in the office, and then tried to add an hour at home in the evening (with mixed results, I often feel rather tired in the evening). Here's the wake of this poll:

I recently ran three combined polls trying to understand if we are applying for enough funding for our PhD students to actually do their PhD research. I've heard a number of stories about professors relying on unemployment benefits for their PhD students for their last year in almost every case, and I don't agree with such practices. I think we should hire PhD students with enough funding to pay them to do their research work within a reasonable amount of time. What I learned from this poll is that not all students are actually hired on projects. This different funding scheme for the PhD seems to be more common in the humanities. The three elements that I evaluated for this poll were: - How much time it took to finish the PhD - If you finished within the allotted time - If you finished before funding ran out, and if not, how you survived financially after funding ran dry. I learned that the majority of voters needed more than 5 years for their PhD project, a number that is in s...

Today, I have the pleasure of welcoming Iván Carrera as a guest author. Ivan is a professor at the Department of Informatics and Computer Science of Escuela Politécnica Nacional in Quito, Ecuador. His research interests are Performance Evaluation, Distributed Systems and Bioinformatics. Check out his webpage: http://fis.epn.edu.ec/sistemasdistribuidos/ . You can follow him on Twitter. I majored in engineering in Ecuador, my homeland. When I finished, I wanted to do grad-school in Brazil. I had studied Portuguese, and for me it was a dream to have the opportunity to do research. I applied to several universities, got a few yes's and a lot of no's. In engineering they say that you shouldn't worry about communication skills, but it was very difficult for me to write. I had to learn how to write formally. I got accepted in University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, and went to do a Master's in Computer Science. During my Master's I felt that my research wouldn...

Today, I am interviewing Dr. Philip Shields. Dr. Shields is a scholar-practitioner in the field of Executive Leadership. He currently works as a manager for a General Electric Company and as an Adjunct Professor at two universities. His undergraduate degree was in Chemistry and he holds a Master's degree in Management with a focus in Integrated Logistics. His passions include faith, family, flying, friends, and bridging the gap between public and private organizations so that both may benefit through strategic alliances. Current Job : Manager at FieldCore, a General Electric Company. Adjunct Faculty at the University of Charleston and at Liberty University Current Location : Unites States and Virtual Current mobile device : iphones Current computer : Dell PC and MacBook Pro Can you briefly explain your current situation and research to us? My research focuses on Executive Leader perceptions of their involvement with forming and sustaining Cross-Sector Strategic Alliances. ...

Vanessa Corcoran earned her Ph.D. in medieval history in 2017 at The Catholic University of America and wrote her dissertation, "The Voice of Mary: Later Medieval Representations of Marian Communication," under the direction of Dr. Katherine Jansen. Her research interests include the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary, the intersection of gender and popular religious practices, and the textual representations of medieval women's voices. Vanessa was the Assistant Director of Tutoring Services at The Catholic University of America. Currently, Vanessa is an Academic Counselor in the Office of the College Dean at Georgetown University. She's working on a forthcoming memoir of her experiences in graduate school, entitled "It's a Marathon, Not a Sprint: Lessons Learned on the Road to the Marathon and Ph.D." Follow her on Twitter @VRCinDC . My dissertation, "The Voice of Mary: Later Medieval Representations of Marian Communication," investigated the eme...

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! Here is Auntie Eva again with a post about planning or time management, I can hear you say with a sigh. But today, I'll focus on one specific element of time management: you need to learn how to manage your energy (essentially, yourself - your raw material) if you want to be able to manage your time. Why is this so important, you ask me. Because knowing yourself and being able to figure out what works for you is an incredibly important skill to learn. And you need to do the work yours...

Today, I have invited Dr. Karin Bodewits to share her defense story. Karin Bodewits is a PhD graduate from the University of Edinburgh and is the author of the humorous but tragic campus novel ‘You Must Be Very Intelligent — The PhD Delusion’ (Springer Nature, 2017). She founded the career platform NaturalScience.Careers. She works as an author, speaker and seminar leader for a range of communication topics, and regularly writes short stories about the peculiarities of academic life. This post is adapted from You Must Be Very Intelligent - The PhD Delusion . I follow Prof. Gilton through the chemistry building on auto pilot. Is my PhD defence really finally happening?... I have postponed this exam as much as anyone can. Under my arm I carry a copy of my thesis, full of dubiously scribbled notes, while my legs move forward unprompted and my hands all but squelch with sweat. For two months I have revised. Felix, a lab friend, had explained me every bit of chemistry in my thesis right dow...