One of the participants in a workshop about post-PhD careers asked the question in the title. We were talking about not knowing what jobs might suit us and the value of taking short-term contracts or taking jobs to try them out, knowing that we could move on in a year or two to something else. […]
Read More »Cheerful counter-point to depressing news (reading list)
I crowdsourced cheering reads for PhD students to counter the anxiety of depressing job market news. Click through to see the full list.
Read More »What is required for management/leadership
Continuing with the difficult thoughts. Someone I follow on Twitter said this: “is it possible to “manage” well something you don’t fundamentally understand or know how to do yourself? I doubt it.” I’m not attributing it because it’s not about them. This is a really common sentiment. I’ll pair it with a statement a colleague […]
Read More »Leadership and management: some questions
To make a start on those difficult questions… Here are a couple of things that have inspired me, irritated me, sparked difficult thoughts lately. Various conversations about women and leadership: The Status of Women: Gender and the Ivory Ceiling of Service Work in the Academy on the FedCan blog. This parody of a post about […]
Read More »Writing about difficult topics
I’m scared to start writing because I don’t know where to stop or how to break it up into manageable chunks (manageable for you to read as much as for me to write; you are busy; you don’t need a monograph from me).
Here are some of the issues I’m mulling over. I’m going to try to write about them.
Read More »On the road again…
This week I’m in Windsor, Ontario, giving the folks there the benefit of my superpowers. This means that I won’t be blogging or tweeting much, if at all, and that it might take a bit longer to respond to e-mail. The folks in the Research Office at the University of Windsor have invited me to […]
Read More »The politics of education
I’ve had a couple of articles open in my browser for a while now and I thought I should share them. In all the policy debate about education, there are some persistent underlying political assumptions. Being aware of these can help you engage with them directly, and address how those assumptions are driving some of […]
Read More »The research you want to make happen
Research produces more questions than answers. (Liz Gloyn calls these “academic otters“. Her strategies reflect her position as an early career research in the humanities.) The successful researchers I know have far more questions and projects they could be working on than they could possibly pursue in their lifetimes, even if they had fewer service […]
Read More »Work-Life Balance in academic careers
I read a thought provoking piece on Work-Life Balance recently. Thinking about this in relation to academic careers, I realize that the choice you face is actually more complex. And that that complexity might make it easier to address the problem (if there is one).
The issue for you might not be a work-life balance issue, it might be a work-work balance issue.
Read More »Being the scholar you want to be
Following a link from Twitter the other day (sorry, I forget who sent me here) I found this fantastic blog post on the Scientific American website: Three things I learned at the Purdue Conference for Pre-Tenure Women: on being a radical scholar. This resonates strongly with my own views about managing your academic career. I […]
Read More »October plans
I’ve got a lot going on this month. First up, the next session of Conscious Careers starts Thursday October 6. I’m looking forward to working with a new group of students. We’re still in touch with some of the alumni and they have found it really helpful. In fact, one of them wrote about it […]
Read More »Post-PhD precarity
We know that to get an academic position you need to publish from your dissertation. It would be helpful to at least have a good idea of where your research program is going to go next. If you can get started on that next project, even better. Competition is stiff. Even institutions that don’t have […]
Read More »
