Scholarly conferences are a regular part of the academic life. Whether big annual conferences run by scholarly associations, or smaller more focused conferences and workshops hosted in various institutions, academics attend conferences regularly. Or as often as possible given the travel funds available. Unless you are invited to give a plenary presentation, chances are you […]
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Who do you want to reach? An example
As I’ve argued in previous posts, publishing is all about reaching the people who can benefit from your ideas. For most academics, some of the people you want to reach are other academics. And the primary way you are going to reach them is through publishing in refereed journals. For too many of us, publishing […]
Read More »It’s fine to only want to reach other academics
I know Knowledge Mobilization, Relevance, Knowledge Transfer and all that are hot topics right now. And if you are doing work that has immediate relevance to particular non-academic audiences, you really need to work out the best way to reach those audiences. Which is one reason that I wrote that earlier post. But that doesn’t […]
Read More »Figure out who you want to reach
In my last post, I talked about how perfectly reasonable it was not to be publishing if you think no one reads journal articles. The problem is, you are doing all this work and you aren’t sharing it with the people who need to know about it. You have great ideas. These ideas are important. […]
Read More »What it means to say the job market is “competitive”
It means that it’s a competition, just like the Olympics. It means that you can be among the best in the world and still not get a medal job. It means that you have to go out there and do what needs to be done to the best of your ability anyway. Potential employers don’t […]
Read More »Two Solitudes? Knowledge mobilization/transfer & the PhD problem
This post might be a bit random but there are some thoughts mulling in the back of my head and I figure if I get them out of my head where other people can engage with them, they might grow into something more coherent. Please treat what follows as preliminary thinking. Thinking aloud. An invitation […]
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You don’t have to know what you’re going to be when you grow up
It is not uncommon to hear glib statements about how the era of the job for life has passed. And yet, people still routinely ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. And we still talk about education as if you get educated in your youth, which prepares for The Job you’ll […]
Read More »Technical difficulties
I have a bunch of posts in draft and lots of updates I want to make on the site. Unfortunately, we had thunderstorm on Tuesday (April 6) and it knocked out my internet. We are waiting for someone to come around fix it but there was another storm in the area on Thursday and they […]
Read More »A job search is a 2-way process
In my last two posts, I suggested that you can decide what kind of academic career you want, and that it’s a good idea to get information and advice from a variety of sources, including informational interviews, to help you figure that out and learn more about the kind of academic career you want. When […]
Read More »How an academic job search is like any job search
In my last post, I proposed that you are likely only interested in a subset of all the academic jobs that are advertised in your field (no matter how sparse or plentiful those jobs may be). If this is a new way of looking at your academic career, it might be unsettling. You might be […]
Read More »There’s more than one kind of academic career
In all the debates about the academic labour market, it seems that an academic career is an academic career. The academic labour market is a mess. Funding is squeezed. Tenure lines (or, in the UK, open-term positions) are not being replaced. There is a huge increase in insecure and poorly paid teaching and research jobs with […]
Read More »More on writing
In my last post, Rebecca Leigh talked about the physical way you write — pen and paper vs. computer. Her main point was that we should do it the way it works for us and not get all worried about how we should do it. There is another big should in the writing world, especially […]
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