Shortly after Congress, Melonie Fullick shared a copy of her presentation. She’d used a new online presentation software called Prezi and I was intrigued with the possibilities. I asked her to write about it for us. In addition to the different visual possibilities and the general need to make presentations less dull, I think there […]
Read More »Why you get hired
What will you contribute to the success of the organization?
This is the primary question every person or committee who has ever hired anyone is trying to answer.
As with any other writing you do, audience matters. The people doing the hiring are the audience for your job application materials. They need to be written in such a way that they can find the information they need to answer this question.
Read More »Yes, you have career options
An article on Embedded Sociologist from the American Sociological Association, inspires some thoughts on the value of organizing scholars working outside academe within scholarly associations. Links to other such groups are encouraged in the comments.
Read More »From Conference Presentation to Journal Article
A conference presentation is an important stage in the development of your research. It allows you to get feedback, helps you refine your arguments, and begins to build an audience for your work. Now comes the hard part: actually sitting down to turn that excellent first draft into something good enough to submit to a journal. […]
Read More »You aren’t looking for a job for life
You are not behind. You haven’t wasted your time. It’s easy to think that you made a mistake somewhere along the line. Studying for a PhD was a wrong turn. Most people have their career figured out by the time they are 30. You should have learned these career research skills when you were younger. […]
Read More »Networking 101
You know networking is important but the thought of it makes you want to shudder. Or worse. It sounds so instrumental. And fake. And like it involves talking to people you don’t know. Out of the blue. If you’re an introvert, it’s even worse. Reassurance It shouldn’t be instrumental, even if the relationships you build […]
Read More »Job hunting in times of change
It’s not just that the labour market is awful right now. Higher education is changing More students. Less public funding per student. Major shifts in the balance of public and private funding, even in public institutions. Stable or declining numbers of full-time, permanent faculty positions (what gets called “tenured” and “tenure track” in North America). […]
Read More »Are you valuing your time?
It is really easy to overvalue tasks that other people ask you to do or see you doing. And to undervalue the tasks you do alone. Writing happens alone. Sometimes it doesn’t even look like work, especially when you have to do a lot of thinking. It takes a long time to get a product […]
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Conferences are an excellent opportunity to meet editors
When I was a graduate student, I completely misunderstood the reason publishers come to conferences. I thought the primary purpose of the Book Fair was to sell books. Then I discovered that people that staff those booths are not (usually) people from sales and marketing. They are editors. And they don’t just stand there at […]
Read More »Hook and Eye: Guest Post: Recycling is not a bad thing
Are you worried that you are “recycling” your work? Are you trying to make sure each paper and presentation is completely new and unique? You are not alone. But you are probably more at risk of not publishing enough and not reaching the people you want to reach, than you are of repeating yourself. I […]
Read More »In lieu of my own post on writing
Inger Mewburn at The Thesis Whisperer wrote a brilliant post recently on getting writing finished. The ‘Out The Door’ rant « The Thesis Whisperer In his superb book “Writing for social scientists” (which should be renamed “Writing for everyone”), Howard Becker talks about the importance of being the kind of writer who can get stuff […]
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Your conference paper & how you present it
The academic conference paper serves a couple of purposes. draft of an eventual journal article getting feedback meeting people with similar interests You probably have 15-20 minutes to present. And one of the most common complaints about conference presentations is that they go over time. To manage or avoid this… How do you prepare? Preparing […]
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