Aimée Morrison, writing at Hook & Eye, raises an interesting point about writing academic bios: One thing that’s increasingly becoming clear to me is that the bios that accompany Serious Scholarly Writing, like a peer-reviewed article, don’t mention teaching. Better more words devoted to where you’ve published and who funded your work, than to describe […]
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What’s YOUR ideal academic job?
When you are looking for an academic job it is hard to imagine that you could get one and be unhappy, even miserable. And yet, I’ve met unhappy academics.
An academic career incorporates a wide range of activities and uses a lot of different skills. Even those who love it, and are successful, love different things about it, or excel at different aspects.
It is important to determine what is important to you. Your actual job may never match your ideal exactly, but knowing what your ideal looks like enables you to choose better compromises.
Read More »How I help mid-career academics
You’d think that once you get that academic job and get through whatever process you have to go through to keep it (tenure, probation, or whatever it’s called where you live), it would be plain sailing. You have been judged by your peers to know what you are doing and be doing it well. Unfortunately, […]
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I wish it were different, too
In an ideal world, my job would be redundant. It is not an ideal world.
It’s okay to ask for help
There is nothing wrong with you. It’s normal to struggle sometimes.
The demands are what they are. The support is what it is. And neither is likely to be ideal.
Read More »How I help with writing
A hadn’t been publishing. He wrote regularly despite a full teaching load. But he wasn’t getting things finished. And he wasn’t submitting them. Writing was an intellectually satisfying process for A. In thinking about why he didn’t finish he realized that he wasn’t motivated by the product — an article or a book — but […]
Read More »Learning to use images
Moving from knowing that images do things words can do to actually using images well in presentations and other work is hard. I’ve learned a lot about that in the past year. For example, finding representational images after you’ve written the content is probably the hardest way to go about it.
I’m now figuring how to use images to help you be a better academic. If you want to help me test a new tool …
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A class provides structure
Now that so much information is available on the internet, this question arises more and more frequently. Why go to university? Why pay all that money to learn things you could learn on your own using resources available on the internet and in public libraries. Couldn’t you just do this stuff yourself? Perhaps with the […]
Read More »What are you going to do with that?
How many people have asked you this question? I bet you’ve lost count. It is such a common question, someone used it as the title of a book. About non-academic careers for PhDs, of course. (It’s a good book. Well worth it.) And it’s probably your number one source of anxiety while working towards your PhD and […]
Read More »Believe it or not, I do this for a living
I never would have imagined it were possible. Given that there was no internet when I was a teenager, running my own business over the internet is obviously not something I’ve wanted to do forever. In fact, running my own business at all only came to me as an option fairly late in the game. […]
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