Blog

Research Degree Voodoo

Boy in voodoo fetish market
Lome, Togo
by Dominik Schwartz

So, I don’t know about you, but embarking on an academic career felt like an entry into a foreign country.  Not just like crossing over the border from, I don’t know, France to Belgium; but entering a strange and difficult land.  A land that, it turned out, not only had a different language and a different kind of currency (cultural capital, anyone?), but a whole range of customs and taboos that I didn’t know.

I thought I’d lived here for a long time.  I’d been a student, and a good student.  I’d done an MA.  I knew how to use a library, how to talk about post-Marxisms, how to use footnotes.  But no, there was a whole load of stuff I didn’t yet know how to do, and no-one who was there could tell me how to do it either.  They threw you in at the deep end, and you had to sink or swim.  When you ‘got it’, you succeeded.  If you didn’t get it…

Anyway, since then I successfully gained my own PhD in three years, helped hundreds of research students to gain theirs in the UK and Australia.  I have asked scores of students and academics basic questions:

  • How do you write?
  • What do you mean by critical engagement?
  •  Do you ever use Wikipedia? (really?)
  • How do you take notes?
  • Do you read everything in the book you are citing?

Here are the secrets, the tricks behind the hocus pocus, the guidebook, the map, the dictionary to this other land. This is Research Degree Voodoo–Uncovered.

SHARE

Succeeding in a Research Higher Degree

Doing a Research Higher Degree (like a PhD) is hard, but lots of people have succeeded and you can too. It’s easier if you understand how it works, this blog gives you the insider view.

Contact

Related Posts

The blog is back

Not only is Writing Well and Being Well for your PhD and Beyond now in to my publishers, but we have a publication date and a preorder link.

Read More

The story of my thesis

If you have ever been to one of my workshops in the last decade, you will probably have done this warm up. In fact, if you came to a multi-day writing retreat I ran, you would have done this at the beginning of each day. It is the most powerful, most flexible, simplest tool in my writing tool box.

Read More

How to unstick your reading list

As I was getting to the end of the recent book, I was buying books at my usual pace but not reading them (as that brainspace was completely taken up with reading my own draft or references for the draft).

Now the book is in and the summer has started, I felt excited to dive into all these books but I also felt stuck. I couldn’t get into gear, let alone find my groove.

So I rummaged around in my toolbox, and came up with this list of techniques. None of them are perfect, but little by little we are turning the dial back to reading.

Read More

Get the latest blog posts