How do you differentiate between work that is hard because it’s complex and challenging, vs work that requires a large volume of labour?
Category: Research Skills
Should you love your PhD?
You might love your PhD. Or you might have been told you are supposed to love your PhD. And love is weird, and complicated. PhDs are messy and complicated. Let’s talk about feelings.
When talking in seminars makes you feel like you don’t belong
Some workplaces and research cultures explicitly or implicitly run so that every conversation is actually a battle for airtime, and it’s common to try to sabotage other people’s chances. We should be working towards the exact opposite: energising, authentic, worthwhile, academic conversations. That’s what we love about getting together with our nerd pals.
When reading makes you feel like an imposter
What these students show is they see reading as an intelligence test. (To be fair, they probably learned this from school.) As a graduate student, they have been a ‘smart’ person all their life, but maybe now they are not smart, or not smart enough.
What is a ‘logical progression’ and how do I make one?
Western logical structures, which developed from the Ancient Greeks and were then developed by the Church Fathers and Enlightenment philosophers, … More
Planning your day, your week, your month… or even your year
(I hope you sang the title to the Friends’ theme tune.) It can be a challenge to juggle lots of … More
Getting started on your PhD proposal
A couple of people in my wider circle have recently asked me about how to get started on a PhD … More
The Insider’s view from the Library: 7 things I bet you didn’t know librarians could help you with.
Research Degree Insiders doesn’t normally do guest posts, but this was a special exception. While I have worked in jobs … More
How to fix slow progress
Your progress might feel slow, but that might just be the normal speed of trying to learn new things, or experimenting (and … More
How do you get from “pre-research” to search, and then research?
Last time I posted about “pre-research”, I talked about moving from pre-research into searching and then researching for a literature review. I … More
