This post is about the ‘Handbibliothek’ (German: hand library), that part of the library where frequently-used books are shelved easily ‘to hand’. At your writing desk, you will need to build a personal Handbibliothek that will be exactly calibrated to your individual research project.
I cannot believe, after all my to-do list and planning your time blog posts, I’ve never actually talked about how to break down a big project, set goals and then plan to meet them: an essential aspect of doing a PhD thesis… Partly because when we teach this in a workshop we know there is so much diversity in the ways that different people achieve the same outcome
Focus is a skill you can learn, and there are some basic steps that can get you started. If you are supervising or advising someone who struggles with focus, you will also find this advice useful.
How do you differentiate between work that is hard because it’s complex and challenging, vs work that requires a large volume of labour?
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.
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.
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.
Western logical structures, which developed from the Ancient Greeks and were then developed by the Church Fathers and Enlightenment philosophers, tend to be what we
(I hope you sang the title to the Friends’ theme tune.) It can be a challenge to juggle lots of different projects and tasks. One
A couple of people in my wider circle have recently asked me about how to get started on a PhD proposal. This advice is mostly
