A blog about PhD life, career decision-making, and information literacy.
“Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening”! This was the common greeting at this year’s iConference, which spanned over several time zones and took place virtually between 17-31 March 2021. A wide range of research topics were covered at the iConference, such as informetrics, archival studies, cybersecurity, and e-government, to name a few. There was … Continue reading Highlights from the 2021 iConference
Dr David Brazier and I are pleased to announce that we are now taking registrations for a set of three participative design workshops designed to enhance the informal learning of early career researchers in the hidden university curriculum. These online workshops build on previous work completed by David that proposed new methods for eliciting, recording, … Continue reading What are your unique information needs? Learning to navigate the hidden curriculum as an early career researcher
Last week, Hazel Hall and I delivered a workshop through Edinburgh Napier University’s Research, Innovation & Enterprise (RIE) office entitled “Work essential or extra workload? The value of creating a personal professional web presence”. The first part of this session was delivered by Hazel, who is an experienced researcher, blogger, and all-around advocate of the … Continue reading Work essential or extra workload? The value of creating a personal professional web presence
Yesterday, I was delighted to present at the CDI student conference on the topic of knowledge co-creation in career development. A copy of my slides can be accessed here. My supervisor Hazel Hall also blogged about the conference here. Many thanks to the Career Development Institute for hosting this session and for giving me a … Continue reading The CDI Scotland Student conference #CDIscotconf: a space to discuss changing career guidance practice
This blog post is the first part of a series of three blog posts on the topic of literature searching and writing a literature review for a PhD. Some of the advice presented here might also be applicable to students doing research at postgraduate level or any researchers undertaking large-scale research projects. What is a … Continue reading Making sense of the literature as a PhD student, Part 1: Literature searching
Time, time, time. It’s all about time, what we do with it, or what we don’t do with it. I’ve been hearing a lot about overwork and burnout in academia lately, so I felt compelled to also say something on the topic of time management! Here, I will share some of my thoughts on time … Continue reading Time management for researchers
In the movie “Yes Man” (2008), we see Carl Allen (Jim Carrey) say ‘yes’ to everything. Carl becomes more adventurous and open, and it quickly becomes apparent that there are many benefits to saying ‘yes’ and going with the flow. At the same time, by saying ‘yes’ indiscriminately, Carl gets himself in some less-than-ideal, albeit … Continue reading As a PhD student, should you be a ‘Yes Man’? Some thoughts on employability and the Vitae RDF
Have you ever wanted to have more hours in a day? Have you ever wanted to be in several different places all at once? Interested in time travel or superhuman productivity? Well, unless you found a way to bend the time-space continuum, these things are not possible yet! However, I think that virtual conferences* are … Continue reading Looking back on the EASST-4S virtual conference: Are virtual conferences here to stay?
Over the course of last week, I attended the ‘Evolving Education & Careers’ virtual international conference hosted by DMH Associates and sponsored by the Edge Foundation. Networking and session delivery were handled through a dedicated app called Whova. This conference comes at a time when careers work is undergoing rapid change. Well, to be fair, … Continue reading ‘Evolving Education and Careers’ virtual conference: Key takeaways for those interested in the current state of career guidance #EducationandCareers #CareerChat
So, I was looking at my organiser the other day, and I noticed that I had quite a lot of tasks ticked off ever since the start of my PhD (which was officially on the 1st of October 2020). Some were admin, some were research; most were all about getting organised and establishing routines. If … Continue reading What does one do in the first weeks of a PhD? 50 steps to on-boarding as a new PhD student
