Top Tips by Alison Phipps (University of Sussex)

Academia is a wonderful profession, but being a PGR or ECR these days is tough. There are fewer jobs and the structures and demands are changing – great in terms of adding accountability to ‘old school’ models, but also creating a lot of pressure, especially for junior staff. I was an ECR in the mid-2000s […]

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Beginning University Teaching

Like conference papers, teaching is something that you may well be expected to begin early on in your career as a researcher, most likely from the second year of your Ph.D. onwards, though rarely earlier than this. It is needless to say that there are numerous teaching strategies out there, and that their suitability depends […]

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Giving Conference Presentations

No matter if as part of a seminar or a postgraduate conference at your own university, as part of your job interview, or as a requirement for your annual progress review as a doctoral student, at some point in your academic life you will – for better or worse, some might say – be asked […]

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About My Blog & Me

This blog is about academia and me. It’s about academia and you. It’s about sharing my experiences of my profession, and about sharing knowledge and skills which are too often taken for granted. It’s about those academic voices which are either not heard at all, or are not heard enough. It’s about challenging dominant ideas of what academics should look like. It’s about redefining what it takes to be an academic and how academics are expected to present themselves, their lives, and their work. It’s about making ourselves and our profession simultaneously vulnerable and stronger, so that we can help change what makes us feel inadequate, ashamed, or unprofessional. So that we can help make academia more inclusive.

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