The Twilight Zone: After the PhD, Before the Academic Job

You’re close to submitting your PhD, to passing your viva voce examination with flying colours, and to be awarded your doctorate. At various stages in these final months of your existence as a PhD student certain scary thoughts – of the practical kind – enter your mind repeatedly and persistently. When will my university email […]

Read More »

When to Say No: Peer-Review Culture & Working for Free

Many of you will have been following debates about the amount of free labour many academics – and particularly postgraduate and early-career researchers – provide almost on a daily basis. Much more persuasive and articulate writers than me have written about this issue on their blogs, in higher education sections of newspapers, and other online […]

Read More »

Academic Job Interviews

Academic job interviews can take a variety of forms, and I’ve experienced a few different kinds of job interview – both from the perspective of a candidate, as well as from the perspective of a member of the interview panel. As with any public speaking engagement, preparation is essential and managing your nerves on the […]

Read More »

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 […]

Read More »

Writing Ph.D. Proposals

The second season of The New Academic returns us, after several requests, right to the beginning of every Ph.D. student’s journey – the Ph.D. proposal. This post is dedicated to tips and thoughts on what makes a good Ph.D. proposal that is likely to win over your potential supervisor and perhaps funders, though (not) securing […]

Read More »

Me, Myself & Social Media: Some Reflections

In 2012 I was finally persuaded – by myself rather than anyone else – to join the world of social media beyond Facebook in the form of tweeting and blogging, mainly to explore its uses for academics, in particular postgraduate students (see @Nadine_Muller and The New Academic). It seems appropriate, therefore, to spend a few […]

Read More »

Publishing Articles & Book Chapters

So far, we’ve looked at how to communicate a topic verbally, in front of conference audiences and students. What I’d like to consider in this post is how to begin publishing your research in writing, be it as a book chapter in an edited collection or as an article in a peer-reviewed journal. It’s important […]

Read More »

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 […]

Read More »

Organising Academic Conferences

The prospect of planning an academic event often causes scholars’ faces to contort into shapes expressing mixtures of panic and dread, or – much less often – excitement and joy. Running a conference is largely an administrative and – quite obviously – organisational task rather than an intellectual exercise, and many of the processes involved […]

Read More »

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 […]

Read More »

Peer Reviewing & Book Reviews

Up until now we’ve taken a closer look at presenting, teaching, writing and editing, and, staying within the realm of publishing, in this post we turn to two final aspects of this area: the challenges of acting as a peer reviewer and of writing book reviews. It is likely that you will have a chance […]

Read More »

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.

Read More »