I was gripped by self-doubt. I couldn’t possibly show anything to my supervisor. What if I was ‘found out’? And so I read and read, but still I didn’t write. And then I had a conversation with a friend who asked what I had written. “Nothing,” I said. “Everything I write is shit.” “Sure,” she […]
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Steven Clough is a mature, part-time, self-funded Ph.D. student who has worked for 30 years and is researching Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
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Dr Nathan Ryder is a freelance skills trainer and consultant. He completed his Ph.D. in maths at the University of Liverpool in 2008. He works exclusively with postgraduate researchers and research staff. Last year he started the Viva Survivors podcast, and in January 2013 he published his first e-book, Fail Your Viva. Find him on […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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EDITING ESSAY COLLECTIONS Last week we looked at the basics of being at the authorial end of academic publishing via the writing of book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. This week, I’d like us to turn the tables, as it were, and consider some of the essential aspects of taking on the role of (co-)editor […]
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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 […]
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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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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 […]
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Several of the modules my department offers its undergraduate students have, as part of their assessment strategy, an online participation element, either via blogs, or – and this is what this post is concerned with – discussion boards within our virtual learning environment. Rather naively perhaps, I assumed that students would appreciate this “innovative” mode […]
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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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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 […]
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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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Here you can find a PDF copy of my CV which I update regularly. You can find more details about most of my publications, papers, teaching, and other activities on this website.
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According to HESA statistics for 2011/12, over 45% of UK postgraduates carry out their studies part-time (and 60.8% of part-time postgraduates are female). [1] While there seems to be little to no data on how many – part-time or full-time – are self-funding their postgraduate degree, anecdotal evidence – including the posts which will appear […]
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