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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Editing Essay Collections & Special Journal Issues

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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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 […]

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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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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 […]

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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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Academic Job Applications

It is notoriously difficult to advise people on how to get shortlisted for an academic job. In the end, someone can satisfy all of the relevant criteria but not get shortlisted simply because someone else satisfies them to a greater degree. The reality is that not all ‘minimally qualified’ candidates can be interviewed; this is […]

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