Looking for tips, tricks and advice to finish your doctoral thesis on time and with high spirits? Baffled by how little information is out there about how to support PhD students to become independent researchers? As an ex-doctoral student now co-supervising five students, I feel your pain. “A Happy PhD” is a blog (and a series of doctoral/supervisory courses) where I distil what has worked for me, as well as recent research in doctoral education, psychology and many other fields. Join our mailing list and get short doctoral advice in you inbox every week!
[AHappyPhD] A tiny feedback idea, and a hypothesis to structure your day
Hi Reader!The summer has come in full force (heatwaves, I'm looking at you!) here in the Northern hemisphere. Maybe now the teaching and other obligations are slowly receding, and many of you are rushing to finish research studies and papers before a much-needed holiday/break. This week's newsletter brings two simple but powerful tips that may be relevant in such a season: a new post about managing feedback in multi-author paper writing; and a flashback to a post where I describe a pet theory I have about how to sequence our activities in a workday. Enjoy! New Post: Tiny idea: Feedback options, not checkpointsCo-writing a paper, especially beyond one or two co-authors, can become a protracted process. If, on top of that, you try to have multiple feedback cycles (as we recommend), co-authoring a paper can feel like swimming in molasses. This brief post describes how the most effective PhD students I know handle this kind of feedback situation. (NB: This post may be familiar to long-time newsletter subscribers, as it was featured as a newsletter exclusive last year). Flashback: The Create/Consume Hypothesis: A simple rule for more effective and valuable PhD work(Tweet-length gists of past posts, so that you don't have to read through the whole blog backlog) As I prepare for an upcoming blog post on attention, I took the time to revise one of my proto-theories about what is the most effective way to sequence activities in a researcher's workday (in my experience, at least):
Is your workday a series of emails, meetings and social media leaving you drained and unsatisfied? You may be ordering your activities the wrong way: Create first, consume later. Read more at https://ahappyphd.org/posts/create-consume/ May you get to consume timely feedback, on all your creations! Did this content help you? Hit reply and send us feedback (I cannot reply to all the emails we get, but I do read all of them), buy us a coffee, or help us spread the word! Forward this email to a friend you think may find this kind of advice useful. If you are reading this and you have not joined the newsletter yet, you can subscribe and get exclusive access to a worksheet to make the strategic plan towards your next dissertation goal, in the button below:
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A Happy PhD
Looking for tips, tricks and advice to finish your doctoral thesis on time and with high spirits? Baffled by how little information is out there about how to support PhD students to become independent researchers? As an ex-doctoral student now co-supervising five students, I feel your pain. “A Happy PhD” is a blog (and a series of doctoral/supervisory courses) where I distil what has worked for me, as well as recent research in doctoral education, psychology and many other fields. Join our mailing list and get short doctoral advice in you inbox every week!
Hi Reader! Wow, this summer hiatus has gotten long! Between the summer holidays, the new season of school-kid viruses, and a rough start of the academic year (redesigning our research methodologies course to make them AI-ready), it's been two months already. Indeed, I've been thinking a lot lately about generative AI (GenAI) and how "kids these days" (both undergrads and master students) seem to use it for learning. I ended up writing a new post about it: a guide for learning with GenAI, to...
Hi Reader! I hope the summer is treating you kindly—and that you've carved out space for some well-deserved holidays. Before I disappear on mine, I’ve used the slower pace of this season to wrap up our two-part post on advice for cultivating a satisfying research career. In this issue, we also revisit a short piece on a little trick I use frequently to be more effective and efficient at a key practice from that post: brainstorming walks. Enjoy! New blog post: A PhD So Good It Can't Be Ignored...
Hi Reader! As we dive right into the summer, I'm trying to come back to a more regular blog and newsletter posting rhythm. In today's newsletter, we bring you a new blog post extracting lessons for doctoral students (also useful for other researchers!) from a classic career advice book. We also flash back to another post about how to change our ways of working to better execute our PhD activities, overcoming the pressures of our everyday lives. New blog post: A PhD So Good It Can't Be Ignored...