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] Impostors, supervisors, and getting into the writing weeds
Hi Reader!In our comeback to (somewhat) regular posting, we are trying out a little experiment -- the "study brief": a new kind of post, in which I briefly summarize a recent research study that I found interesting and which may be relevant for your "happy PhD" journey. Concretely, we delve on a recent study on important factors for doctoral student well-being. To contrast this high-level view of the doctorate, we also bring you a flashback that gets into the nitty-gritty details of how to write better prose for your research papers. Enjoy! :) New blog post: Impostors and supervisors - Personal and contextual factors in a happy PhD (study brief)In the blog we have written a lot about doctoral well-being, from different angles... but what personal and contextual factors seem to affect it? A recent study out of Italy asked 216 students about this and about challenges to their well-being. In this post, we summarize the study and its findings, connecting these results with prior ideas in the blog, and how we can apply them in our own doctorate journey to find better well-being. Flashback: Getting into the weeds of writing(Tweet-length gists of past posts, so that you don't have to read through the whole blog backlog) I wrote this post some years after our classic writing research papers series, noticing another hard part of writing papers (going from the paper's outlined ideas to the final prose). This is a topic that could fill a whole book and feel overwhelming, so instead I just gave a few ideas to get you started:
Getting negative feedback about your paper (or dissertation) drafts? You may be missing a deep sentence-by-sentence editing. One trick: read your prose aloud. This and pointers to more editing tips at https://ahappyphd.org/posts/weeds-writing/ May you never get tangled in the weeds of feeling like an impostor! 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 milestone, 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! We are still trying to come back to some sort of blogging and newsletter regularity over here. This week(s), we bring you two very related posts: a new one about restarting a long-term project (especially, thesis work) after a long stretch of not working on it. We also bring you a classic post that explains a lot of the underlying psychology of how these thesis productivity slumps appear and are perpetuated (or not): the role of avoidance in much of our self-sabotaging during the...
Hi Reader! Whoa, it's been a while! After almost six months of not being able to write for the blog or this newsletter (more on that in the next post), you may have forgotten about A Happy PhD. To kickstart my own newsletter habit (and hopefully, your habit of reading it), here is a short one: a little nugget about how you can use AI to "talk to the blog" (or listen to it) about a certain topic... and a flashback to our classic end-of-year post. Do a yearly review, I'm doing one myself and...
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...