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] Is doctoral productivity bad? How many PhD students have problems? And we go to LAK24
Hi Reader!As we race towards Easter (in case you're in a country where that's a thing), we bring you a new post questioning productivity as something to aim for in our PhDs - and what we mean in the blog when we say we try to be "productive". We also bring a short post from the past trying to answer the question: how many doctoral students worldwide suffer from the mental health and dropout problems we often talk about? And I travel to a live event: a scientific conference where I will meet and give advice to doctoral students in my field. New Post: Is Doctoral Productivity Bad?In this blog I have written a lot about doctoral productivity tools and advice. Yet, many doctoral students out there may also think that the focus on productivity is exploitative, dehumanizing and counter to the very spirit of the scientific endeavor. Should we reject the quest for being productive altogether? Should we “quiet quit” our PhDs? This post tries to clarify what I mean by (doctoral) productivity, which may not be the “narrow productivity” view you find in certain research policy or journalistic articles about the topic. That way, you can decide whether it makes sense for you to follow my advice, or to get it elsewhere. This post may be familiar to you, as we did an early preview of it in the newsletter a few weeks ago. Flashback: Quickie: How many PhD students are anxious or depressed (or will drop out) worldwide?(Tweet-length gists of past posts, so that you don't have to read through the whole blog backlog) This short post (from back in 2021) has been one of the cornerstones of my motivation to continue writing in the blog and this newsletter:
In the blog we talk a lot about the dropout and mental health problems of doctoral students. But... how big is the problem? It turns out, pretty big. Hundreds of thousands of people big. More details at https://ahappyphd.org/posts/how-many-phd-students/
Event: Going to the Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference (LAK24), March 18-22, Kyoto (Japan)Long time readers of the blog know that I recommend going to scientific conferences, as a great tool to get the pulse of your research community, present your work and, especially, to get to know "the real people behind the papers". Next week I will be at the LAK24, co-hosting its doctoral consortium (check here if you don't know what that is), a workshop on culture and values in learning analytics, and generally geeking out about how to use technology (especially data analytics and artificial intelligence) to support teachers and learners -- including doctoral students, we have a small contribution about that in another workshop as well. So, if you happen to be those days around Kyoto (especially, if you are attending the conference), do not hesitate to drop by and say hi! May you be productive... in alignment with your values! 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! As we rush towards (or just after) Spring breaks and Easter holidays, we may be thinking about all those thesis tasks we wanted to get done before the summer. To help us be productive without burning out, here are two purposeful doctoral productivity tips: one psychological (a new mantra I use a lot myself lately) and one tactical (a classic post on how to schedule time for hard PhD work). Enjoy! New blog post: Monday Mantra: Nothing meaningful without discomfort We spend a lot of...
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...
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...