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] Learn for the PhD with AI, an exclusive goodie, and reviewing doctoral well-being
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 help them avoid the biggest pitfalls leading to a weaker, de-skilled future -- which I think could be useful for PhD students as well (and as a reminder for myself!). This week, we also bring you a newsletter exclusive goodie: a guide to create your own learning projects, based on the principles of the aforementioned post (which we use in our course). And, for those of you more interested in doctoral well-being, a flashback to our latest post analyzing a recent review of the research on this crucial topic. Enjoy! New blog post: Learning for the PhD in the age of GenAIGenerative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT have been hailed as both a revolutionary resource and an apocalypse for education. Among graduate and doctoral students around me—and in my own everyday learning as a researcher—I see both futures playing out. How to use these tools to support learning as a budding researcher, rather than de-skill ourselves? This post reminds us that the doctoral journey is a learning journey and highlights a key aspect of any learning process, along with different ways we can engage in it. Then, I draw on these research-based ideas to outline (tentative) principles for learning effectively with (or without) these AI tools. Newsletter exclusive: A guide for learning projectsWe may agree on the principles and tips above, about learning with GenAI. But... how exactly do we put those principles into practice, to learn about a specific topic? In our course, we recommend students to design their own short "learning projects" (individually, or in groups): a sequence of learning activities of different kinds to engage our minds meaningfully with the topic. Below you can find a short guide to create such projects, including an example project and a catalogue of learning activities of different kinds we can use in our learning projects, some using AI, some not. Just for you, newsletter subscribers!
Flashback: Reviewing doctoral well-being research (study report)(Tweet-length gists of past posts, so that you don't have to read through the whole blog backlog) The widespread well-being challenges of the doctorate were the spark that started A Happy PhD. We analyzed a recent systematic literature review on the topic, to understand what is currently known about the topic: What does research say about doctoral well-being? Don’t be a workaholic, be active in your community, be passionate, remember it’s a process, and meet your advisor frequently. More well-being triggers at https://ahappyphd.org/posts/review-wellbeing/ May you learn well, be well! 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! 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...
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...