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] Nurturing a research mission, and preloading brainstorm walks
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 (II): Mission, a System, and a Case Study (book extract)In the previous post we established that a PhD provides plenty of opportunity to develop mastery and (in many cases) autonomy. Yet, these properties alone do not always ensure a remarkable and satisfying research career. In this second part of the book extract from Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You, we look at an additional piece in the puzzle—having a “mission”—and summarize the book’s system of practices to develop both mastery and mission, which can be applied directly during the PhD. I conclude with some critiques of the book and a case study to test whether these ideas map to my own research career thus far. Flashback: Quickie: Preloading productive meditation (book extract)(Tweet-length gists of past posts, so that you don't have to read through the whole blog backlog) A key practice in the book above is to do regular "brainstorming walks" (called "productive meditation" in Newport's Deep Work) to work out difficult or creative parts of our research. This little post describes how I prepare those walks to make them more effective, given my often-faulty memory:
Difficulties finding time for your important creative research tasks? Try preloading a "productive meditation" with unfinished ideas and squeeze a few more hours of creativity out of a busy week. More at https://ahappyphd.org/posts/preloading/ May your creativity never stop! 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! 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...
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...