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] Should you do a PhD? And some useful doctoral productivity mindset shifts
Hi Reader!This week, we continue our "alternative productivity" series of new blog posts with one about an underdiscussed issue in the (doctoral) productivity literature: the mindset with which we approach tasks, systems and to-do lists in the doctorate. Also, we flash back to a post looking at the origin of many of our ailments, by discussing whether or not one should do a PhD at all (hint: of course, it depends -- but on what?). New Post: Productivity as Avoidance, or How Not to Think about Doctoral Productivity (book extract)If you are a doctoral student struggling to move your dissertation forward, especially in the face of additional jobs, teaching, family, or other obligations, the thought of becoming more productive can be very appealing – to the point of becoming an obsession. After our review of (somewhat caricaturesque) doctoral productivity and anti-productivity arguments, in this post I summarize some of the ideas in Oliver Burkeman’s recent book, Four thousand weeks, which I have found very helpful to reach a balance between my own productivity obsessions and the abandoning of all hope of being any good at my daily research activities. Flashback: Big PhD questions: Should I do a PhD?(Tweet-length gists of past posts, so that you don't have to read through the whole blog backlog) One of the most underrated posts in the blog, this article goes through the thought process I'd follow to decide whether to start a doctoral degree or not, from my experience being around doctoral students and supervisors in academia for 15+ years:
Should you do a PhD at all? Think about your envisioned career path, consider relevant (but sometimes underpublicized) factors, and ponder whether you'd like to undergo a transformation. Read more at https://ahappyphd.org/posts/should-i-do/ and send it to anyone close to you facing this fork on the road.
May you never regret having decided to do a PhD! 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...