PhD impostor syndrome revisited
Impostor syndrome is that insidious feeling that you aren’t good enough or that you don’t belong and that you’re going to be “found out”.
And if you’re afraid of being found out, you’re likely to avoid taking risks or making mistakes. That then affects your ability to do research or to improve your skills, so effectively the part of you that feels like an impostor finds a way to make your fears come true.
The dangerous myth of the “independent researcher”
Many people think that the goal of a PhD is to become an “independent researcher”. While there’s some truth to this, it does not mean you should be trying to do everything alone.
How getting a PhD changed my life (and how it really didn’t)
Looking back on my PhD 15 years after finishing: how it changed my life, how it really didn’t and the lesson it’s taken me a long time to learn
"I can't contact my PhD supervisor until I have something to show"
By far, the most common cause of PhD failure (or extreme difficulty) I have seen is isolation and a lack of feedback from other academics.
Often, this is because a student is working remotely, but the problem can be compounded by the student thinking, "I can't contact my supervisor until I have something to show."
How to improve your academic writing, part 3: Structure
Understanding structure in academic writing can save you a huge amount of time
How to improve your academic writing, part 2; shorten the feedback cycle
If you’ve been in the habit of just getting words down and editing later, your temptation might be to rush on to the next section, do the next 1000 words and the next, and the next… But there’s a vital step, that so many people miss if all they think about is producing more.
How to improve your academic writing, part 1; Say less!
One of the reasons why writing is so difficult is that at every point in your writing there’s a vast range of possibilities in terms of subject matter, in terms of structure, in terms of style, sentence construction and word choice—all of which require decisions
How to cope with a problematic PhD supervisor
“Is there any system that protects PhD candidates from having a problematic supervisor? For example, any ways to make complaints? Or would complaints not help but make the relationship worse?”
How to manage anxiety and panic
While meditation and exercise can help you feel better in your situation, they won’t necessarily be enough to improve your situation.
Sometimes, we feel anxiety because there are real, tangible, practical issues we have to address, or decisions or changes we need to make. The more we avoid those issues, the worse, inevitably the anxiety will get.
Why you (probably) shouldn’t do a PhD
For most people, doing a PhD is a terrible idea.
Now I’m not saying that nobody should do a PhD- for some people it’s exactly the right path and I strongly believe in the value of academic research. But a lot of PhD students do it for the wrong reasons, without really understanding what they’re getting into, and they suffer as a result.
So why is it such a bad idea for most people? And who should do a PhD?
How to train your inner writing critic
It’s clearly a problem if your inner critic is stops you from writing anything at all, but the problem is not that you have an inner critic, but that it is badly trained. Perhaps, then, it is better to think about how to train your inner critic to give useful feedback rather than turning it off completely.
How to cope with PhD impostor syndrome
Impostors, by definition, hide their identity. In the context of a PhD, this means hiding any insecurity or weakness in knowledge; avoiding asking the "stupid question", avoiding mistakes, avoiding risk and avoiding difficulty. It is a state motivated by fear, by the avoidance of a negative outcome, but it actually makes the negative outcome more likely.
Planting seeds or putting out fires?
If you're putting out fires, you're dealing with the urgent, short-term problems, but potentially neglecting your longer-term success.
If you're planting seeds, you not only have to wait before getting the benefits, you also have to put in work over time to cultivate them. It's slow, but the earlier you start the greater the payoff in the long term.
What goes in the introduction, what goes in the conclusion?
It can feel like you’re just writing an overview of your research twice under different headings, so what do you put in the introduction and what do you put in the conclusion?
The secret to good academic writing
One of the most common pieces of writing advice is to “just get words down on the page”. In fact, the advice is so common that it’s often repeated without question.
While “just getting words down” appears to help in the short term, unless you know how to sort those words into some kind of logical order, filling hundreds of pages is just going to create a lot of stress later.
But if you understand structure, you can give your writing a logical order from the start, making it far easier to edit later…
How to build your bibliography from just one paper
Search engines aren’t the only way to grow your bibliography…
An easy way to update your literature review quickly
If it's been a while since you last looked at the literature (or a specific area of the literature), here is a very quick way to find recent relevant papers.
Your final PhD year: moving towards submission
The final year of your PhD is all about pushing towards submission of your thesis. In order to reach that point, you need to go through a process of consolidating and finalising the various aspects of your work.