Rather than looking at your daily PhD existential crisis with dread, embrace it as part of your successful PhD journey. One of my favorite PhD Comics is when Celia looks at her watch, sees that it is time for her daily five-minute existential crises, and takes a brief break from her computer to tear out her hair in agony over
Read moreThe COVID-19 pandemic has changed the daily lives of Americans and citizens around the world who are practicing social distancing to help stem the novel coronavirus that causes the disease. For international students living abroad in host countries, the stress and anxiety can be even more unnerving than for those of us who are required to work or school from
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Congratulations, you have achieved candidacy! Now what? The first couple years of a doctoral studies are arduous but predictable: slogging through tough coursework, learning new theories and methods, juggling academic work with teaching or other responsibilities, attending seminars, and trying to figure out academic culture. After some core milestones (such as coursework, comprehensive exams, candidacy papers, etc.), you gain a
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Surviving your dissertation and the job market requires a secret sauce of excellent research, strong work ethic, and effective project management. Dissertation advisers typically focus on the first two ingredients. However, project management skills are equally important, and not just for MBA, MPA, MHA, and other terminal degree students who are training for managerial positions. In this series, we will
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In a painfully realistic PhD Comic series, a student receives his edited paper from his adviser whose “few tweaks” were a rewritten paper with his professor explaining, “it’s easier to rewrite it than to point out all the things you do wrong.” In discussing specific feedback, his adviser’s comments include using too many sentences, poor word choices, bad punctuation, and
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In an all-too-relatable PhD Comic series, Celia tackles her anxiety by making a list of everything she needs to accomplish and categorizing them by their level of importance. To her horror, she realizes that they are all important. In a state of panic, she does the dishes, organizes the desktop icons on her computer, and finally crawls underneath her desk
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Take Control of Your Meetings to Get the Just-in-Time Mentoring You Need You eagerly enter your adviser’s office for your quarterly committee meeting, ready to discuss your burning questions. You can’t decide between two dissertation topics– what is the best choice? You ran some regressions and have an estimated odds ratio of 38.2– that can’t possibly be right, is something
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