It’s been a shamefully long time since I last posted, or carried out a 10 minute interview, for the blog. What better place to find willing recruits and interesting research to showcase than the largest annual gathering of geoscientists: the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting? For those of you who’ve been before, there is no doubt that attending the AGU Fall Meeting is a daunting experi ...[Read More]
How to survive your PhD – A free online course
“The Ph.D. is an emotional roller coaster, and how well students react to these emotional pressures is crucial to their success, ” says Inger Mewburn, of The Thesis Whisperer fame and Director of research training at the Australian National University. With the emotional and personal strain a PhD can cause, I couldn’t agree with Inger more. During my PhD journey, this was an aspect that I fe ...[Read More]
Help! I’m appearing as a scientific expert on TV
At the beginning of the year, the small village of Rutland, in the heart of the UK, was hit by a 3.8 Magnitude earthquake. The quake didn’t cause any significant damage or injuries, but hit the headlines as seismic activity is a bit of a novelty in the UK! In the wake of the quake, the UK press and media picked up the story and sought the opinions of experts to take part in interviews and give the ...[Read More]
Some handy tips towards stress-free PhD completion…
Laura and I both submitted our theses at the end of September after four years of intense work. We felt there’d be some value (nostalgic to ourselves, hopefully useful to others) in putting together some tips of our own now that we can look back on our achievements. There are loads of brilliantly-written and extremely useful posts providing advice on the pastoral side of undertaking a PhD, such as ...[Read More]
Making the Most of your PhD: Think about the next move
Welcome to the second post in this series of how to make the most of your PhD. If you missed what these posts are all about, check out last week’s post to get all the details! For this post, I wanted to talk about getting some generic (and very transferable, also known as soft) skills. They are the sort of thing any employer, whether you want to continue in an academic career or are thinking of ma ...[Read More]
Soliciting peer reviews from PhD students
This post does not discuss science per se but the topic is important from a personal point of view and hopefully useful to others in a similar position (i.e., PhD student currently putting together their first papers and hoping to learn more about the peer-review process). Feedback from those at a similar stage as well as more experienced members of academia is most welcome. The British Society fo ...[Read More]