Hey – Before I start, here are some upcoming events I’m doing at Cambridge University, which are open to the public: A lecture at Wolfson College, Cambridge on Tuesday 6 June at 5:30pm, which touches on themes from my new book with Simon Clews ‘Be visible or Vanish’. There’s an in-person option if you can get to Cambridge, and an online version if you can’t: you can book here. I’m giving a lecture about the PhD in uncertain times where I will talk about the latest data we have on the UK market for research skills, at Kings College, Cambridge on Monday 10 July, 5:30 – 7:30pm: you can book here ..read more

I’m on sabbatical for the next three months and have committed to doing a literature review on neurodiversity and PhD study. Ugh. I hate doing literature reviews. I’m just going to say it: most academic writing is BORING and doing a big review means reading lots of it. The thought of reading more than 200 papers in 3 months makes me want to poke my eyes out with a pen. The good news is I can use ChatGPT to help me write this review. There’s something of a moral panic around ChatGPT, or, as my twin sister amusingly calls it: ‘ChattieG’. We’ve heard much about the perils of misinformation and ho ..read more

Like many academics, I have too many things on. By ‘things’ I mean projects of all shapes and sizes, from ‘write a book on neurodiversity and the PhD’, to ‘Fix up the Bootcamp page on the ANU website’. Exhibit A: I’m going on Sabbatical in the UK from May to August. To minimise disruption to the team, I bunched my first semester of teaching into two months. At the same time I stupidly decided to do a new podcast series with my sister about the Apple TV show Severance: (it’s going to be a blast, you can listen to the teaser trailer and subscribe via your favourite pod platform here!). This ‘li ..read more

It’s been a busy month here at Thesis Whisperer HQ… I am doing #LazyPost this month by recycling a bit of my teaching content. This post is about organising yourself for a ‘binge writing’ session. While ‘snack writing’ (writing small amounts, consistently) is good practice, there comes a time when deadlines require the strict application of bottom to seat. These binge writing sessions are much better if you prepare well in advance. As I write this, I’m running a thesis bootcamp weekend at ANU, where we challenge people to write 20,000 words of their thesis. Long time readers may recall Liam Co ..read more

Writing a thesis or book is an enormous task that takes years and involves reading hundreds, sometimes thousands, of books, papers and articles. At the same time, you must produce your own words and make sure you don’t accidentally plagiarise other people. People end up with all kinds of home-brew solutions to solve this epic information management problem. Just like hooch, the quality of the home-brew information management solutions can vary enormously – either bringing joy or slowly killing you. As Peg Boyle Single wisely said ‘Collect notes, not articles’. I try to concentrate less on fili ..read more

Happy new year friends! They say how you spend NYE night sets the tone for the year. If that’s the case, I’ll be eating Indian takeaway with my girlfriends and going to bed at 9:30pm. I’m VERY ok with this plan after the eventful couple of years we’ve had. I followed up the quiet start with a quiet ‘going back to school’ activity: prepping my Bullet Journal for the new year. While I love my digital task manager Omnifocus, for the last couple of years I’ve been supplementing it with the Bullet Journal method (#BuJo) designed by Ryder Carroll. Doing part of my organising and planning work by han ..read more

A little content warning first: I talk about depression and anxiety in this post. If that’s not for you today, click away friend. I’ll see you another time. I have been trying to work out how to write this without sounding like a privileged white lady, but I can’t, so I’ll just say it: I am very tired. And I don’t just mean in the physical sense, although it’s true I am not always getting enough sleep. I’m talking about a weariness deep in the soul. A tiredness that puts you off going out about, doing things in the evenings after work. A tiredness that feels like this: It’s a tiredness that g ..read more

** Apologies to email subscribers – I accidentally sent a draft version of this post on Saturday. The fully edited piece is below. Thanks for your patience and understanding.** —————————– Before I start, big news! Long time readers will know that I have been working for years with a team here at ANU on PostAc: a job search engine, powered by machine learning, just for researchers. We have seven subscribers in Australia and are looking to expand internationally. We will soon start taking orders from UK universities for the PostAc service. You can watch a video about PostAc UK and sign up to get ..read more

Hello dear reader! It’s been a busy winter and I am suffering a bit of post-election exhaustion. Last month, For the first time in 12 years, I did not get around to doing a Thesis Whisperer post. While I felt bad about breaking such a long streak of self-imposed discipline, I consoled myself that the previous post was very long and still getting a lot of reads. The important thing is to get back on the horse, right? Sometimes a funny title comes into my head, I write it down and make a few scrappy notes, but don’t get much further. This post has been sitting in the archive, half-finished, for ..read more

Language warning. It’s fruity in here people! On the back door of the Greens office in Braddon, where I’ve been spending a lot of time lately, there’s a sticker with ‘unfuck the future’ right at eye height. This sticker made me chuckle each time I opened the office during this long election campaign. The election is over and, from my point of view, Australia did the right thing and voted to unfuck the future. A lot of work was done by thousands of people just like me, on the left and the right side of politics, to convince voters that the lack of government action on climate change is a real t ..read more