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If I could distil 4.5 years of a PhD into a 4.5 minute song, it would be a tune I half-heard one morning at the gym. I hadn’t heard it before, and I was sufficiently…
Mentoring is something everyone has to do in academia and the truth of the matter is that not everyone is a good advisor. The supervisor-student relationship is a…
  • Guest Author
  • May 31, 2019
The past few months have been, well, predictable and unexciting. Transitioning from fieldwork — and a nine-to-five job — was, and still is, draining. Post-fieldwork…
Today marks one year since I touched down on Jordanian soil to begin PhD fieldwork. And it also happens to be my 25th birthday. And guess what? Both of these markers…
When we just met, I was so in love. I wanted to be with you, gather data and write papers for you. I wanted to “science” with you and spent many of my waking hours…
  • Guest Author
  • May 30, 2019
No, I don’t mean that PhD life and research are the spawn of evil and researchers are like Death Eaters using their skills to destroy the world as we know it. What I…
I had the viva part of my Early Stage Assessment yesterday and I’m relieved to say that I passed. Everyone was telling me that no one fails and it’d be fine, that I’d…
In my 20s, I was a devoted student of art history who waffled between going to graduate school for art history or maybe going for something like nursing. To my dismay,…
One of the things I’ve found challenging in graduate school is the sheer number of things I need to know, and also, how much to know about each thing. My dilemma is: do…
I first stumbled across astronomy by reading Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time,’ and countless documentaries on the Discovery channel. I was fascinated by it…
  • Guest Author
  • May 30, 2019