Having now been lecturing for a few years, I’ve had the opportunity and time to think about what kind of lecturer I want to be. I wrote this down a while ago but decided to share it now – because thinking about and sharing best practice makes us all better teachers, and because ECRs just …
There is often a lot of doom and gloom in Academia. People discuss the workload, the work-life balance, and the difficulty in taking maternity leave or having a family. For example, this recent piece in The Guardian highlights one professor’s less-than-positive experience of having children as an academic. The Times Higher Ed writes about the …
Last autumn, I had two great pieces of news. The first was that I had been awarded a small grant to conduct three weeks’ fieldwork in Chile. The second was that I was pregnant. I was obviously immediately interested in other people’s stories about fieldwork while pregnant. I could find only a few blogs about …
I’m delighted to have been awarded a £3000 Software Sustainability Fellowship by the Software Sustainability Institute. This promises to be a great collaboration and I’m excited to be working with the SSI to promote sustainable software practices. I plan to use the Fellowship funds to host a Software Carpentry Workshop at RHUL, and to attend …
A position on a funded PhD studentship in the environmental sciences (including Geography and Geology) has never been easy, but in these days of funding cuts and university and RCUK (Research Council UK) reorganisations, it’s ever more difficult to get PhD funding. It’s competetive and every studentship may have hundreds of applicants. Here’s a guide …
Career to date This week (Feb 2014), it’s five years since I had my viva. Rather like finishing my PhD originally, I feel like I’ll celebrate this anniversary several times (five years since submission, since viva, since corrections accepted, since graduation, etc.). I guess this means that I’m no longer an early career researcher, and …
It is a good idea, at the close of one year, to review the past 12 months and to reflect on accomplishments, skills developed and lessons learned. Inspired by similar posts by Jon Tennant and Martin Eve, I thought that I would also write a summary of my activities and achievements in 2013, just for …
Why do I need a post-doctoral position? In an era when PhD students are rising in number and the amount of highly qualified early career scientists is huge, competition for post-docs are intense. These fixed-term research positions, which can be thought of as apprenticeships, are essential for scientists wishing to move to permanent positions in …
At some point in the journey to the PhD, it is time to stop experimentation, stop data collection, stop fieldwork, and consider how to convert this huge pile of data into a PhD. It’s not easy. No one said it would be easy. But it is achievable. Here are some coping strategies that I used …
People often ask me how I find the time to update and maintain this website. The truth is, I make time for outreach in a number of ways.
