This article is contributed by Dr Lizz Ultee based on their recent paper with Alex Robel and colleagues: For whom and by whom is glaciology? Robel et al., 2024. How do glaciologists choose what to work on? Group leaders more or less choose our own research questions according to what interests us. Many of us, …
Day 2 Today is another day in the office. On office days I’m usually busy with meetings, teaching, emails and administration. I try and keep a couple of days clear a week for more thoughtful work, and try and work from home, but it’s not always possible. 0800: I’m in the office bright and early, …
Day 1 This is an example of one typical day at work for a mid-career academic. This semester I’m teaching a couple of undergraduate courses, a postgraduate course, and teaching a field class abroad. I’m supervising 5 PhD students and 1 MRes student, and am currently Director of Research and REF2029 lead for the Department …
Friends, I’m really excited to say that I will be joining the University of Vienna for 5 months from September 2022 to January 2023 as the Ida Pfeiffer Professor, a visiting professor position in the Faculty of Earth Sciences, Geography and Astronomy. I’ll be taking research leave from my university to allow me to take …
I’m really happy to say that I’ll be joining the Juneau Icefield Research Project (JIRP) this summer (2022), traversing the icefield with a whole group of amazing people. I’m really excited to have the opportunity to visit the icefield, and spend some time conducting research and teaching and training early career scientists over the icefield. …
RHUL’s Geography department hosted their first polar pride event yesterday (18/11/21) hosted by Bethan Davies. The event brought together staff and students to celebrate TLGBQAI+ polar scientists, where we enjoyed cake and discussed the importance of polar pride through a Q&A with PhD students Dan Parkes and Laura Boyall. The first polar pride took place …
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 …
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 …
