In my PhD methods class, our professor asked us to pick something that inspired us — it could be a song, a research article, a movie, a book chapter — make a brief presentation on it and on how it inspired us in our work. Inspiration can come from unexpected sources and feed us in …
Category Archives: Academic life
A student or a scholar
One of the things I discovered about myself during the past year is that I’m a student, not a scholar. I’ve always thought of myself as a “lifelong student,” but I’m not sure I really understood what that meant till recently. In my view, a master’s candidate is a student, a PhD candidate is a …
The end is nigh…
Of my master’s degree progress, that is. I took my comprehensive exam on Friday. At SILS, that is writing 6-8 pages on one of two essay questions that are emailed to you at the start of the day. You have until 3:30pm to finish the task. I started mine at about 10 am and wrapped …
Summarizing the past year
Sorry to disappoint my skeptically inquiring readers, but I love reading my weekly Freewill Astrology post. Rob Brezsny’s Libra posts for the last three weeks have swirled around the idea of a cycle ending, taking stock, and looking ahead. Here’s how his Aug 12, 2010, reading put it: If you and I were sitting face …
From dr to mr
During my single year in PhD-land, my primary focus of research was on myself.
Fall 2009 chicken
Taking a leaf from Havi’s Friday Chicken, this post will review the semester just past, but with a few additional headings. The Hard I never got around to writing all the blog posts documenting my semester, its ups and downs—which is one of the reasons I started the blog, so that it could serve as …
The bones beneath the skin
A few months ago, I was struck by this tweet from HiroBoga. For whatever reason, a circuit snapped in my head and I Got It. All my little productivity obsessions and systems were all about creating my own infrastructure: my calendar, my to-do list, my inbox, my habits, all of it. If I were to …
Downstream, Upstream
One of the ways to make sure a change in your life sticks is to make what you want to do so easy to do, you can’t avoid it. Another way is to adjust your environment so that going back to the old way is more difficult. Not given to easy solutions, I suppose, I …
My future is assured
Vaynerchuk tells anecdotes, but his main activities veer more into the uncool profession of teaching. In the above-linked interview he admits to being a “class clown,” and I have found in my twenty years of teaching that that one characteristic is a better predictor of who ends up a teacher in life than any other. …
Writing the Lit Review for Research Methods
I recently finished a pretty big, for me, literature review that totaled about 17 pages, including the title page and two pages of references. Here are some scattered thoughts and lessons learned, at my customarily hideous length: I saw the wisdom of The Scholarly Cassidy’s advice to begin the search haphazardly. I spent much early …
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