How to PhD - your academic survival guide

We're not huge fans of the word 'networking', but it is an important thing to learn during your PhD. But you don't have to be the loudest voice or super extroverted to network! No, all you need is to put yourself and your work out there for people to see, and there are many ways to do this. 

Here's a guide to all things networking and building your research profile- from your two, relatively introverted, hosts! 

"Being a supervisor?? Wait, but aren't I the one being supervised?" Yes! But don't pass up any opportunities to engage with supervising other Bachelor/Masters students during your PhD! There's so much value in being able to apply what you know from your own PhD experience in teaching and guiding the next generation!

In this episode, we'll cover all of the essentials to do with how to be a supervisor. 

Research proposals can be extremely daunting and it's easy to get lost in the process. Fortunately, we've been there before and we've got an episode packed with practical guidance on writing your own research proposals- both for a future PhD and for those that come after!

PhDs are difficult things! But don’t confuse difficulty with progress. Just because you might be facing challenges does not mean you’re not doing well- quite the opposite in fact! In this episode, we talk about the 5 key challenges we faced in our PhDs and how we went about dealing with them.

Posters are often only thought of in a conference context, but actually they can be so useful at all stages of your PhD. They put you in the right mindset for thinking about your work in a concise and effective way and are a brilliant thing to create before say, a viva or presentation. 

This week, we'll give you all the details on how to create a poster, from the first key questions to ask yourself all the way to actually designing and transporting your poster!

Have you ever felt lost conducting a literature review? How do you know you've covered enough of the literature? That's exactly what systematic reviews aim to solve by giving you a super structured process to follow.

In this episode, we're diving it why you might want to consider systematic reviews and crucially- how do you actually do one! It's time consuming, but it's not too confusing once you know how!

This is one of the big things in the academic world, but unfortunately there's very little guidance on what exactly it is and how you can get involved. In this episode, we'll take you through everything you need to know about peer review and why it's something that can be very helpful for you!

We're back after our break and we're wrapping up our two-part episode on interview studies. This time we're tackling the practical things you need to consider when actually running your interview studies. 

Hello everyone, a warm welcome to all of our new listeners and of course all of you who have been with us since the early days. 

It’s been a long time since we spoke! Firstly, we want to apologise to all of you listening here for not updating you all on what’s happening with the show. We had sent a message out on Twitter and Instagram, but of course, not all of you have access to or use those platforms- and we just didn’t realise that, so that’s why we’re posting this message today. 

As I’m sure you noticed, we haven’t posted an episode in a couple of weeks.  We had to pause the show for a few weeks. Last month in August, our baby son passed away and it’s been a really difficult time for us. So we took time off work and really focussed on our wellbeing and grieving. 

But we’re now doing much better and we’re ready to get the show going again. In the meantime, the show has continued to grow and we’re so excited. We’ve grown to over 1000 followers on Twitter- so thank you!!

So stay tuned- we’ll have an episode out in the next week or two. In the meantime, good luck to everyone who’s just started their PhDs! We’ll be here to support and get you all through what will be some of the most exciting years of your life!

In the meantime, if you have any questions, you can email us at [email protected], or follow us on twitter and instagram @howtophdshow, for all of the latest updates.

Take care and we’ll see you all very soon!

Interview studies can give you a huge amount of valuable data- if done correctly! In this first part of a two-part episode, Arun & Julia give you all the details on why you might want to consider doing an interview study and how you go about preparing to do one! In part 2 next week, we'll talk about how you actually run the study and how to go about analysing your data!