PhD Talk

In today's episode, Eva interviews the podcast co-host for season 3: Phil Creswell. Phil has a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin, a Master of Social Sciences and a PhD from Uppsala University in Sweden. His PhD dissertation Chains of Trust: Networks of Persistent Resistance in Digital Activism is an ethnography of the hacktivist scene in (and around) Anonymous and its activism that looks at participation and collaboration in risky and costly activism online. We talk about Phil's career path so far, and what it is like to do a PhD in Sweden.

His research interests have tended to coalesce around social networks and social theory. Currently, he’s working on a book chapter about the Pirate Movement in Sweden, a paper with a collaborator about environmental activism, and trying to survive an intensive adjunct teaching position. We learn more about Phil's research as well as how he landed teaching positions after the PhD.

He will begin a new position at the University of Gothenburg as an Assistant Professor with a focus on teaching sociology to teacher students. We learn about the process of applying for this position, and what's coming up next for Phil.

He is also an increasingly distant figurehead for a highly successful metal review blog and all around nerd.

I asked ChatGPT how I can reduce my workload as a professor, and I have Some Opinions on that. Here’s what AI recommended me (in italic), and what I think about that (regular).

As a professor, reducing your workload can be challenging due to the many responsibilities you have. 

You bet, AI, there’s a lot on my plate.

However, here are a few tips that may help:

Bring it on…

1. Prioritize tasks: Make a list of your tasks and prioritize them based on importance and urgency. Focus on the most important tasks first. Yes, prioritizing is important – it’s the only way we can make time for writing. But we need a bit more time management tools than just listing everything and adding priority categories to it. While the Urgent-Important Matrix can be helpful to evaluate how we spend our time and what we focus on, it is more a tool for evaluating if we are working on our priorities and not so much a tool that helps us to find time for these priorities.
2. Delegate tasks: If you have teaching assistants or administrative staff, delegate tasks to them to reduce your workload. I don’t have TAs nor RAs. Administrative staff can help, but only for booking rooms, invoicing and other things the central system wouldn’t allow me to do anyway – so they don’t really reduce the workload.
3. Streamline your teaching methods: Look for ways to make your teaching more efficient, such as using technology or group work. I agree that streamlining teaching is important. I use checklists to do everything that needs to be done at the beginning of the semester and before classes start. Technology can help, but it can take a while to learn new tools and set these things up – so a new tool is not a direct remedy for the workload. I’m not sure how group work reduce the work load of a professor – except if it means less reports to grade (but the win is only marginal I think). 
4. Set boundaries: Establish clear boundaries with your students and colleagues, such as office hours and response times, to reduce the amount of time spent on email or other administrative tasks. AI, you have no idea how many emails I get. I also don’t know how setting boundaries is going to help me reduce the amount of time spent on replying emails – stuff needs to be addressed anyway, right?
5. Take care of yourself: Make sure to take breaks, exercise regularly, and maintain a healthy work-life balance to reduce stress levels and increase productivity. Hear hear – but maintaining that healthy work-life balance is rather hard when the workload is high.
6. Seek support: Consider joining a peer mentoring program or working with a professional mentor to help you manage your workload more effectively. My first reaction is that most programs just take time and don’t address the root cause of the problem, which is understaffing in higher education as a result of neoliberal budget cuts.
7. Re-evaluate your workload: Regularly review and assess your workload to see if there are any tasks that can be removed or streamlined to reduce the amount of time spent working. Indeed, we can optimize some time here, by leaning out of some service work – but when it comes to research and teaching, the project deadlines still need to be met and the exams all still need to get graded.

What do you think? Did ChatGPT give me good advice on how to reduce my workload?

When are growing into a position of becoming an independent scholar, an important element is to start new collaborations. You are no longer expected to work exclusively with your colleagues at your institution or with your former supervisor. You are expected instead to spread your wings and develop new collaborations.

Unless you are planning to shut the door behind you and work in solitude for the rest of your days, it will become necessary to reach out to colleagues worldwide who have skills that are required in certain projects. Initiating international networks and collaborations is also important for your publications: it is generally considered positive if you get the opportunity to publish with colleagues from different institutions. 

So how do you initiate and build international collaborations? Do you buy a plane ticket to a colleague whose work you’ve read, and just barge into his/her office to make your colleague an offer for collaboration that he/she can’t refuse? There’s no need for such drastic ways, and there are a variety of ways indeed in which you can start working across institutions and across borders. Below, you can find a number of ideas to get started:

1. Reach out to colleagues
The colleagues you’ve met several times at conferences over the past years and had good talks are potential collaborators. If you have a chance to talk to one of your colleagues at a conference, propose to work on a topic together. Don’t be vague, but propose a topic that is of your mutual interest, that combines both your skills. Make sure you’ve read some of the work of your potential collaborator, so that you have a good grasp of what he/she has been working on recently. If you want to start small, propose to write a conference paper on a certain topic first, and then see where the results take you. If the collaboration is pleasant, you can consider to apply for funding for a joint project.

2. Reach out after reading a paper
If you’ve read an interesting paper, go ahead and reach out to the author to ask further questions. If the author proposes an interesting method, you can ask for supplementary material and suggest to implement this method to your results, and develop a publication together. You’d be surprised how often fellow researchers react enthusiastically. Don’t feel disappointed if the author gets back to you making it clear that he/she does not want to share additional thoughts and insights on the topic – if that’s the attitude of this person, you won’t have a good collaboration anyway. 

3. Service appointments
An excellent way of starting international collaborations is through service appointments, and in particular through technical committees. As technical committees develop technical documents, you get the opportunity to publish these documents either as committee documents, or by working in smaller task groups. If you are in your early career, don’t let an opportunity slide to work on technical documents (provided that you have the time, and can deliver what you promised). Working in technical committees also gives you an opportunity to interact with colleagues from different institutions directly. 

.../...
Full post here

In today's episode, I answer the following questions:
- How much time does it take to write a paper?
- How can you remain focused on writing a paper over weeks on end?
- How can you quickly pull together a conference paper when the deadline is near?

This episode is loosely based on:
- How to write a paper in two days
- How much time does it take to write a paper?

In this episode, I talk about good habits to develop during the PhD, the post-doc years, and the tenure track years.

You can find the associated posts here:
- Good habits to develop during the PhD
- Good habits to develop as a post-doc
- Good habits to develop on the tenure-track

Another bonus episode!

We’ve all been in this awful situation: you need to write a paper or work on a chapter of your dissertation, but 20 minutes pass, and you can’t write anything. You go surf the internet for a little bit, return to your white screen and blinking cursor, and quickly get sucked into the internet again. Suddenly it is 5pm and you have not done anything. An entire day wasted without doing anything…

Writer’s block – it can strike us all at any given time. 

If you feel that your writing is not moving anywhere, don’t sit through the day hoping that things will change. Take action, make some course-corrections, and save the remaining hours of your day.

Here is a list of 30 things you can try to get your juices flowing again:

1. Reuse some old material

Your first draft is not the paper that you are going to submit. Feel free to copy and paste some material from a previous paper or report, and start from there. I usually write down the research steps that I followed in a research report, and use that as the rough basis for my papers. Not using research reports? How about browsing through your lab book and just typing out some of the material that is in there? You will edit later anyway.

2. Go for a walk

If you look at the habits of highly creative people from the past, you will see that almost all of them made time to go for a walk and sort out their thoughts during the day. So, leave your desk and enjoy a brisk walk around campus.

3. Try pen and paper instead

Are the internetz distracting you too much? Why not ditching the text processor software, and writing by hand? Some (older) researchers still write their papers entirely by hand first, and then either type up the material themselves or give it to a secretary/typist. Since most of us don’t have a typist handy, you might have to type it up afterwards, but really, just typing goes super fast. Typing is a different action than writing.

4. Talk out loud

Stuck on forming sentences? Why don’t you try talking out loud instead? Talk to a friend or office mate, or even an imaginary friend and explain what your paper is going to be about. Try the same technique when you can’t find the right words for a sentence: just talk out loud: “What I want to say here in my own words is,… “.

.../...

Full post on PhD Talk

In today's episode, I share my methods for staying engaged with the presentations at conferences.

Here are my seven strategies:

1. Schedule smart: We all have a maximum capacity of how much learning we can do without a break, and how much learning we can do in a day. Ideally, we have this information available because we know how we study. If not, run an experiment at a conference and track your attention per half hour increments. When do you start to have difficulties staying with the presenter? How many hours of listening on a day can you stomach? Then, use this information to plan which sessions and presentations you will attend.
2. Take notes: For me, taking notes is key. I’ve learned over the years that taking notes by hand (or on a tablet with pencil) works best, as I like sketching things and drawing arrows in my notes. Typing out notes works much less for me.
3. Think of questions: To engage more with the contents, you can think of questions you’d want to ask the presenter. You don’t need to actually ask these questions, but just identifying questions will already help you understand the material at a different level.
4. Relate to research: Try to find out how this research is interesting for your research. Are the findings directly relevant for your work? Is the methodology something that can inspire you? Could you use this information for teaching?
5. Note down action items: What will you do with what you’ve learned? Maybe you want to try out the methodology they propose on your data, or check their test results against your model, or maybe you want to read the full paper after the conference. Jot down at least one action item for each presentation, and put this task on your schedule for after the conference.
6. Follow up: If a presentation is particularly interesting for you, go talk to the presenter afterwards or send them a follow-up email after the conference. As you get to talk more about their research, you’ll gain an even deeper understanding of the work and its implications.
7. Sleep: If you want to be fresh and able to learn, get enough sleep. Getting enough rest at a conference can be particularly challenging if the social program runs late into the enough. I will often have to make a conscious choice between attending an early session and attending a dinner, to make sure I don’t get too drowsy for the actual conference. I also try to add a buffer day when I have a difference in timezone between home and the conference to adjust to the jetlag (and to have a buffer in case something goes wrong with the flights).

This episode is based on an earlier blog post.

I’ve found what really works for me to write an abstract in roughly 30 minutes. As I was googling “How to write an abstract” in the past, I came across this article by Philip Koopman which caught my attention.

What I most like about this website is the questions it has in the different sections your abstract should contain:

Motivation: Why do we care about the problem and the results?

Problem statement: What problem are you trying to solve?

Approach: How did you go about solving or making progress on the problem? Did you use simulation, analytic models, prototype construction, or analysis of field data for an actual product?

Results: What’s the answer?

Conclusions: What are the implications of your answer? Is it going to change the world (unlikely), be a significant “win”, be a nice hack, or simply serve as a road sign indicating that this path is a waste of time (all of the previous results are useful)? 

In fact, whenever I now write an abstract, I simply copy and paste these questions into a new document. Then I start answering them one by one. Sometimes I just talk out loud and write it down. Style and grammar don’t matter to me at that point – I just need to get the ideas out first. 

These answers then make up the first draft of my abstract. I simply delete the questions, and print out this first version. At that point, I start manipulating the abstract into a readable text, in correct English (as good as possible in my case), and making sure the entire piece flows from its starting point and background description towards the results and conclusions.

Do you have a method which helps you to write abstracts?

A very quick bonus episode today to thank all of those who made season 2 possible!

In today's episode, we interview Jenny Orlando-Salling. Jenny is a PhD Fellow in Law at the University of Copenhagen.  Originally from Malta, Jenny has lived, studied and worked in a number of countries eventually settling down in Copenhagen, Denmark where she raises her children. Prior to her PhD, Jenny served as a diplomat in Brussels (at the EU) and Egypt. She holds degrees in Law and Political Science from UCL and the LSE.  We talk about her career path, and how she returned to academia after a number of years in the foreign service. We also zoom in to her PhD program, which is combined with an LLM, and the structure of this program, as well as its requirements with regard to courses, teaching, international fellowship, and other milestones in the program.

Jenny's research focuses on colonialism in EU Law. We learn about how her experience as a diplomat shaped her research interests, as well as how the experience of always being on-call as a diplomat influenced how she set boundaries around work when she returned to academia. 

Jenny is currently pregnant with her third child and has two daughters (a four year old and a 10 month old). She is married. We learn about her experience as an academic parent, and the differences in support she experienced as a new parent in the foreign service and as a parent pursuing a PhD at a university in Denmark.

To round off, we learn her best advice for PhD students, how Jenny sets boundaries to her work, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on her research and PhD, and what a day in the life looks like for her.

References

• Jenny's Twitter
• Reimagining a European Constitution
• Understanding Identity and the Legacy of Empire in European Constitutionalism: The Case of Hungary