This post is about the "love life" of an academic, particularly aspiring female academics and the choice we sometimes have to make between love and academia.
Burn-out II: The Weight of the World
As academics, we deal with big topics and huge research problems. From disillusionment about the impact of your work, to self-censorship, these natural features of our work can contribute to burn out. This post commiserates with you, but also suggests some coping strategies for managing.
Preventing burn-out during COVID-19 lockdown
After more than a year of COVID-19, some of us are going into a second lockdown. The end to this seems very far and it's harder and harder to stay positive. In this post, I share with you some tips for preventing burn-out and staying positive.
Burn-out I: Symptoms and Individual Factors
This post covers the definition of burn-out, the different symptoms and some of the individual factors and circumstances that lead to burn-out. Learn how to spot the early warning signals and strategies for coping.
Burn-out
This is an opening post for a series on "Burn-out". The content and reflections I present here are based on a workshop I recently hosted on "Academic mental health and well-being". In this workshop, we focused on two themes: burn-out and secondary Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But given the depth of the issues we discussed … Continue reading Burn-out
Why do a post-doc anyway?
This may seem like a no-brainer for many early-career academics. You do your PhD, then you do a post-doc and then you get that prized tenure-track position at a university. But the structural changes that have been happening in academia over the last decade or so have made this path a lot less linear and a lot more uncertain. This post provides you with some pointers to help decide which path to take after your PhD.
The Chinese New Year Life Defence
For those of you in the parts of the world who celebrate Chinese New Year, you would know that it can be an excruciating event. This is the time of the year when all your relatives judge every aspect your person and your life choices. This post is about how you can prep yourself for the interrogation with some tips.
Choosing Academia
Those of us still on the early-career academic treadmill probably already know that we didn't choose academia, it chose us. But the choice to accept or decline this calling is easier for some than for others. I hope this post will give you courage to pursue your calling.
Dealing with transience in academic life
This one is for all the post-docs out there. It's also for those of you thinking about pursuing a PhD. Here are some hard truths about life as an academic: it's nomadic, transient and sometimes lonely in the "in-between periods". But it is also (mostly) interesting, it is a global occupation like no other, and … Continue reading Dealing with transience in academic life
Finishing that thesis under COVID-19 lockdown conditions
So it looks like 2021 is going to be a continuation of 2020, at least for the first half of the year (if we're lucky!). And if you are somewhere in the last stages of your PhD, writing up your dissertation or pumping out those publications, this could prove challenging with many university offices and … Continue reading Finishing that thesis under COVID-19 lockdown conditions
The Doctorate 