Category: academic careers

What 40,000 job adverts say about academic career progression

Discussing the findings of a study of over 40,000 academic job ads, Lilia Mantai and Mauricio Marrone, highlight how the skills required for academic progression differ over career stage and geography. The skills required to progress from PhD to profes…

Lives change across academic careers – so should your writing habits

Are your writing habits the same as they were when you started your academic career? Are your lifestyle and responsibilities the same? In this post, Chris Smith explores how writing habits formed at the beginning of academic careers can be difficult to…

Book Review: Getting the Most out of Your Doctorate: The Importance of Supervision, Networking and Becoming a Global Academic edited by Mollie Dollinger

In Getting the Most out of Your Doctorate: The Importance of Supervision, Networking and Becoming a Global Academic, editor Mollie Dollinger brings together commentary and analysis from an international group of students and scholars to offer reflections on the doctoral researcher’s journey through a PhD programme. This is a smart, handy and pragmatic contribution to any doctoral student’s bookshelf, writes Sabrina Wilkinson, and may […]

Is pursuing an academic career a form of “cruel optimism”?

What does the future hold for PhD graduates? Marie-Alix Thouaille has found that for many the post-PhD transition is characterised by exploitative, often unsustainable working conditions, emotional upheaval, financial worry, and poor wellbeing. Despite this most PhD graduates remain absolutely determined to forge an academic career, unwilling to even entertain the idea of working in another sector. This paradoxical condition […]