This Fall I will be teaching no less than 3 multiple day masterclasses for PhD candidates at the Erasmus Graduate School for Social Sciences and Humanities. This challenge takes me to all stages of a PhD project. The first course is for beginning PhD candidates:
A couple of weeks ago Helen de Cruz conducted in-depth interviews with philosophers who work outside of academia. She published the complete interview series at the New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science group blog: part 1, 2, 3. The interview series has also been featured at the Atlantic. I have been posting selections from the interview she had with me (here, here, and here). Below I elaborate on some of the points and add some answers that did not make it into the original series for reasons of space.
A couple of weeks ago Helen de Cruz conducted in-depth interviews with philosophers who work outside of academia. This is a selection from the interview she had with me. Helen published the complete interview series at the New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science group blog: part 1, 2, 3.
A couple of weeks ago Helen de Cruz conducted in-depth interviews with philosophers who work outside of academia. This is a selection from the interview she had with me. Helen published the complete interview series at the New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science group blog: part 1, 2, 3.
A couple of weeks ago Helen de Cruz conducted in-depth interviews with philosophers who work outside of academia. This is a selection from the interview she had with me. Helen published the complete interview series at the New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science group blog: part 1, 2, 3.
Doing science is about researching and then going public with your findings. If you keep your findings to yourself, you are just privately musing, but not doing scientific research. However, going public with your research can be daunting, especially for PhD’s. What to do when you are scared to show your first piece of writing to your supervisor? When you dread nasty questions about your presentation at a conference? Or when you feel ready to quit because you just received stinging criticism from a reviewer on that article of yours with the top results of your research? Here is a bit on how to face criticism without letting it take you down.
Inevitably you will experience moments during your PhD where things between you and your supervisor do not go as smoothly as you would like. Small wonder: a PhD is a pretty intense project in which you yourself go through a considerable personal development and in which your supervisor has to balance two roles that are hard to combine, that of coach and that of examiner. Most supervisors know exactly which role to adopt at a given moment, but there will be a day, or days, where e.g. you receive fierce criticism while you actually badly needed a pat on the back.
Een maand na ons gesprek (zie vorige blog over stress in de realiteit van je ‘droombaan’) mailt Ella dat het tot dusver heel goed is gegaan, maar dat ze zich nu toch voelt afglijden in zelfkritiek en haar oude patronen die haar zoveel stress en onrust opleverden voor het lesgeven en presenteren van haar paper op conferenties en symposia. Dat is niet zo gek, want het is niet makkelijk om de manier waarop je jarenlang gewerkt hebt zo grondig te veranderen. De gedachte aan een afgesproken coachsessie geeft gelukkig al wat rust en ruimte om de negatieve spiraal te stoppen: “als het echt zo erg is,” weet ze bij zichzelf, “dan is er bij die afspraak ruimte en aandacht voor.”
Ogenschijnlijk gaat het van een leien dakje. Na haar promotie in de geesteswetenschappen kreeg Ella een plek als postdoc aangeboden en na een paar jaar volgde een tweede postdoc aan een andere universiteit. Daar krijgt ze een flinke onderwijstaak die haar zwaar valt. Uit zenuwen voor het lesgeven is ze dagelijks tot in de kleine uurtjes aan het werk, maar deze druk en stress is niet langer vol te houden. Hoewel ze altijd overtuigd was dat een academische loopbaan helemaal bij haar paste, denkt ze na een paar maanden in deze postdoc positie eraan om ontslag te nemen. Gelukkig luistert haar hoogleraar goed en spoort haar aan om actief naar een oplossing te zoeken om met meer zelfvertrouwen en effectiever te werken. Zo komt ze bij mij terecht.
These are two sobering figures for the current situation in academia in the Netherlands:
Percentage of women professors in EU countries and the gender distribution in academic careers.
I have written about this before in a post on motherhood and academia. Before the end of year festivities caught up with me was at a symposium of the LNVH (Dutch network of women professors) where I had the pleasure to hear Prof. Curt Rice speak about implicit bias as the key to career differences between men and women. He argued that the confirmation of stereotypes leads us to forming an implicit bias where we, men and women alike, more readily see a man in a high profile function or on track to a professional career than a woman. If you think you are above this implicit bias, take this implicit bias test at project implicit and think again!