After leaving academia, for example at the end of a Ph.D. project, some research and projects might still be unfinished and on-going, and formally leaving academia for a job elsewhere therefore may not be the end of the relation and ties to it. Continue reading…
When talking to and reading about those in the middle of doing a Ph.D., one sometimes gets the impression that those Ph.D. years are mythical. You are on your own, need to solve a problem that nobody ever looked at, and the deadline clock is constantly ticking.
But are the years of doing a Ph.D. more difficult, demanding, stressful and challenging than other years of work? Continue reading…
At some point, maybe straight after finishing your Ph.D. project or at a later point, you may decide to leave academia and look for a job elsewhere. You may find a job on a similar topic as your academic research, or you may end up working on a completely different one. In any case, you will start in a new organization, meet new colleagues and get new collaborators. This, however, does not mean that you need to cut all ties to academia. Continue reading…
When attending the latest conference, I was once again reminded that some scientists and researchers are good at preparing and presenting their work, and others less so.
While giving a good talk also depends on aspects such as the quality of the work and personal charisma, presentations often are not difficult to follow, or straight up uninteresting to listen to, because these are lacking, but because basic rules and guidelines on how to prepare and give a conference talk are not followed. Continue reading…
When you first start working in research, for example in the last years of your studies or when starting your Ph.D. project, you haven’t produced any research output yet.
Eventually, the research projects you are part of or your own research start to shape into actual research output, which may materialize into a conference abstract or paper. This further develops into a poster or talk to be presented at a conference, and later it may become a journal paper. Continue reading…
The time around New Year’s is the perfect moment for reviewing the past year to remind oneself of tasks, projects, results and achievements. Once the review has been written, it can be used, together with one’s personal ambitions, to formulate goals for the coming year. Continue reading…
Completing a Ph.D. project successfully depends on a number of factors, such as working on an interesting and well-posed problem and together with skilled people from whom you can learn the trait of becoming and being a researcher. It also, however, depends on you and your ability to develop the right habits during the project.
In this post, I share the essential habits that I formed and developed during my own Ph.D. project – several of which I’m still relying on and holding on to in my post-Ph.D. career. Continue reading…
When you near the end of your PhD or postdoc project, you aim at wrapping up all projects and results, so that you get the last results and manuscripts submitted. And you likely do not manage to finish everything, and interesting work and results therefore remain unpublished. So what do you do? Continue reading…
As I entered into the last six months of my PhD project, I started looking more seriously and concretely for my next position. I had, almost since the beginning of my project, kept an eye out for interesting research groups and companies as I came across them, but at this point I started looking more specifically at open positions.
But there was still one big decision I hadn’t made: Stay in academia or leave for the industry? Continue reading…
Scientific papers and authorships increasingly constitute the currency in which researchers and scholars are evaluated and assessed. Publishing interesting work in the right journals is crucial when it comes to academic employment and funding for future research. Continue reading…