To celebrate 75,000 views on dr.ofwhat, I asked what kind of content people wanted to see and this was one of the requests. There are a lot of deadlines during a PhD. Whether these be set by you, your supervisor, candidature milestones, or journals. These various deadlines mean that there is a lot of opportunities to miss deadlines, and when […]
If you haven’t read what I learnt during my first year of a PhD yet, go here. “Middle of PhD” lull exists- It is not a myth- when I hit the halfway mark I reallllllly started to lack motivation and I think others in my office felt the same. You start to realise why getting a PhD is such a […]
Being a psychology PhD student, I wanted to discuss one of my favourite psychology theoretical frameworks that I use to motivate myself. Operant Conditioning is a learning theory identified by Skinner (for more info click here) which in basic terms says that being rewarded encourages behaviour to continue (or increase) and receiving consequences encourages behaviour to stop (or decrease). It […]
I am sure that like me, you have said to multiple people during your thesis experience that “My PhD is a job” or “I am going to work”. As PhD students we are so quick to defensively argue that our PhD is a job, but many of us are much less likely to actually treat it like one. We will […]
In previous blog posts, I have wrote about how celebrating the small stuff is really important whilst working on your PhD (or doing any job or university degree for that matter!). Waiting only until you achieve big tasks (like finishing a PhD) to celebrate will lead to burnout. Here is five ideas for how to celebrate the small stuff: Knock […]
Break it up into small time periods- Reading about theories can be draining. I often break up my day so that I only work on this task for 30 minutes at a time throughout the day. You will often be more productive during short time periods. Just write, even if it is terrible! Sometimes writer’s block can be caused by […]
*This is a throw back post that I originally published in 2018, when I was in the damn slump* When I first started my PhD two years ago, I heard whispers about a so-called “PhD slump”. About how in the middle of the PhD journey people want to scream, and cry, and give it all up. I thought it was […]
I am a workaholic. There is no denying that. People who know me know that I work a lot. I have had a really interesting relationship with my workaholic tendencies. When I was younger, in early undergraduate years, I was extremely proud of this. Boasting that I worked 30+ hours a week whilst also doing large amounts of study and […]
I started teaching undergraduate psychology courses in the second year of the PhD. The first courses I taught were an introduction to psychology course & a sustainable tourism course, which was a great combination. I learnt so much during this first year of teaching, things that stick with me today! 1. I am more capable at public speaking than I […]
1) I wouldn’t know how to correctly export data from SurveyMonkey into Excel 2) I wouldn’t know how to graph in excel 3) I wouldn’t know how to clean my data 4) I wouldn’t know how to run or interpret my statistical tests 5) I wouldn’t know where to get Three Minute Thesis inspiration from 6) I wouldn’t know how […]