Tag Archives: phd

‘Busyness’

A friend sent me a blog last Friday on the importance of find time for leisure, both for personal well-being but also for work productivity. Funnily enough, I worked until very late on Friday on a thesis chapter, so didn’t read it until the Saturday morning…

Working so late is actually a rarity for me. I have done it twice in the last year, and in both cases it was simply because I felt in a particularly productive mood, and had nothing too urgent the following day that would suffer from me being more groggy than normal.  Continue reading ‘Busyness’

Supervisions, and the ‘fear’

I have a full meeting about my thesis with my supervisors roughly once a month. We chat and discuss my research more often than that, but every month is our ‘structured interaction’, as it is known. In this blogpost, I want to discuss how my supervisory meetings have evolved since I started my PhD in September 2013, and the changing ‘fear’ as the ‘supervisee’. Continue reading Supervisions, and the ‘fear’

Publishing academic work

Newcastle University’s Politics department hosts a professional development seminar series. The series is very useful, offering helpful advice to postgraduate students across a range of issues, from setting up a research radar, to getting funding for your PhD, to publishing your work and getting a job in the academy, there are many things that postgraduates might want to know more about, but are not sure where to start. For more info, click here.

Today’s seminar was titled ‘Meet the editors: getting advice about publishing from the journal editors in Politics‘. Newcastle is fortunate at the moment to have four members of staff in the Politics department that edit academic journals. Martin Coward and Kyle Grayson edit Politics, Alistair Clark is one of the editors of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, and Anthony Zito is one of the editors of Enviromental Politics. Together, they offered their advice to postgraduates in the seminar, and I’d like to post some of their thoughts on this blog today. Wherever I can, I’ll try and group them into specific sections. I’ll refrain from attributing specific ideas to specific people, because I think they all concurred with each other sufficiently to make that unnecessary. Whilst all of the comments below are helpful and important, I do not take any credit for them. This blog is written with postgraduate students in mind. Continue reading Publishing academic work