Academic Coaching Blog — Doctorate

This is the time to wish all graduate and doctoral students a very happy and successful time in 2025! Most of you have been working away at your dissertations for many years, and so if you're near the end, I hope this is the year you will finish your program and graduate.  However, if you're not at the end of the journey yet, I hope that 2025 is a year of great progress and positive results.    I haven't posted for a while because, frankly, the last six months of 2024 has been very stressful for me  personally, with a...

   That's what a Master's student said to me a couple of days ago.  He said that, as he was working on his thesis, he was thinking about what might come next. But when he talked to the PhD students who were ahead of him on the academic ladder, he realized what horrendous experiences they were having. Noxious is a good word to describe the experiences of many doctoral candidates. I hear about them daily. The environment in some graduate schools is truly poisonous. And it's not necessarily the fault of the professors, but rather of the system that...

In honour of International Women's Day, I'm posting this tribute to the women who are working on a doctoral thesis whilst juggling dozens of other responsibilities and demands.  If you're one of those, I salute you. Often the thesis writing for these candidates is done in stolen precious moments at the end of the day, or waiting for a bus, or in stolen breaks in the the office.  Even women who are full-time students still have to find time for research and personal writing in the midst of lab work, writing journal articles, or attending meetings with advisors. And then...

      Expecting to be dawdling over your thesis in 2024?   To help you avoid that, I invite to join me for a four-week series of tutorials on how to write a “Good Enough” thesis, starting January 25th. Why?  Well, did you know that the average thesis takes eight years to complete? I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks that PhD programs are excessively long and that doctoral students take too much time. In spite of the best of intentions, too many find themselves failing to reach the end of their studies, and there are probably several...

  Graduate Pathways to Success Model When you're planning to build something, like a doctoral thesis, it's a good idea to create a model that shows how all the pieces connect.  I'm very proud of the model that I created for the Graduate Pathways to Success program at the University of British cancel, and I saw it was still in use when I visited for a special event this week: https://www.grad.ubc.ca/current-students/professional-development Also pleased to see that I'm still being given credit for my work with GPS: https://www.grad.ubc.ca/current-students/professional-development/about-gps Of course that may change shortly, because the special event was the retirement...