Academic Coaching Blog

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...

I keep this little statue on my book shelf, and as you can see she's looking out at the world in which I live.  I bought her many decades ago when I was making changes in my life and it suited my mood at the time. Contemplative. Today, I was looking at it again and realized that it's just as relevant now as it was earlier in my life and career.  So I moved it from a lower shelf to give it pride of place on the top shelf to help me focus on what I'm going to do next.  ...

Can I be replaced by AI? This is the question I've been asking myself. And I've come up with two answers: Yes and No. Yes, I can be replaced by AI in the sense that graduate students who used to come to me for assistance in writing and editing their dissertations are now turning to AI to do that.  How do I know?  They tell me so. What is interesting is that because I work hard to build trust with the students, they are very open in explaining how they use AI to generate content for some of their thesis...

On International Women's Day, I sent a message to all women PhD candidates who are pulled in so many ways as they manage their studies.  But it's not just women, of course.  Juggling studies, work and home is something that all grad students have to do.   I know that the stresses and challenges of completing a PhD program are experienced by everyone who starts the journey.  I’d like to send a few words of encouragement to you too, with one or two suggestions for making it to the end. First, some of the happiest students are just focused on their...