Academic Coaching Blog

Matt Might has diagrammed the PhD this way in his brilliant Illustrated Guide to the PhD.  I love it because he cleverly shows that doctoral research pushes beyond the edges of what is known, to discover new knowledge outside the boundaries of the human record. This is what examiners are looking for. In fact, they can't award the PhD unless you've demonstrated that you have made an original contribution to what is already known.  You have to poke at the edge of human understanding and find your own Eureka! moment. And that's hard.  You're in unchartered territory.  You find yourself the world's...

One of the things I love to do is to bring my coaching clients together in small groups to chat and exchange advice on Zoom.  But in the free drop-in today it was a special treat to spend time with a candidate who had graduated a last month, and was happy to share his experiences.  One issue that he emphasized was the choice of supervisor.  As all doctoral candidates know, the supervisor has the power to approve your thesis and move you on to your oral defense (or Viva if you're in the UK), So having a supervisor who is interested...

As my doctoral candidates will know, I have a Kiwi upside down map on my wall and it's something that appears in all my Zoom calls.  But that's a flat map.  This globe adds more dimensions and it has a message for doctoral candidates. (Scroll down to see where this is!).  Your doctoral journey may have seemed simple enough at the beginning...a straight line from acceptance into the program to graduation!  However the world can turn and throw you off balance. What you thought was up is now down. Your perspective has changed.  So if you want to chat about...

I was so delighted to get this card from the candidate who graduated a couple of weeks ago.  I want to show anyone who wonders if the end will ever come! And I want to say how grateful I am to him too, for letting me share in his journey,  How lucky am I!! One of the joys of my work is to get those emails that say the oral exam is over and all is well. In my posting on LinkedIn, I tried to describe what that moment is like: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7111895817543712768/ While I celebrate the success of another brilliant doctoral...

.I just heard from one of my most hard-working and successful PhD students that she got a “B” on her last course paper.  Wonderful! We were both very happy about that, and I want to explain why. First, she's a part-time student, and working full time at a job that requires a lot of travel, and she also has a family.  She had recently been promoted, and was also taking some skill-development courses. But then she applied for a C-Suite job for fun in another city—and got it! That meant she had to move. In the middle of this she...