Higher Education News

It’s Hard to Be Ill in Academe

But dealing with illness on the job — and I’m focusing here on basic health woes, not on serious long-term diseases — is a fraught issue for all academics, who tend to have porous work/life boundaries...

4 Strategies for Completing Your Dissertation

No single piece of advice will help you complete your dissertation, but these suggestions may help.

Academic Book Reviews Deserve Some Respect

Academic book reviews deserve to be taken seriously, and reviewers at all career stages should be encouraged to aim for innovation and creativity when writing them. Why not offer prizes in recognition of reviews that push at these boundaries?

The Case for Generalists Working in Higher Education

Should higher education professionals aspire to be specialists or generalists? A response to this question comes with a lot of “But what ifs.” However, becoming a generalist, as in acquiring a knowledge breadth through career experimentation, even

You May Not Be the Inside Candidate

While on the surface it might seem like the internal candidate is always the candidate of choice, you as the external candidate might actually be the top choice.

Teaching Online Will Make You a Better Teacher in Any Setting

When it comes to online teaching and technology, however, many academics remain leery. They continue to suspect it’s where good teaching goes to die. [Here is] a counternarrative.

Why We Need to Talk More About Mental Health in Graduate School

Dark humor was a coping strategy for me and my cohort, which is why we regularly read Tumblr sites like Lego Grad Student and What Should We Call Grad School, as well as PhD Comics....

Graduate Students Need to Think Differently About Time

If you're a Ph.D. student reading this article, chances are that it'll take you less [sic] than five minutes. Not an outsized outlay of time, but still time you could have spent elsewhere....

How to Get Started in Freelance Writing

“The first essay I ever published online, “Coding ‘White Trash’ in Academia,” was a rant I drafted in a few hours — about how my rural, small-town origins often left me feeling out…

How to Give an Excellent STEM Job Talk

“For Ph.D.s on the job market in the sciences, no element of the hiring process is more important for making or breaking your prospects than the job talk.” Key areas: “Beyond “know your…

Collaboration as Career Value

Employers frequently list collaboration and teamwork among the top competencies they value. More graduate programs are also thinking about how to better integrate collaboration and project-based learning into their curricula....

The true costs of research and publishing

In academia, as everybody knows, it’s publish or perish. But it turns out that it’s also publish and perish.... (Times Higher Education)

OK, I Admit It: Productivity Is Overrated

“This year I turned 47, but instead of the traditional midlife crisis — wherein I rethink my partnership or my career, have an affair, or purchase something flashy I can’t afford — I’ve…

Publishing Isn’t Just About Volume; It’s Also About Strategy

“Question: I just finished Year 1 of my first tenure-track job at a research university. My aim is to get a contract for my first book within the next six months, and I’ve…

US colleges identify shortcomings in teacher training

The key to maintaining US leadership in science and engineering may rest not primarily with universities’ science and engineering programmes but rather with their schools of education, experts have told Congress.

Outcomes-Based Graduate School: the Humanities Edition

The numbers tell the story: In 2013, 39 percent of English Ph.D.s at Lehigh University found work only as contingent instructors. By late 2018, that figure had dropped to 9 percent. Instead of dead-end adjunct work, 46 percent of the university’s Eng

When It’s Right to Walk It Back

Sometimes, you may realize after the fact that you should have made a different decision, write George Justice and Carolyn Dever, and in such cases, it's OK to hit pause and start again.