Category Academic Careers

Practical guidance for PhD students, postdocs, and faculty building self-directed academic careers on their own terms.

Statistics with R

R has become one of the most popular and versatile applications for conducting statistical analyses in recent years. Statistics with R is a common approach. In this course, I will introduce you to the world of R for statistical analysis. This…

Effective Career Planning for Academics

I know that academic careers unfold over years of study, writing, and steady planning. This guide is a practical map you can reuse as you grow, from graduate school to tenured roles or other paths in higher education. It treats career planning as an active, ongoing practice, not a one-off exercise.

It aims to help you turn career planning into daily habits. You’ll find a clear sequence you can follow, with concrete actions tied to your values, strengths, and opportunities in academia. The focus is on clarity and actionable steps so you can make informed choices about research, publishing, and professional development.

How to Get Unstuck: Working Through Academic Writing Blocks

You sit down to write. You open the document. You reread the last paragraph you wrote, change two words in it, change them back, and then check your email. An hour later nothing has moved.

Almost every academic I work with knows this experience, and most of them privately believe it says something damning about them. It doesn't. Scholarly writing has structural features that make it unusually easy to stall in — the standards are high and largely tacit, the feedback is delayed and often harsh, the projects are long enough that no single day matters, and nobody ever explicitly taught you how to do it. A block is what happens when those conditions meet an ordinary human attention span. It is a solvable problem, and this piece is about how.

Academic Productivity Systems: Five Reasons You Think You Don’t Need This

I lost most of a year to a filing system.

Not to the system itself — to its absence, and then to my elaborate attempts to build one after the fact. I had the notes. I had read the things. What I did not have was any record of why I had made the choices I had made eighteen months earlier, and so I spent months reconstructing my own reasoning from fragments, badly, under deadline. Every one of those months was avoidable. I did not avoid them because I had never seriously considered that a person of my competence would need infrastructure. Infrastructure was for people who struggled.

That belief cost me a year, and I meet it constantly in other academics, so let me take it apart properly. Here are the five things people say when I suggest they need scaffolding for their research, and why each of them is wrong.

What the Evidence Actually Says About Neurodivergent Workplace Adjustments

Give an autistic employee the quiet, private workspace they asked for, and there is a documented chance you will make things worse. Not because the quiet was wrong. Because being moved to a room away from everyone else read as exclusion rather than support.

That finding sits inside a systematic review of physical workplace adjustments for neurodivergent workers by Clara Weber and colleagues, published in Applied Psychology: An International Review. It is worth sitting with, because it breaks the logic that most neurodivergent workplace adjustments are built on: identify the sensory problem, apply the matching fix, close the case.

This post covers what that review found, why its single most generalisable result is the one nobody puts on an accommodations list, and how to run the conversation differently if you are a neurodivergent researcher asking for something, or the person being asked.

Why Academia Keeps Failing Neurodivergent Researchers (And What the Evidence Says About Fixing It)

The further you go in academia, the less support you get. Undergraduates have study skills centres, structured timetables, and someone whose job is to notice when they fall behind. By the time you are a PhD researcher, most of that scaffolding is gone. You are expected to just know how things work.

For neurodivergent researchers, that quiet withdrawal of support is where the trouble starts.