mental health – AMBER DAVIS

Earlier this year I ended up in a strength assessment workshop for professionals in a social club in Cape Town. Think tennis courts, bowling and croquet greens (really!), a cricket pitch, a ballroom, a swimming pool with a view of Table Mountain, a sushi bar, palm trees, the works! I was invited by my friend and Cape Town host Gen. After a fantastic visit in 2023 I am trying to make my trips to Cape Town a regular feature, and this year I succeeded and I was back in town. A place had opened up in this workshop she was [...]

8 Lessons from Academic Failure

When my former EUI colleague and friend Andrew Glencross asked me whether I'd be interested in co-authoring a piece on failure and derailment in academia my answer was an immediate yes. That was two years and endless revisions ago, and last weekend we finally received the email to say our article has been published! Our contribution is part of a forum on "Dead-Ends, Disasters, Delays? Reflecting on Research Failure in International Studies and Ways to Avoid It" in 'International Studies Perspectives' and you can find it here. In the article, we reflect on our own academic journeys and the pivotal role [...]

Pick the Right Supervisor

Do me a favour? Pick the right supervisor. It is THE power relationship that matters when you are writing a PhD, and its impact not only on your work and career, but also on your wellbeing should not be underestimated. If you are looking for a PhD position, don’t just start with the university, the reputation of the department or the field. People matter, and academia is built on personal networks. Being part of the right ecosystem so to speak, is everything. I’ll tell you a story to illustrate. I thought I had all this supervision business covered when I [...]

‘How to Write a PhD’ with Cassandra Frear

I met Cassandra when she was part of the first round of the Stress-Free PhD programme, where we met weekly online with the group. She is based in Philadelphia, and I remember all too clearly the culture shock: when I introduce the idea of writing a PhD more efficiently by working fewer hours, it tends to be a leap even for Dutch or other European PhDs, but for a US PhD candidate to embrace these insights about the importance of being idle is next level! A few months ago she wrote me to say she’d be reviewing the course materials [...]

Was It Worth It to Finish Your PhD? And Should I Finish Mine?

When a PhD researcher asked me during a coaching call whether it had been worth it to finish my PhD in difficult circumstances my answer could have been both yes and no. I could hear the debate in my mind, which wasn’t really about my own PhD, but about hers, which she too was trying to finish in difficult circumstances: It may not be worth it, was a thought I had. When you’re facing something big (she was facing something big) you realise that the PhD isn’t that important. It doesn’t really matter whether you finish the project or not; [...]

Fighting the Borg. Or how to stay focused by working offline

I only vaguely realised the Borg was a Star Trek reference when the phrase ‘It’s like fighting the Borg!’ popped into my head as I was thinking about social media consumption and addiction. I googled it just now, right after I promised myself I was going to get started writing this blog post. Technically I could even say it is part of work, right? Googling for my blog is doing research! I also know it is one of the habits I was much, much stricter about when I was finishing my PhD: I was uncompromising. I didn’t work online at [...]