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New job, new phase, new country, new me
An academic career is never a straight line. Or at least, I’ve never seen one which was a straight line from the inside. Some look straightforward from the outside, but for the individual are full of weird coincidences, backtracking, and random chance. I’d refer to what my career has been so far as a ‘portfolio…
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The life-changing optimism of quitting (and how it saved my PhD)
by Katie Cox In the second year of my PhD, I was in despair. My family was in crisis, I had just spent a horrible few months navigating a hostile rental market on a PhD stipend, and I was starting to wonder if I’d started my PhD for the wrong reasons. Of course I hadn’t…
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A wardrobe full of clothes, but not a thing to wear
Hi there! This is my first post on this blog, so I thought I’d start with a giant topic… typical me. And that topic is academic dress codes. While fashion might sound like a shallow topic, how we present ourselves to the world can be deeply stressful for some of us. When I first started…
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The beginning is a very good place to start
Welcome to Academic Tensegrity. A spoonie’s* perspective on the multi-directional tensions of academia, early career researcher life, and work and life goals. The goal of this blog is to think and reflect on personal experiences of academic life in today’s world, and to try to draw lessons and tools from those experiences. Mostly the blog…
A spoonie's perspective on balancing the tensions of working in academia