A spoonie's perspective on balancing the tensions of working in academia

Category: Research

  • 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…

  • 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…