ErrantScience guests and wonderful people that help contribute content
Academia (noun): the environment or community concerned with the pursuit of research, education, and scholarship. Readers of this blog will more than likely be familiar with academia. But how do you feel about this definition? I would agree with it, but in my opinion academia today is concerned with the pursuit Read more…
This year has been a bit of a hectic one for the Clutter overlords, so we’re especially grateful to our guest writers who have helped keep the blog going. Below is a round-up of 2018’s brilliant guest posts, from managing supervisors and juggling motherhood and research, to advice on making Read more…
Being a grad student is hard work, being a post-doc is hard work, being a professor is hard work. I remember the constant state of stress, lack of sleep, concerns about deadlines and massive workload I carried as a doc student. Now, looking back five years later, I can say Read more…
The undergraduate years remind me of being an adolescent. It’s an awkward stage in which you try to wade through schoolwork while also trying to answer very philosophical questions such as, “What do I want to do with my life?” If your sights are set on doing science, the question Read more…
And now for something completely different. Let’s jump ahead to that (seemingly impossible) point in the future where you’ve spent enough time working on THE graph as well as many other graphs and words, which have themselves come from what feels like millions of experiments. You’ve not slept a full Read more…
Hello! Welcome friend. Pull up a rocking chair and sit down. I am yet another person who wants to tell you what to do and how to do it. But bear with me here – what follows is not your ordinary life advice. It is ‘Claire Murray Life Advice™’ (It Read more…
The big decision has been made, you have picked the right supervisor. They’re going to help you flourish and develop into the perfect, employable graduate student. They’ll always be there to answer all your questions, but wait, what? What do you mean they’re in another country, before going to a Read more…
A colleague of mine was sitting beside a senior academic at a conference. A young researcher was giving a presentation on the preliminary results from their doctoral research, and the senior academic was really impressed. The topic coincided perfectly with his research interests. Meeting the young researcher over coffee, the Read more…
It’s been almost a year since I defended my PhD, but still I find myself considering what the main lessons from graduate school really were. Unlike undergraduate studies, there’s no real curriculum for doctoral studies beyond some perfunctory courses at the beginning and “research”, which takes a different shape for Read more…
