As I write this I have on my desk next to me, my lunch. Today it consists of a bagel filled with some left over BBQ chicken, a small Tupperware box with a piece of unicorn birthday cake and a bottle of water (so exciting) I normally bring something in Read more…
It’s September and the start of a new academic year. New year means new students! Fresh, optimistic, nervous, new students from all corners of the globe all depending on university for the first time. Or at least that’s what I’m told, I spend September hiding under my desk until the happy noises stop.
If you are one of these happy noise producing students then your first time at University can be a bit daunting. And as a seasoned, experience, bitter academic I feel like it’s my duty to help new undergraduates with some advice for their first exposure to academia. So here are my 9 things that are worth remembering during your first few weeks of university.
The internet and social media are great at filtering. And not as you might expect filtering other people, but I’m referring to filtering yourself. A persons’ internet presence is not an objective transect of their lives, but a very carefully curated and select transect with it’s own bias. There is plenty of stuff that Read more…
Despite my prolific blog output, I managed to find time earlier this year to write a paper. It was a labour of love, passion and frustration at Word’s image handling system. As a new academic and as a proto-academic, I have been given lots of training on how to write papers. They Read more…
If you haven’t noticed, it’s Olympiad season. I’m not especially sporty myself – I quite like sports but just in a “lazily half-arsing them in a park on a Sunday” kind of way and not “watch them and wave tiny coloured flags while wearing very expensive branded shirts”. But right Read more…
Academia thrives on posters. At school whenever I was asked to make a poster project I always wondered why, they just seem like busy work for kids given by teachers who had run out of ideas. But it turns out that at the age of 32 I am still making them on Read more…
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been helping my boss out with a review paper. Mercifully I’m not actually writing much of it, I’m mostly just helping out around the edges by sorting out references and digging through them for useful metrics by which we can compare techniques. This has led Read more…
A check list of things that every academic will be doing as they start the new year
