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news

Interesting Things, August 6th 2015

It’s a long, long time since I’ve written a post for this blog – I deliberately took time off to focus on other projects (more on those soon), but today I want to share a couple of links to interesting things.

We The Humanities, curated by Emma Cole – all this week We The Humanities is being curated by Emma Cole, who recently produced a daily vlog about the last thirty days of her PhD leading up to submission. Emma has some interesting things planned for this week, and on Thursday – tomorrow! – I’ll be headed down to London to film a vlog episode about the viva and viva prep with her, as well as doing a Q&A on viva things with her. Check out the Twitter accounts above for more details.

Extremely Useful Notebook Organizing Hack – a title that does what it says on the tin; I’ve recently been cultivating a SANE habit of starting the day by recording a page of ideas in a little notebook, but that hasn’t quite hit the productive highs I’m aiming for. I think that having a more substantial notebook for idea development might help, and organisation-wise this might just make the difference.

20 misused English words that make smart people look silly – I’m going to print this and stick it in front of my desk for when I get my writing groove back…

10 tips for more concise writing – …and I think I’ll be sticking this next to it.

Explaining graphic design to four year olds – this article delighted me in a number of ways. First of all, I liked the approach and the results that the author took; it made me think about design and what it is, as it’s definitely a component of my work, and perhaps I need to recognise that more and think about how to apply it. But it also made me think about my work and the work of a lot of people I meet: researchers. How would you explain what you do to a four year old? My daughter is fast approaching two, and her language is really starting to come along – although the phrase “Chocolate biscuit please daddy please!” is clearer than some others – I have no clue what to say to her when she is a little older.

And I have a sneaking suspicion that if I can find a way to explain what I do to a four year old, then perhaps I’ll have figured out what I do too…

Thanks for reading!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

 

Categories
quick thought writing

Summer Experiments

Through the end of July and August, when few of my clients want me to deliver workshops, I’ll be working on a new writing project – which I’ll announce properly some time in the next week! I need to produce about 35,000 polished words by the end of September in order to hit my goals, and have a series of first draft milestones spaced out over the next six weeks.

Throughout a big chunk of this time I’ll be writing most days about PhD matters – and so I think here on this blog I’ll take the opportunity to do something a little different as a creative outlet. I’ll still be writing something PhD-related, but it may be more of a piece of creative fiction rather than the non-fiction that I’ve been writing for the last year. I have a couple of ideas of the directions that might take and it may draw together some of my other interests as well.

Summer is a good time for experiments: I’d rather be cold than hot, but sunshine boosts me a lot! I feel like I can get a good routine going. I also know that there is going to come a point where I think “I need to be out there delivering workshops…” but I wonder if there is maybe something that I can do about that…

Anyway! Stay tuned over the summer for fiction, of a sort. A few more weeks of PhD musings and ideas.

What experiments might you try over the summer?

Thanks for reading!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

Categories
quick thought

You Don’t Use Your Maths Any More, Do You?

A few days ago I was talking to someone about my work. They know me fairly well, so it came as a shock when they said:

“You don’t use your maths any more, do you?”

It really surprised me. They don’t see me every day, so how could they know what I do or don’t do?

I don’t follow the #postac hashtag a lot on Twitter, but I follow a few people who are involved and I wonder if this is a common thing if you finish a PhD/post-doc and then go on to do something outside of academia?

I suppose I felt a little judged as well. Which, on reflection, is odd! I’ve been doing what I do now for nearly seven years. I’ve been doing this longer than my PhD. I couldn’t do this without my PhD – my PhD was like start-up capital for this business. And not just in terms of experience with the area that I work in, important as that is, but in the intellectual capital that I accrued as well.

Some of that is totally maths-related. I analyse problems and make some decisions very quickly because I have a brain that is keyed up to look at things in a certain way. I look for certain types of information about a situation, because my experience – in maths – tells me what things are important to look for.

I guess… I guess I felt like perhaps I wasn’t being seen for something that I am. I’m not a mathematician, I don’t think, not any more. But I do use those tools, that mindset a lot. I’m sure I always will. I love maths, and I love solving problems with maths.

I’m happy using what I’ve learned, happy to be an a-math-teur. 🙂

Thanks for reading!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

Categories
writing

Book Reviews Please!

I Need You!

Have you read either of my books? If you have, would you consider posting a review on Amazon or on your blog? If you do, and send me a screengrab or a link that proves you’re the author, I’ll send you a 50% off code to my books on Payhip – you can either buy a copy of a different book for yourself, or give the code to a friend so that they can give one or both of my current books a try.

Categories
quick thought writing

Taking A Day Off

Thursday 11th June

I took a day off with my family. It was planned that we would go out to Liverpool to look around the Tate, taking the train whatever the weather, but as it turned out it was a gorgeous sunny day. Sunglasses all around for the three Ryders, and our daughter was especially enjoying the new places that we passed walking along the dock towards the gallery. It was around her snack time when we arrived, excited because this was the first time that we had taken her to a gallery.

We stopped for a cuppa, she ate her rice cake and drank some water…and promptly fell asleep.

Categories
work writing

On Guest Posts

Unless this is the first post of mine that you’ve read, you’ll know two things about me: one is that I really enjoy writing things (and delivering workshops!) for postgraduate researchers, and the other is that I run the Viva Survivors Podcast. But these are not the only outlets I’ve had for communicating with researchers. In the past I’ve written a few pieces for various publications like the late GRADBritain, the former Vitae “What’s Up Doc?” blog and others. I thought it might be fun to go and look at these pieces – some of which are a few years old now, and share links to them in today’s post. As it happens, because of site restructuring I can’t find the pieces I’ve written for Vitae – if I look on my hard drive I’ll see if I can find my copies and share them soon – but in the mean time I’ve found links to a couple of others that I’ve written or been involved with.

And at the end of the post I want to make you an offer that you won’t refuse!

Categories
work

Stand & Deliver

Last week I facilitated on my first workshop in almost a month. The break was halfway-intentional: a few clients have had changes in the last year. This meant that workshops which previously made the end of May and start of June a very busy time made it a very quiet time. As this became apparent I fixed the time as a pause from delivering workshops, shifting new bookings to either side of the break.

As the three week gap approached I thought, “This is great! I love doing workshops, but a break, time to step back and write more regularly, to plan some projects – that will be wonderful.”

As the end of that three week gap approached I thought, “This is great! It’s been fun working from home, and I’m really excited about these projects, but I really need to get out there and delivering stuff again!”

A change is as good as a rest? The grass is always greener on the other side? I don’t know! I’m thankful that I have a job which allows me this much flexibility. It’s great to have an area to focus on – helping postgraduate researchers – and several different ways that I can do that.

I’m looking ahead to the next academic year, and contacting my regular clients to put together my diary. I have some openings for new clients, and if you’re looking for someone to come and work with you and your postgraduate researchers then please email me. This blog and the courses page can give you some idea of what I do and what I’m interested in, but if you have any questions then please just ask.

What are the top three areas that you want workshops on or help with? Let me know, and if I can offer any thoughts I will, or if I can point you in the direction of someone else who could help then I’ll try to connect you. But please, get in touch!

Thanks for reading!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

Categories
quick thought

Commitment and Starting

I spend a fair amount of time thinking up ideas. I have a hope and a goal to develop a kind of muse business, one that I can set up and let run, that will contribute to my family’s financial security. I want to explore new topics with postgraduate researchers, and to do what I already do with them better. And, as you can tell from this blog and my books, I want to write more books for postgraduate researchers (and possibly for other audiences too).

A big problem, one that I’ve carried over from my PhD days, is procrastination – well, not exactly. It’s a bit of procrastination, a bit of Imposter Syndrome, a bit of “what-if-this-doesn’t-work-out?” I worry. The key of it all is thinking: “What if this idea is not right?”

This is a perennial problem for me, but something that has helped a lot recently has been re-reading Poke The Box by Seth Godin, which I mentioned in a recent post. Previously, I would build up an idea, then stop, stop short of going through with it. What if it wasn’t right? I’ve had an idea for a new book – actually, for a series of books – and I thought that it was good. Great actually, if it’s OK for someone to say that about their own ideas!

And yet… What if it wasn’t right?

Categories
quick thought

Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk

Today I want to share a video that I’ve found really helpful in the last few years. Amy Cuddy‘s TED Talk, Your body language shapes who you are, has had a big impact on how I go about preparing to present things. The idea that practising poses of confidence can help you to feel more confident is really intriguing – the fact that according to the evidence it seems to be a real effect is astounding.

The video is just below, and after that I’ll share how I use it in what I do.

Categories
writing

Why Did I Do A PhD?

I was looking through a folder of writing projects recently, and came across 80,000+ words of things which have not seen the light of day. I originally wrote this piece as the first chapter of a book that had a working title of “Stories from my PhD”. I’ve tweaked it a little to share it here, and I hope you find it interesting!

Why Did I Do A PhD?

I love interesting challenges. For a long time I thought that I just loved the challenge of maths, and maths research in particular. Not knowing something, and not having a handy three-times-a-week class to tell you forced me to accept the realities of research. It’s all up to you. If you don’t know something, it’s your responsibility to find it out. That’s fine. It might be difficult, but if you’re going to do research in any area, that’s what you sign up for.

I kept flirting with the idea of a PhD during my Masters. I couldn’t decide on what area I wanted to do research in though. I ended up doing my final dissertation in knot theory. This seemed like a challenging area. There was just one problem: by the end of my Masters I felt totally burned out by the thought of more maths. I was typesetting and bug hunting day after day and it was driving me crazy.

The PhD was moved to the back burner – I wanted to do it, but maybe I needed to take some time in between. This then posed a second problem: what was I going to do instead?