Categories
quick thought work

One Hundred Posts

This is the hundredth post so far on this blog.

No guest posts, no repeats – a couple of round-ups – but a hundred original posts including this one. I started sharing posts on this blog in mid-September last year, with the hope of maintaining a regular schedule. For the most part I think I’ve kept that up, although I think that switching to three posts a week has been helpful to keep a writing habit going but not over-extend myself.

Writing has helped me to find new ideas, write a book, come up with ideas for other writing projects and workshops – and has also helped me to work through some undeveloped ideas that I’ve been exploring in other settings. It’s great to know that some things that I have done so far have resonated with people reading.

I’ve no idea what I will write about in the future – I just hope that I can continue to write regularly, and hope that it keeps resonating. If you have ideas for topics that you think might be interesting to explore, let me know in the comments. Or if you want to know more about the other kinds of work that I do, get in touch!

So if you are or have been, thanks for reading, here’s to the next hundred posts – and more!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

Categories
quick thought

Hard To Find A Gap In A Chasm

I remember reading somewhere once, I don’t know if it’s true or not though, that if the Earth was the size of a golf ball it would be almost entirely smooth. Holding it in one’s hand we would not notice any mountains, the Grand Canyon would be indistinguishable and so would the deepest ocean trenches.

Seen from a great distance or a different scale, the massive seems inconsequential. Yet from inside the Grand Canyon, you’re dwarfed by what’s around you. On a workshop once, a postgraduate researcher shared with me that they loved their research field, but that they were struggling to find something to focus on.

“After all,” they said, “It’s hard to find a gap in a chasm.”

Categories
quick thought

On a Storage Shoestring

During my Masters, and then later during my PhD, I learned how to use the typesetting software LaTeX in order to write my dissertation and thesis. If you ever looked at a maths or sciencey thesis and thought, “How did they do all the equations and stuff?” the answer is LaTeX. At times, writing up was tough; not because the subject matter was difficult or because I was learning LaTeX as I went, but because we were given 20Mb of storage to cover all of our data requirements at the university. Stop for a second and think about the capacity of the SD card in your phone. 20Mb was a microscopic amount of storage to process images, files and so on to produce a dissertation.

Categories
quick thought

Circumstances

I write a lot of my posts a few days or a week in advance. This suits me, but along with using Buffer to schedule tweets it gives the impression that I’m here a lot, when in fact the lights are on a timer and I only check the mail when I feel like it. Last week, when I published three posts on here and one over on Viva Survivors, I started the week in South Wales and finished it feeling exhausted due to illness. It was only when I had a look just now that I realised I had actually published some thoughts last week – and got some comments! – for the most part when I got home I was too busy focussing on feeling sorry for myself.

Skipping The Gory Details

Now, I wasn’t really very, very ill. I don’t know what caused the illness, could have been something I ate, more likely to be a virus that seems to be going around. I had to cancel a workshop with less than 24 hours notice – which I hated doing, and hope I get to Edge Hill soon! I felt hot, cold, hungry, unable to eat, weird, tired and all sorts of other things. But towards the end of the week something worse happened.

I couldn’t drink tea.

Categories
quick thought

Three Weeks

Three weeks into a month, my mind starts thinking about the next one: “What have I accomplished, what am I unlikely to get done, what do I need to start on the first of the next month?”

I do this a lot, sometimes I set goals so realistic that I don’t do anything but what I set out to do. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with this; I don’t think I or anyone needs to work flat out all the time. I have noticed in the last week or so, though, that when I work from home I’m setting more and more realistic goals – to the point of finishing everything early, doing a little extra and then feeling pleased with myself. But on the following day(s) I don’t take time for myself, or for my family, I just wonder what else I could do to “get ahead.”

There are so many tensions here! The tension between doing too little, too much and “enough” – the tension between getting things done and getting more done – work expanding to fill the time available versus being realistic… Am I alone in thinking about these areas? Have you experienced similar thoughts, either in work on a PhD or in other creative work? Let me know in the comments if any of this resonates with you.

Next week I am going to review where I’m up to, and I am going to plan for June – but not before I do my best to really make the most of the last week of May, and any opportunities that that might bring.

Thanks for reading!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

Categories
quick thought

Bad Powerpoint

A short post and a few thoughts for today. I was reviewing my business notes a few days ago and realised that I have delivered nearly 40 First Year Development Workshops at the University of Liverpool. That means I’ve met and worked with over 1000 new PhD students at the university! A key component of the workshop is communicating research ideas, and one way we do that is through a group Powerpoint presentation. We help participants think about how to do this well, and start that process by sharing the following video:

I don’t use Powerpoint a lot for my work any more; I like the spontaneity of having a few key points in a talk or workshop that I’m trying to explore with participants, and being free to work towards those points in a variety of ways. I think that I can do this better with flipcharts and boards rather than a pre-determined series of images and text.

Categories
quick thought

A new acronym for habit-building

One of the great things about the kind of job that I have is that I often have time to think and time to play – not video games or role-playing games, although I must have mentioned by now at least once that I like to do both of those – but to play in the sense of trying things out. Trying things out to see what happens. Being my own boss and doing the kinds of things that I do for work gives me a great degree of freedom.

Like this blog: I write when I want, I try to stick to a schedule (although, hello, it’s been a month or so since I posted!) and I write about things that interest me and hope that they interest you too.

Last week I was working with my good friend Dr Aimee Blackledge on a First Year Development Workshop. Aimee talked a little about habits, and this got me thinking, because I also knew that we were going to spend some time on the workshop introducing tools and ideas that are bound up in acronyms for shorthand. I wondered, was there a good little acronym just waiting to be discovered for habits?

I think there was! It hit me some time during the day and I shared it with the cohort of 24 postgraduate researchers, and got feedback quickly that this was a neat little tool for thinking about habits as agents of positive change.

Categories
creative thinking quick thought

Heuristic Ideation Technique

I’ve had a little time off from working on my second book on the viva (coming soon!), and this has given me some time to check through my records. I’ve been a skills trainer since September 2008, and have accumulated a lot of stuff – some of it is worth keeping and refreshing myself on – some of it I’ve been happy to chuck into the recycling bin in the last few weeks.

I recently found my notes from a workshop that I ran for Vitae a couple of years ago. The session was on blogging and social media, but the idea that jumped back to the forefront for me was the icebreaker for the day’s workshop, which we used as a way to get people thinking of ideas for blog posts. The process is called Heuristic Ideation Technique:

Heuristic Ideation Technique, which I saw first in Gamestorming.
Heuristic Ideation Technique, which I saw first in Gamestorming.
Categories
quick thought

Nathan’s News

Once again the blog becomes a one-day-per-week affair. Apologies. My mind has been on other pieces of writing of late, as well as related aspects of them. As of Tuesday I finished the second draft of my second book – which may or may not be titled Frequently Asked Questions About The PhD Viva – and am now at the stage of looking for or designing a cover. I made the cover for Fail Your Viva myself, and while I’ve never been unhappy with it per se, I’ve always wanted something a little snazzier. I have found myself looking at the pre-made covers at Go On Write a lot in the last few months (spoiler alert: I’ve bought one or two already for future projects!). I don’t have one yet for this new book.

A new episode of the Viva Survivors Podcast went live on Monday! It was great to talk with Dr Eljee Javier about her research and viva; I met Eljee when she had just started her PhD several years ago, and it only seemed like a few months. Time flies, eh? It was great to hear how things had gone for her, and also hear about some really interesting research. There will be a new episode on Monday 23rd February too – it seems like a new pattern for the podcast might be that it updates on the last two Mondays of a month… I’ll see what I can do about that.

I’ve had a week of working from home, so don’t have any workshop news – I could tell you about my daughter’s latest accomplishments with the Megablox, but that might be less interesting to you than it is to me! In the coming weeks I’m back out on the road, delivering Viva Survivor and other workshops. If you’re reading this and want any details of these workshops then please get in touch and I’ll help in any way I can.

Until next week! Thanks for reading.

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

Categories
news quick thought

The Last Three Weeks

They’ve been quite intense actually! In the last three weeks I have:

  • delivered seven workshops, including facilitating a Grad School;
  • three of the workshops were Viva Survivor, and I also spent half a day working with PhD supervisors and telling them about my research so far into the viva experience of PhD graduates;
  • travelled to Wales and Scotland – including my first workshop in Edinburgh;
  • finished the first draft of my second book;
  • been ill for a day, which really knocked the wind out of my sails;
  • read several books – including a few from my reading list for 2015;
  • signed up with Payhip, and from next month I’ll be selling Fail Your Viva through that service as well as through Amazon.

I’ll write again on Friday with details of the books that I’ve read so far, and why I think they might be interesting to you, dear reader. I’m also working to arrange new interviews for the Viva Survivors Podcast – and if you’d like to join me on the podcast to talk about your viva then do get in touch.

Thanks for reading!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)