Category: Academic Life
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My PhD mood, longitudinally. Part 2.
I’ve already written a little about the efforts I took to keep track of my moods, qualitatively and quantitatively, during the process of writing my dissertation. But it was a long road, and so here is Part 2, the endless middle slog. To remind: every day I wrote down what I worked on, what chapter…
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My PhD mood, longitudinally. Part 1.
So I passed my private defense today. I feel both triumphant and exhausted, but now I’m inhabiting a strange null space – kind of like floating between gravitational masses, I’d assume – because the first defense is done, but the public defense still looms. So I’m not Dr Wolfe yet, but everyone keeps telling me…
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Two exciting developments for urban studies in Switzerland
I spent the afternoon at the University of Basel at an informal workshop on urban studies pedagogy. The idea of this workshop was to bring together a range of scholars working on the urban in order to exchange ideas about pedagogy. It was a lovely opportunity to meet interesting people and discuss approaches to teaching,…
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I submitted this today
Next step is for the esteemed jury to read through it, and then we’ll all meet for a private defense at the end of June. If I make it through that, then they’ll schedule a public defense for later in the summer. It feels odd, to tell the truth. I was sort of expecting angels…
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The Endless Dissertation Desert
If this project were a movie, this would be the part where the main character slogs through the endless desert – I’m thinking Gobi, but feel free to fill in whatever wasteland you wish. Parched, exhausted, merciless sun beating down, shirt wrapped over the head, stumbling down a dune. You know the drill. I have…
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Two Potential Post-Doc Paths
Another challenge in writing this dissertation is the idea that I also have to lay the groundwork for the next phase of my academic career, such as it is. So aside from the fact that I have to believe in myself and my potential for doing good work – despite the barrage of self-reproach that…
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Dissertation blues
Dissertation Blues Writing this thing is like building a house. Only I can’t actually see what I’m doing, the plans keep changing, and there are periodic earthquakes. It’s a wonder that I’m this far along at all! A brief progress report: I broke ground on this, officially, on February 28 2018, so almost a year…
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Diverse paths to an uncertain future: Early career options in Human Geography
I co-organized a panel in the Human Geography stream at the Annual Swiss Geosciences in Bern. We aimed it at early career researchers and entitled it as shown above: “Diverse paths to an uncertain future…” Tellingingly, this appeared in the conference program as the more anodyne “PhD, What Next? Early career options in Human Geography.”…
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Travails of the dissertation, part IX
It’s not easy, doing this. I’ve never really bought into the idea – omnipresent but not so often explicitly stated – that the academy is something special, that by virtue of doing a PhD we are smart and unique. I don’t think being an academic is really much different from being an airplane mechanic, a…
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What is objective information? Robert Orttung in Zurich
“At some point you have to take a moral stance and say that undermining authoritarian governments is better than undermining democratic ones.” This is how Robert Orttung, from the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington, answered my question today. Robert, together with Sufian Zhemukhov, have written enough about the Sochi Olympics that you…