You probably recognise this. A meeting with your supervisor is coming up, you prepared every detail, you know what you want but when the meeting is over, you leave the room disgruntled. Or you feel insignificant the moment you step through his/her door? You have the feeling like you are…
Take the following ingredients.… The classic first words of every recipe. I received a recipe via Marc Koper on how to write a paper. He didn’t cook it up himself, but George Whitesides did, a Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. His recipe is intended for chemistry, but is also very…
The last couple of weeks I had lots of talks with PhD students. The thing that struck me the most was that PhD students don’t talk. Yes, they talk to me, because I am an outsider and not too scary and I know so much about the process of getting…
Whenever I see Donald Trump on TV I wonder if he ever doubts himself. Then I noticed a newspaper article about his nocturnal tweets to rectify his controversial statements about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. Is the Donald insecure? I know that PhD students are, especially meetings with their supervisor…
Are meetings with your supervisor difficult? Can’t you get the feedback you need? I wrote about that before, but recently I found some great questions in the book ‘How to get a PhD. A handbook for students and their supervisors’ by Philips and Pugh that can really improve your meetings…
A lot of PhD students complain about the meetings with their supervisor: they don’t get the feedback they need, they are overwhelmed by all the tips they are getting but don’t know how to use them, and they are getting lost because their research needs to go into a different…
