It can be challenging to prepare an elevator pitch as a junior PhD student — as someone just embarking on a research career. Nevertheless, junior PhD students are often encouraged to prepare elevator pitches about their work. I both think that this is good advice (people will ask students about…

When I think about direction-setting and the PhD process — and life in general — I often think about Lululemon’s 10-year “vision and goals” worksheet. Lululemon’s worksheet is a wonderful tool for exploring, developing, and refining a “life direction”. I write “life direction” instead of “life plan” because I don’t…

Research brings order to complexity and chaos. As part of the PhD process, one learns tools, methods, and strategies for creating such order from the complexity and chaos of open-ended research projects. Still, the complexity and chaos of research makes research challenging! The Cynefin Framework and the Five Decision-Making Domains. …

All advice that is given is probably true and great advice from the perspective of the person giving it. That doesn’t mean that it is the right advice for the recipient. That doesn’t mean that it is the wrong advice, either. …

Research productivity can’t — and shouldn’t — be measured while doing research. Or, at least this statement is true under a natural definition of “research progress.” Understanding the above paragraph and adopting a different definition of “research progress” can help researchers unlock the next step in their research and overcome…

The following notes capture some of my early (to me) thoughts about active learning. I wrote these notes in 2014, in an email to other educators. A recent conversation reminded me of these notes. Although I’ve changed my approach here and there, I still largely agree with many of the…

Here, I discuss the application of the “Research Iceberg Analogy” to the art of writing a research paper. There are two key topics covered in this post: During the research process: Many explorations are often needed before fully determining what a paper is about, many of which might end up…

It is tempting for researchers — including PhD students — to compare their individual progress and journey with the progress and journey of others. I encourage PhD students to try to avoid making such comparisons. In this post, I explain why. I do so using the “Research Iceberg Analogy”. I’ve…

This is a “sidebar” to my “Unseen PhD Effort, ‘Failures,’ and the Research Iceberg Analogy” post; I’ll refer to the other post as my main post. In my main post, I include the figure below and I remark that research is an iterative process with many “failures” along the way…