One of the realities of an academic career is that international mobility is often part of the journey. You may move abroad to start your PhD, relocate for a postdoctoral position, accept a faculty appointment in another country, or move…
Over the past weeks, I have been reading a number of proposals for potential candidates to our PhD program. Reading proposals is always interesting: you get a glimpse of what prospective doctoral candidates are excited about, which problems they see…
With AI tools becoming part of our everyday academic lives, it is tempting to ask: do we still need to read? If an AI tool can summarize a paper in seconds, compare arguments across articles, and produce a neat overview…
Part of the planning and preparation for each semester is sitting down and asking myself: how can I make this semester work? Not in an ideal-world, perfectly-color-coded, never-interrupted way, but in a way that reflects the reality of academic life.…
I have written before about how I, as a PhD supervisor, onboard my PhD students. In that post, I shared the checklist I use to make sure a new PhD candidate has the information, access, and structure they need to…
For many years, most of my international academic travel revolved around conferences, and then my annual research stay in Delft. I would travel to present a paper, chair a session, attend committee meetings, meet colleagues, and learn about the latest…
This post is part of the series PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: posts written for the Dutch academic career network AcademicTransfer, your go-to resource for all research positions in the Netherlands. These posts are sponsored by AcademicTransfer, and tailored to those…
Many research projects involve partners from different universities, countries, disciplines, or sectors. When you work in a consortium, organizing a workshop is often part of the project activities. These workshops can be especially important when you are the consortium lead,…
From the outside, conference travel and project travel can look almost identical. In both cases, you may be away from your office and teaching duties for one or two weeks. You need to book transportation and accommodation, rearrange meetings, prepare…
Work-life balance is a challenge in academia. The work is rarely finished: there is always another paper to read, proposal to write, lecture to prepare, or email to answer. The flexibility of academic work can be an advantage, but it…
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