News: Student life
How we manage our time (or fail to)
Time, and attempting to manage it, can be a difficult thing.Â
When was the last time you saw an act of grace?
And what was it? ‘I work in an emergency department. There are a thousand tiny acts of grace everyday – every beat of the heart – most unnoticed by the bigger, glossier world, but they add up. In essence, the acts of grace are sometimes barely noticeable as the world rages away in its current state, but they can be seen if you pay enough attention.’
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Not all who loiter are lost
A group of my friends at uni are in their last few months of their PhD. They are in the home stretch. I can’t help but wish I was in their place. I tell them this and the reaction I get are genuine looks of trepidation and anxiety. They tell me it feels like they’re so close to the finish line, but also feel so far away from it.Â
Summer is coming!
The first hints of the change in season got me thinking about what I am most looking forward to about the warmer weather.
On blossoms and overcoming
‘Happiness held is the seed; happiness shared is the flower.’
I’m a tropical girl and am not originally from Australia so I still really sometimes struggle during winter. Having said that, I think this time of year is really magical - especially the last couple of weeks of winter, when the season’s just about to change.Â
Michelle and Barack on a podcast and my reflections on ‘community’
Podcasts everywhere. If you’ve chanced upon on any of my other posts you’d have already surmised that I quite enjoy tuning into a podcast, especially when I’m going out for a walk or doing some of my chores. So now that Michelle Obama has started her own podcast, I was quick to check it out.
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Book reflection: the sense of style – by Steven Pinker
In between all of the reading I have to do for my Ph.D., I intentionally read something a bit more literary. I find that after long bouts of reading academic pieces and re-writing thesis drafts renders me a bit stuck in my writing. I understandably become too bogged down with the data, that I forget that I actually have to be able to effectively communicate my data. My writing becomes robotic and boring, which doesn’t really help in getting people to care about my research or at least get anyone interested in it.
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Can we have it all?
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to ‘have it all'.
HDRs and grow your career week
It’s still about two years until I complete my thesis and (hopefully) finish, but with everything that’s happening with the health and economic crisis, it won’t hurt to start preparing for the future right now. Grow Your Career Week was helpful in getting myself thinking about the future. I attended three of the offerings during GYCW. One was on developing your personal brand, the other one was how to leverage LinkedIn, and the third one was showing up at the Hub to get a photo taken from my LinkedIn profile. (I thought it was about time. The current photo I have on there, although also professionally taken, was from nearly ten years ago, pre-baby!) The sessions I virtually attended were effective in helping me reflect on the skills I have already mastered, but also made me think about the areas I needed to develop. Of course, I needed to have thought about the ideal career, but then also the kind of job I wanted if I couldn’t get the dream career (yet). One of the key insights I had was on the significance of networking, especially in the current circumstances, even for researchers. I like metaphors so I thought pass on what I’ve learned by using a marketing perspective: you – your qualifications, skills, and experiences as the investment or the product, and them, the buyers, representing the visibility concept, your researcher profile, social media, peer groups, mentor/sponsor relationships, and so on.
Unpopular opinion: I am starting to like mullets
I have always hated mullets. Dirty, grungy haircuts that need to be left behind in the 80’s. Society has moved on and advanced, but are they coming back?
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