News: What messes with your head
Review: Everything's gonna be ok
One thing I generally look for in my television and film viewing is heart.
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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A trip to the market
I love going to markets. This week I ventured out to the Adelaide Farmers Market.
A new member of the family
As of 2am Friday, I am officially an uncle!
A mission to cook more
I struggle to stay organised in my approach to cooking, but now, I’m committing to getting better at planning my meals and snacks.
Black box
In a lot of areas of work you get to be part of creating something beautiful. Developing a new technology, curing people, building something. Unfortunately not all work is so positive.
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.
Cancelling Plans
The other day, I was on my way into the city on my bike, almost at my destination, when I got a call. The call was from the secretary of the person I was on my way to meet.