Online communities for PhD students
Being a PhD student can sometimes feel a little isolating, although those of us based in the lab are lucky enough to have an built in community, that doesn’t mean we can’t also look outside of the lab, our departments and our institutions for people to talk to and discuss PhD life with. For humanities and […]
The elusive work/life balance
I’ve spoken about work life balance before and how I have to work hard to maintain it. Recently the issue of overworking in research science (and by all researchers, STEM or otherwise) has been brought up due to a recently published article on the Science website called “Getting noticed is half the battle”, it was […]
Sports membership update
Great news everyone, following on from my blog a few weeks back about the lack of gym membership options for PhD students (and other post-grads) I’ve got an update. Sports and Rec have agreed to introduce a membership that runs from 1st Jan-31st Aug each year, as it runs for 2/3’s of the time of a […]
While the Undergrads are away…
So today is the last day of term for the undergrads but University life goes on for the rest of us, admittedly much more quietly, but still we’re here working away. I’ll be here for another week and then I’ve booked off 2 weeks for Christmas. I’m only actually using 2 days of annual leave (of the 24/year […]
Working 9-5
What a way to make a living … a lot of the time PhD’s and also academic jobs are portrayed as having very long hours, essentially we are worked to the bone for not a lot of money, but is this really true? Do we have to work long hours or risk not achieving our goals? […]
Hitting the ground running…
I think it’s fair to say I didn’t exactly hit the ground running when I got back to work on Wednesday. I spent a fair amount of the morning doing some of that productive procrastination i.e. looking at travel options for a conference I’m attending in June. Overall an important task, at some point I’ll need to […]
Should we give up on the selfish gene?
So this one is going to be a science opinion post not a life at Leicester post because at the weekend I read this article: http://aeon.co/magazine/nature-and-cosmos/why-its-time-to-lay-the-selfish-gene-to-rest/ Thank you kindly to Josh and Chuck at HowStuffWorks.com for their weekly “The Best Stuff We’ve Read This Week” which appeared on my twitter at the weekend. For any budding […]
A little Friday afternoon procrastination
I know the majority of people are currently revising like mad for Jan exams but once you start a PhD you can leave that world behind. I’m not saying we don’t work hard, as I’ve said before it’s much more like having a job then being a student, and I’m definitely not trying to rub it in […]
Chris Ramsey – The most dangerous man on Saturday morning television
I think it’s really important to maintain a good work(uni)/life balance. Before beginning my PhD I worked for 2 years and the last of these was spent working on a 1 in 4 standby rota – the weekends I did have became very precious as when I was on standby I’d work 12 days straight :(. Now I’m free from […]
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