Before I came into higher education I had a brief stint as a civil service strategic planner. I got pretty interested in the process of scenario planning – that’s where you develop a narrative about something that could happen in the future. Or better still multiple narratives. The point of scenario planning is to identify ways […] … learn more→

When I started my PhD, I was full of enthusiasm, excited by this new opportunity and period of growth. I read a  blog by Jodie Trembath about having a PhD symbol (she originally called it a PhD totem but changed this on the request of several First Nations scholars in the US). I bought an Asian bamboo […] … learn more→

I completed a Ph.D. at 63, two weeks before falling in love for the first time in a decade and frittering away two post-doc years swanning around Europe, circling the globe from Canada to Europe and returning at last to my tiny pied-a-terre in downtown Vancouver. At the tender age of 65 I am, this week, […] … learn more→

If the PhD degree is an international reference, its equivalent in France, the doctorate, does not yet have the aura it deserves on the French job market. Yet it is a potential vector of innovation and economic development. Its valorization thus constitutes a leitmotiv of the public policies of the French State. One of the recent acts of this […] … learn more→

At many times during my PhD years (2013-2018) I wished for a ‘pause button’ which would freeze the lives of those around me. Mainly, I wanted to put on pause the lives of my sons who were aged 13 and 10 when I embarked on my PhD but had become teenagers before I submitted my […] … learn more→

I used to get raised eyebrows and looks of disbelief, when I responded to the question: ‘how long did it take you to get your PhD’ with the answer: 2 years. I could have said 14 months to submit and 22months if you include the graduation ceremony, but that would have been pushing the limits […] … learn more→

Of course a PhD is “hard” – as in it “has a high difficulty setting” and also “is a lot of work”. It is three or more years of creating new knowledge, after all. But how “hard” should it be, and what kind of “hard”? In my work teaching research and writing skills at La […] … learn more→

I commenced my PhD programme in Molecular and Cell Biology of Infectious Diseases at the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP), the University of Ghana in August last year. WACCBIP is a world class research centre where young African researchers are groomed to be research leaders who would change the landscape […] … learn more→

You’ve heard of Lego your research method and Dance Your PhD. But now Bake Your Thesis is getting to be a thing. There’s a hashtag #bakeyourphd and active competitions in New Zealand, Canada and the UK. One of the Canadian thesis baking competition represents their research on immigrant communities through a cinnamon bun – a complicated and lengthy […] … learn more→

The PhD is finished, and finally, everything is packed away in my home office; but it took me 18 months to get to this concluding stage. My desk was unusable for the year-and-a-half that followed my graduation and the mess worsened as the months slipped by. After the final printing, the lovely purple-bound copy of […] … learn more→