In August 2020, I defended my PhD successfully. In the preceding months, I had generated a list of potential defense questions by using various different sources (websites, other defenses I watched, and my supervisors). The list ended up helping me a lot. Today I shared this list with a colleague who is soon defending, and I thought: Why not share it publicly?
Author: Melina Aarnikoivu
“Which language shall I learn this year?” On language struggles of mobile early-career academics
I never studied French at school. Some years later, in 2015, I came to regret this decision when I suddenly got a chance to move to France. The original stay was supposed to be 15 months. And then two years. Today, I find myself having lived on French soil for over seven years, barely being able to discuss anything in French beyond basic small talk and getting some official business done.
Doing doctoral studies: selected literature
We all probably know the feeling of downloading interesting-sounding articles onto our computers, thinking we’ll read them “at some point”. And then we’ll never look at them again. However, sometimes those papers come to form the core background literature for our doctoral (or later) research. But once the thesis is done, what do you do with all those neatly sorted and zotero’ed papers?
“Look, a squirrel!” Non-focus in qualitative research
This blog post is an English translation of a peer-reviewed journal article that has originally been published in Finnish in the journal Tiedepolitiikka [Science Policy].
Why I have a problem with the “top” discourse
It’s usually once a day that I browse through Twitter or other social media sites and see the word “top” connected to academia somehow. Most of the time, this word drives me completely mad. I stopped to think for a moment why that is.
The Making of Early Career Higher Education Researchers: An open-ended experiment in community building
A a narrative reflection on the past, present, and future of the Early Career Higher Education Researchers (ECHER) network. Given its independent, informal, loosely structured, and voluntary character, we conceptualise it as an open-ended experiment in community building.
What happens if you put academics from different disciplines in the same room and ask them to talk to each other?
Anyone who is trying to facilitate change in higher education settings knows that it’s a challenging thing to do. As the famous analogy goes, “changing a university is like moving a graveyard— you don’t get much help from the people inside”. […]
What does it mean to be an early-career higher education researcher? And why we should all care
If you are reading these lines, there is a good chance you are thinking of yourself as a higher education researcher. You may have started your academic career as […]
“Your article is more important than the journal you put it in”: Interview with Petra Angervall, Editor-in-Chief of “Journal of Praxis in Higher Education”
This time in the “Meet the Editors” interview series, we talk to Petra Angervall, the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Praxis in Higher Education (JPHE), a new, open access journal established in 2019. […]
ECHER: Spring/Summer 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic has affected and continues to affect us in ways we are still struggling to make sense of. Even within the academic “micro-universe” —the one most of us are closest to—the impact […]