What? Why? How? A list of potential PhD defense questions

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?

“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?