GradHacker

At the beginning of January I opened a word document and started to write my dissertation. I hadn’t collected a single participant and am probably a couple years away from defending my thesis. That being said, it felt good to start writing and here are seven reasons why you should be writing as soon as you begin anything related to your thesis collection:

Social media is often stereotyped as a frivolous, navel-gazing enterprise, and completely antithetical to the deep thinking and thoughtful questioning of academia. However, most gradhackers know that academia and social media are not at all incompatible. Used well, social media can be a vibrant and fruitful space for networking, exchanging ideas, and--dare I say it--building supportive friendships.

In the sticky, sweltering heat of late summer, I wrote a little post called “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dissertation,” which translated my writing struggles into a therapeutic list of writing tips. This post was written as I despairingly grappled with many of the negative emotions that can accompany slogging through a long form project like a dissertation (guilt, self-loathing, and a healthy dose of but I don’t wanna, primarily).

What digital skills, technologies, and tools should we develop while in graduate school? And how do we do that? I’ve put together a few suggestions and hope readers from a variety of disciplines will offer additional ideas in the comments section below.

One of the challenges to teaching with technology is helping students figure out the "who", "what", and "how" of internet messages. As a grad instructor of “Human Diversity, Power, and Schools”, a course that centers on issues of difference, this challenge coincides with a key concept: social construction, or the idea that dominant groups’ norms are positioned as natural, to the exclusion of non-dominant groups. I have stumbled into memes as one fruitful teaching tool for helping students to uncover the ways mass media shapes how we view ourselves, others, and the world around us.

This is a personal narrative of how I’m trying to strike a better balance in my life. For some people, finding a balance isn’t hard and taking time off doesn't lead to guilt- I'm not one of those people. For those of you who are perfectionist workaholics like me (i.e. anyone who related to Julie's post on the perils of perfectionism), relaxing can be one of the most difficult things in the world.

Some of you reading this article are about to start your first round of graduate school interviews this spring. Many of these interviews will take place during what is known as recruitment weekend. However, this is a much different process than your standard job interview and you should be aware that there are some key differences between the two.

I've found that the end of 2012/beginning of 2013 has brought some changes to a number of services that I rely on for my Grad Student productivity/teaching/ writing/etc. Since it's always hard to keep up with tech changes (especially when the pace of change seems to be daily, even hourly), I thought I'd share a brief round-up of the news that has been of interest or of use recently.