Study

Far from being useless precursors to a life of burger flipping, Arts degrees actually provide students with a range of important life skills. From skulling beers to rolling joints, from discussing both Noam Chomsky and Nim Chimpsky to being able to read several layers of meaning into Dr Seuss.

During an Arts degree you may develop highly sophisticated techniques to pass subjects while attending minimal lectures; you may hone your hacky sack skills. By the time you graduate (10 years later) you may have mastered cunning linguistics or the discourse of ethnocentrism.

Of course, you might actually learn something. Like a language or how to help someone with a mental health disorder or how to better understand politics or people. That most basic Arts course, Philosophy 101, teaches logic and logical fallacies – skills sorely lacking in the general population.

Continue reading "We must be clever to avoid being the dumb country" »

Right now, there are thousands of brand new PhD candidates entering universities around the country. Many of them will be highly anxious, knowing that they have a long, difficult journey ahead of them which, statistically speaking, they have less than a 75 per cent chance of completing successfully.

Emma Jane last year described doing a PhD as “childbirth for the brain”. And, while I liked her sentiment, I don’t agree that the whole process really has to be so “mind-meltingly, stomach-churningly, sleep-deprivingly difficult”.

Just as there are many things expecting or labouring mothers can do to make childbirth easier and more bearable – epidurals, controlled breathing exercises, gym balls, warm baths, happy gas, umm… taint massage – there are some simple rules Doctoral students should follow in order to deliver their baby without recourse to forceps or an episiotomy.

Continue reading "Eight simple rules for losing your doctoral virginity" »

People often say that writing a PhD is like giving birth to a baby. Having given both these projects a whirl in recent years, I’ve decided that some parts of the analogy are more apt than others. 

Like making a new human, enrolling in a Doctor of Philosophy program often seems like a good idea at the time. It is frequently accompanied by thoughts such as “how hard can it be?”

The answer in both cases, of course, is “mind-meltingly, stomach-churningly, sleep-deprivingly difficult”. In fact, I wonder if any sane person would ever knowingly embark on PhD study or biological reproduction if they were fully cognizant of the hard labour that was actually involved. 

Continue reading "Doing a PHD is like childbirth for the brain" »