Professional Development for Graduate Students and Faculty

The Work-Life Balance

Robert Boice's books are great for thinking about how to weave writing into a variety of other (scholarly) activities. I especially recommend Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing and Advice for New Faculty Members.

Joan Bolker's book, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis is clearly about the process of finding a dissertation topic and writing it, but it is generally a book that encourages productive writing alongside a sane existence.

Conference-Going and -Presenting

Claire Potter writes brilliant advice at the blog Tenured Radical, and this entry is a step-by-step explanation of what to do to give a good conference paper.

The Academic Job Search

Kathryn Hume's Surviving Your Academic Job Hunt: Advice for Humanities Ph.D.s chronicles the different aspects of the job search and how the tasks change throughout the academic year. Although the sample documents and the websites offered for help are all tailored for the humanities, the advice would be helpful for anyone who is an applicant.

Julia Miller Vick and Jennifer S. Furlong's The Academic Job Search Handbook is the most complete book on the topic.

And again, the excellent Claire Potter on the job market —addressing the psychological aspects of the process much better than the above books.

Writing Academic Synergy offers retreats on academic job market documents at affordable rates. These retreats are designed primarily with the interests and needs of advanced doctoral students, postdoctoral scholars, and non-tenure-track appointees from historically underrepresented communities in mind.

Best of the Blogosphere

Many bloggers, often pseudonymous assistant professors, sometimes grad students, sometimes tenured, a few administrators, write about their lives and their work within academia. It's nice to have this multiplicity of voices. Those below tend to think through the culture of academia as they experience it in a way that I have found illuminating. (Note: Many of the writers work in the humanities.)

The Professor is In
Bardiac
Dean Dad of Confessions of a Community College Dean
Flavia of Ferule and Fescue
Historiann, History and sexual politics 1492 to the present
Undine of Not of General Interest
Notorious Ph.D. of the Adventures of Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar
To Delight and To Instruct
Grad School Confidential

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