A week in the Life of a PhD student  0

Like I promised in my last post, this time I’ll tell you a little about how I spend my days. Since it’s Monday today, I’ll talk about what I did last week. I even kept some notes on a little post-it!

 

Monday

I actually started my Monday by doing some very useful tasks. I cleaned my desk and my outlook inbox. Even though I try to stay organised, my desk usually gets pretty messy. The picture below is a photo of my desk today, so my cleaning effort was futile. I’ll try again soon. IMG_1507

 

Monday is also teaching day at our institute. I wasn’t teaching last week, but because I supervise the research projects of student-teachers, there were plenty of research plans for me to provide feedback on.

 

The third big thing I did on Monday was think about an elevator pitch about my research subject and why it is interesting. My supervisor asked a few of us to prepare a pitch for a presentation on Friday. We also spent some time discussing what the presentation would look like.   Read more

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Planning to do everything: reading, writing, but still…  0

Indira was so nice to share this with me after my previous post :-)
Indira was so nice to share this with me after my previous post 🙂

So, in my previous blogpost I shared with you some ways in which I cope with time.  And this blogpost will go further on it. For, it has turned out, that even with my ‘assistants’ (OneNote and Wunderlist) some things are still very hard to do exactly as planned/required/wanted.

 

At the moment I am still writing my first paper and some weeks it seems, I cannot write a word at all! It doesn’t have anything to do with not knowing what to write, but with:

 

  1. Not having time to write, or even
  2. Being ‘scared’ to write (yeah, you read well, scared, as in frightened, terrified)

 

No time? And what about planning….?

Yeah, I know, last time I said that time can be made… Read more

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Phd: To Finish or not to finish  1

phdcomics

 

Doing your Phd means doing a research project for a number of years. These number of years are usually fixed. As a Phd candidate, you are supposed to start at a certain date and also to finish at a certain date. You sign a contract…it’s an official thing.

Supervisors monitor your progress and colleagues ask in which year you are or for how long you still have to continue.

 

If only it was that simple….

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How to get your article rejected ;-)  4

Picture 6

When I raised a topic like this, I’m quite aware of your disappointment. It doesn’t make any sense at all  to work on a paper that is intended to be thrown away. In fact, I’m on my way as you are to get my articles published instead of getting them rejected. However, after being rejected several times by several different journals and with different articles, I realized my potential to do it the other way. For some people, getting their articles published is a piece of waffle; for me, getting articles rejected is easier than preparing a herring. I was thinking that perhaps sharing the experience with you can help you to reflect your own experience if you have the unexpected experience of being rejected, or your own plan if you are planning to submit your article to a journal, and re-evaluate your own potential: whether you want to do it this way, or the other way?

I’m not alone in talking about how to get articles rejected. Some editors also did that. With exceptional expertise of themselves and profound sympathy to the authors of rejected articles, they got their articles on how to be rejected PUBLISHED on peer-reviewed journals. Personally, I do not recommend you to read these articles, because if you truly want to get your articles rejected, with their exhaustive advices (including very smart ones like “don’t put your photos in the paper,” which I should try next time), you might end up with your articles PUBLISHED. And that’s for sure.

 

a way to peer review

 

Here’re my tips to get your article successfully REJECTED, seriously: Read more

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What does a PhD student do all week?  1

Whenever I tell people about my job as a PhD student they tell me that they could “never work on the same thing for four years!”.

Like doing your PhD is mindlessly slaving on one specific task, non-stop, for four years. I guess it’s one of the most common misconceptions about doing your PhD. While it is true that I am spending four years working towards one thing: my dissertation and defence, I am not working on one thing at all.

In fact, being a PhD student is a very diverse job with a lot of possibilities and quite some freedom to choose. After four (or three, or five) years, your dissertation needs to be finished, but it’s not like you can decide to start writing it on your first day.

 

Things that need to be done before you can finish your dissertation:

  1. You need to read about your subjectrequired-reading
  2. Your research needs to be planned
  3. Data needs to be collected
    1. Instruments should be developed (or found somewhere)
    2. You will spend time finding participants
  4. Data needs to be analysed (maybe you even need to spare some time for data cleaning)
  5. Results need to be interpreted
  6. And of course those results should be written down
    1. You will have to spend some time researching journals that you want to publish in
    2. You will spend endless hours polishing your text until it is perfect (although it never will be)
  7. You’ll have numerous meetings with your supervisor(s) to discuss all these different steps

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5 Success Factors of Multilingual Universities  2

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As promised in our last blogpost, in this post we share our view on what makes multilingual universities a success:

1. Promote teaching and learning through multiple languages
There is sometimes a tendency to promote the idea that being a multilingual university today means adopting English as the main language of instruction and marginalising courses taught in the national language. This is not the vision of multilingualism we imagine. As mentioned in one of the responses to our previous blogpost, our concept of a multilingual university is one that supports teaching and learning in the national language and additional languages. Decisions as to which language is used in which course will depend on the needs of the students, the program goals and the University profile.

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The Hagelslag Dilemma  3

Blog 1 - hagelslag 3

I’m standing in the supermarket. It is a rather large supermarket, but luckily I only have to be in one department. So, here I am, standing in front of a pile of boxes of chocolate sprinkles (“hagelslag”, in its Dutch term). The place has huge departments and lots of choice. I recently got hired to do research on boxes of hagelslag. Which makes me very excited, because I love hagelslag! I look at the shelves, no, I gaze in awe at the shelves, where piles and piles of hagelslag are exposed, hundreds and thousands of different kinds. Since I know nothing about hagelslag yet, I have to get a grip on the field I’m studying. I have to choose the right boxes of hagelslag to start with, otherwise it will take me ages to find some information. After all, I’m getting paid now to choose the appropriate boxes of hagelslag for my research. Where to start?? Read more

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5 Reasons Why Monolingual Universities Will Fail  9

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Last November a celebration was held to laud 25 years of bilingual education in the Netherlands. A month earlier a so-called “Manifest voor het behoud van het Nederlands” was published by four Dutch university professors making a plea to stop the development of English language university programmes. This “manifest” obtained some support in the Dutch media, for example in Volkskrant writer Aleid Truijens’ piece “In het Engels haalt niemand zijn niveau”. As bilingual and international education researchers and teacher educators at Iclon, we want to share with you 5 reasons why we believe monolingual universities are doomed to fail.
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How to improve the speaking skills of individual pupils in secondary schools in classes of 30 pupils?  2

presentatie

Context
In September 2014 I started as a Ph.D-candidate at Leiden University (ICLON) in the context of the Dudoc-alfa program, supervised by Prof. Dr. Jan van Driel en Dr. Ir. Fred Janssen. The main purpose of the Dudoc-Alfa program is the improvement and innovation of foreign language acquisition in secondary schools.

Focus research: speaking skills
My research focuses on feedback on speaking skills in foreign languages. Many language teachers in secondary schools have difficulty paying attention to the performance of each pupil and adjusting their feedback on each individual. What type of feedback is effective, when and how to give?

Feedback: What, when, how?
If these are questions you are also interested in, as a teacher or as a researcher, please contact me to share your ideas, opinions, advices and wishes: devrind@iclon.leidenuniv.nl

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PhD: What did my first year teach me?  7

This post is a first of a track where
ICLON PhD students want to share
their trip on the PhD-lane with you.
Hope you enjoy it!

 

As I only now, after more than a year doing my PhD, start blogging, I thought this topic would be the best way to get you a bit up-to-date on what I do and how I do it…

My PhD started in August 2013 and I went head first into it, immediately. The project at the school started running and I had to start up my research directly in order to track everything that was going on. Starting my PhD with taking my time reading, thinking what ways to go, sorting out my materials etc. was not applicable to me. For me, this meant instant decision-making. Later, timeslots opened up

to contemplate what I had been doing the past time, how it went, and how it all relates to what I want to and will be doing.

 

‘Somewhere in your career, your work changes. It becomes less anal, less careful and more spontaneous, more to do with the information that your soul carries.’
Ben Kingsley

But I had to do it the other way around!

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