Search Results for: routine
Because of the pandemic, I am now shuttling between Aguascalientes (where I live) and Leon (where my parents live). Any kind of inter-city movement should be stressful enough. What keeps me more or less grounded is that wherever I am (and have been – including Paris, last year), I always have more or less the […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 7, 2020
It’s September 1st,2019. For many students and faculty it’s Back-To-School Week and a flurry of pieces of advice on #AcademicTwitter are flowing through the interwebz. I’ve seen people recommend that they treat school like a 9-5 job, particularly PhD programmes. I actually agree with this view, provided that 9-5 represents the kind of routine that […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 2, 2019
One of the main questions that my doctoral students have asked me most frequently is “how do you structure your daily work routine, professor?“. While I am a scholar of neoinstitutional theory and I know the importance of routines, I have to confess that I don’t think about my own daily work routine often enough […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 17, 2018
While I have a couple of blog posts pending (both by request, on how to prepare for comprehensive exams and how to build a research trajectory and a project pipeline for early career scholars), I wanted to write a post on something that I get asked about quite frequently. I arrived to the daily writing […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 29, 2017
A lot of people ask me about my actual writing process, so I figured I should share some of my practices, and make them into blog posts. I’m lucky that, as I write this blog post, I have a full day available to write (no meetings). The first element of my writing practice is the […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 16, 2024
I’ve had an absolutely bonkers pair of months (April and May, and June is gearing to be the same). For the first time in 2.5 years, I attended in-person workshops (2!) I am, of course, behind on absolutely everything. I used to be a very big proponent of the “write whenever you have a small […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 30, 2022
“You need to stay on top of the literature” This is such a common trope in academic life (just look at this Twitter search I did). I have uttered more times than I want to admit. It’s important to note that just about everyone who does scholarly work feels the same. It’s absurdly difficult to […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 25, 2021
This Fall 2020, despite having to teach online and facing the challenges of a pandemic, I have had amazing experiences teaching research methods, research design and the mechanics of research. This past summer and fall, I taught these courses online and I realized something that I had been thinking about for a very long while […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 26, 2020
In a previous post, I indicated that one of the best ways to develop a writing practice was to read volumes that worked as workbooks, teaching readers how to write and how to gradually learn the craft of producing good prose. This post is a summary of the second part of my Twitter thread on […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 6, 2020
As I write this series of blog posts on writing the thesis/dissertation, I get serious flashbacks of the period when I had to write my doctoral dissertation. The funny thing is, I have also had flashbacks from when I wrote my Masters’ and my undergraduate theses. Despite the fact that one was in chemical engineering, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 31, 2020
I clearly remember my first semester. I was absolutely dedicated to studying. Like, beyond whatever I ever had done before. I arrived on campus at 7:30 in the morning and left at 9:30 at night. I don’t want anybody to think that this was healthy. It was just that I was… really convinced that this […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 21, 2019
A few months back, Dr. Jane Lawrence Sumner(University of Minnessota) asked me if I had ever written on setting goals. Her request made me ponder whether I had one specific blog post on goal-setting as an important, strategic, research planning activity. I had a dormant Twitter thread that I wanted to save for posterity, so […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 4, 2019
One of the most under-appreciated instruments of academic life is working space. I specifically think that desk spaces are fundamental to our scholarly work. Whenever I travel, what I appreciate the most is a hotel whose rooms have roomy, ample desks for me to write. The room size is somewhat irrelevant as long as I […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 2, 2019
This blog post comes from a Twitter thread I did on snippets of wisdom that I have drawn from a broad range of writers. It’s like the synthesis/distillation of all (or most of) the books about writing that I have read. This wisdom applies to writers of books, articles, or theses. MAKING SPACE: Most authors […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 29, 2019
I recently wrote a 24-tweet-long thread that summarized some of the life lessons I learned the hard way in the past few months, and thanks to the work of ThreaderApp I am able to summarize them here. I am going to share the core, key lessons I have learned in the past 5 months, in […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 15, 2019
One of the best books I’ve ever read about academic writing was Joli Jensen‘s “Write No Matter What“. Ever since I read it, I pondered, “what does ‘constant, low-stakes contact with a writing project‘ mean, in practice?” This notion of regularly contributing to a piece of writing, even if it’s not daily writing, was one […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 7, 2019
I work according to my circadian rhythm, which may be completely different to that of other people. I do wake up at Ungodly In The Morning (4:00am, or 4:30 when I’m a bit tired, or 6:00 am on weekends – for my reasoning for doing this, you can read this blog post), and obviously by […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 1, 2019
Lately, I’ve seen a lot of online commentary against the “write every day” mantra. Helen Sword, in a 2016 article, released results from surveys, interviews and focus groups she conducted with academic writers, challenging the results of Robert Boice’s research. For ME, writing every day (even if just a tiny bit, as I’ve explained in […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 21, 2019
Over the past six weeks, I’ve been reading a lot of books on the PhD journey. Mine wasn’t easy, but I wouldn’t say it was a nightmare. I made a commitment to read more stuff about how to better guide my own doctoral students, and I’m sharing what I’m learning with the world too. The […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 24, 2018
I’m definitely not someone who reads “pop psych” or “psycho babble” (short monikers for popular psychology, the easily digestible version of scholarly psychological findings), which is how some books on habits, speed reading, speed writing, etc. are categorized. I don’t read self-help books because I think I need them, but because they’re fun reading material, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 5, 2018
Slowly but surely I’ve been amassing a small library of academic writing books. Not because I love dispensing advice, but because a lot of people ask me to recommend books, and others suggest the ones that have worked for them. But first, a disclosure statement: I buy absolutely each and every single one of my […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 24, 2018
There’s an article making the rounds on the academic circuit on the importance of writing good sentences: HOW ACADEMICS SURVIVE THE WRITING GRIND: SOME ANECDOTAL ADVICE. In the article, Helen Sword encourages the reader to improve academic writing by recognizing that writing involves editing, and rewriting. I have previously blogged about the importance of valuing […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 11, 2017
I’ll be the first one to confess that, after having loved Helen Sword’s “Stylish Academic Writing”, I was very much looking forward to reading “Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write“ (also published, like her previous book, by Harvard University Press). And I’ll also be honest in voicing (like with Paul […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 26, 2017
One of the reasons people with whom I talk to gets frustrated is because they can’t find the time to write, and they ask me how I can write for 2 hours every morning. Well, turns out, some days (luckily not EVERY day), I am so busy with administrative and busywork that I just have […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 14, 2017
Even though I write a lot about Academic Writing, I rarely read books now on #AcWri. Not because I don’t want to, but because I have so much stuff that I need to write myself that I end up shunning any other type of reading other than my scholarly work. HOWEVER, I had heard so […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 8, 2017
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