Understanding and solving intractable resource governance problems.
I have the hardest time saying NO. While I am an incredibly busy person, I am also someone who works super fast. As a result, I tend to overestimate how many things I can do, and end up saying YES to things I should have said NO. No longer. This year, for the very first […]
– January 22, 2019
One of the things I have begun to appreciate with time is the value of drafts. I am pretty good at cranking out a first draft of a paper, and then I hate editing and revising it. The editorial process for me is way more painful than the writing process itself. But as I said […]
– January 7, 2019
My students often come to me frustrated to my office and tell me “Professor Pacheco-Vega, I am making such slow progress with my dissertation/thesis/paper. I feel like I need to read faster, or read more”. I know this feeling. I often feel like I haven’t done enough. What I always tell them is what I […]
– December 30, 2018
When I was a child, I learned Pittman and Gregg shorthand because my grandfather taught me about them. He learned Gregg shorthand in secretarial/administrative assistant school, and I learned both Pittman and Gregg when I took a class (I was in grade 7 but this was not part of the school’s curriculum, so I had […]
– December 10, 2018
My students often ask me for advice on how to take good notes. This is a hard task to comply with because, well, it’s been a very long while since I’ve taken a class/course. BUT I do take notes of stuff I read, so this compilation of blog posts should be useful. A proposed heuristics […]
– December 9, 2018
When I was in graduate school, I discovered Endnote. Not only did I discover it, I actually bought a copy at the student price and became absolutely dependent on it. I taught courses to my fellow graduate students on how to use Endnote. I wrote my PhD dissertation using Endnote, as well as many, many […]
– December 8, 2018
As I noted on Twitter, it’s been a VERY long time since I have taken a class, so while I have my old notebooks from courses I have taken, ranging from Comparative Public Policy to Chemical Engineering Plant Design, I am not sure I could teach anyone how I take notes. I’ve written a blog […]
– December 8, 2018
One of the most challenging topics of conversation I’ve had in the past few years is the eternal question of “why don’t you go all digital? Why keep paper planners, write in project whiteboards, and have an Everything Notebook?”. The answer is: I like the idea of having redundancies. For me, making sure that things […]
– December 8, 2018
A couple of people have told me that they feel uncomfortable using index cards for their note-taking process. I completely understand, even though I love writing index cards and I use them to take notes too. Nevertheless, I also use other note-taking techniques. One of them is using just ONE notebook for absolutely EVERYTHING. That’s […]
– December 7, 2018
I’m an old school kind of guy, and I think everyone who follows me on Twitter and reads my blog (and knows me as a person) knows this. I like highlighting, scribbling (by hand, on paper). I write handwritten notes. I keep just one notebook, my Everything Notebook. I carry index cards, highlighters, fineliners, pens […]
– November 28, 2018
I have three PhD students right in their second year, plus I informally mentor other 3. I love mentoring and supervising students, particularly doctoral ones, because this component of being a professor is really the one that allows you to build how other scholars think and you can see them flourish. All doctoral students I […]
– November 22, 2018
As most of those who read my blog and follow me on Twitter know, I’m very systematic about what I do and how I plan. My annual programme (which I create using printed monthly calendars and my Everything Notebook has the major milestones, but as time goes by, and things get post-poned, plans get derailed, […]
– October 29, 2018
One of my PhD students lamented this week with me that she had a lot to juggle (taking children to and from schools and to and from activities, etc.) and that she needed a strategy to make her research move forward. I had been planning to write this blog post for a while, since this […]
– October 6, 2018
One of the biggest issues we seem to have as academics (be it practitioners, students, faculty, post-docs, contingent faculty) is carving the time to read. I’ve written before about the importance of reading systematically (every day, if possible), and about the legitimacy of reading as a key component of academic writing. Well, here’s my challenge […]
– October 1, 2018
The second book I absolutely did not like at all was “Destination Dissertation: A Traveler’s Guide to a Done Dissertation“. As I indicated in my reading notes of Ogden’s “Complete Your Dissertation or Thesis in Two Semesters or Less“, I acquired this book because Dr. Kimberly Wiley, someone whose advice I fully trust, suggested that […]
– September 18, 2018
I recently ran a poll on Twitter about whether I should write about books I did NOT like, and the majority ruled that it was important to know which ones and why not in order to make better decisions. This was a split decision, since 48% approximately suggested that I should NOT write about these […]
– September 18, 2018
Whenever I read conclusions of papers, both in my students’ papers as well as in journal articles and book chapters, I find that writers are so tired of writing and doing the research that they end up exhausted. As I often say, they have “run out of gas”. Conclusions read hasty and rushed. I decided […]
– August 31, 2018
A few weeks ago, University of Toronto Press sent me a complimentary copy of “Work Your Career: Get What You Want from Your Social Sciences or Humanities PhD“, a book written by Dr. Loleen Berdahl and Dr. Jonathan Malloy. It’s the first time I have gotten a complimentary copy of a book of this type […]
– August 24, 2018
I sometimes eschew book recommendations even though I have an intuition that these may actually work for my purposes. A number of scholars had recommended to me that I should check Umberto Eco’s How to Write A Thesis whose 2015 reprint was published by The MIT Press, particularly since I’ve been reading a lot of […]
– August 23, 2018
When I was in graduate school, I took several courses with Professor Anthony (Tony) Dorcey, Professor Emeritus with the School of Community and Regional Planning at The University of British Columbia. Perhaps unbeknownst to everyone but only those closest to me, my first interest was in water planning and governance using multistakeholder processes. Professor Dorcey […]
– August 9, 2018
I’ve been teaching small workshops for my lab on how to do scientific writing. Doing these short, quick courses helps me provide them with insights on how I write my own papers, and how they can write their own papers (plus dissertations and theses). With these classes, I also create a shared knowledge base and […]
– July 18, 2018
I was asked by Dr. Joanna Brown for guidance on how to write a book chapter. I wouldn’t say I’m the ideal person for this task, but since I have published many of these for several edited collections, I think I can offer some advice. I’ve got a few single-authored chapters on the go for […]
– July 11, 2018
I recently participated in a doctoral candidacy exam recently (a student who asked me to sit on her committee, but whom I’m not directly supervising), abd my participation prompted me to reconsider what and how I teach my doctoral students. I reflect on this issue frequently because I am really trying to improve how I […]
– June 28, 2018
As I mentioned in one of my recent blog posts, I have PhD students at all stages (about to defend their PhD proposal, about to go on to the field, about to finish) and therefore I have been reading a lot of books on the PhD journey. I’ve also been participating in several events associated […]
– June 27, 2018
I am a member of the Public Outreach Committee of the International Studies Association’s Environmental Studies Section (ESS of ISA). At ISA 2018, recently held in San Francisco, I participated in a Publishing Roundtable organized by Dr. Beth DeSombre as part of our Speed Mentoring Series, which is organized by the Public Outreach Committee. I […]
– June 24, 2018
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