Search Results for: writing
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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– 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 […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 24, 2018
The past few weeks have been a whirlwind, and I’ve had to focus even more on my writing. This meant that I had to stop reading books on the dissertation journey to make time to finish papers I need to submit. But yesterday, a PhD student on whose committee I am and with whom I […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 19, 2018
I just returned to Aguascalientes (literally, I walked through my house’s door less than 10 minutes ago) from a gruelling, one-day field trip. A good friend of mine from the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana Xochimilco (UAM-X) had invited me to join her, one of her PhD students, and two other professors on a trip to three […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 9, 2018
Despite the fact that I’m super organised and systematic, things get out of hand sometimes, particularly with all the travel I need to do, and all the students of mine that are graduating this semester, my teaching (I used to teach only in the Fall, but this Spring I had to teach because my students […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 20, 2018
I have to admit that from the title, I was expecting a really powerful book, and while I liked it, it really didn’t feel like Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day nor Patrick Dunleavy’s Authoring a PhD. The great thing about this book is that it is a guidebook, so your […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 20, 2018
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