Search Results for: writing
Perhaps the weirdest thing about the way in which I conduct research and I write is that I find that the old-fashioned way works best. For me, doing everything online (on the screen) doesn’t work. I am quite well-versed in computer-aided qualitative analysis (I use N*Vivo, Atlas Ti and will start using Dedoose once I […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 1, 2015
While normally I try to keep my desk quite neat, both at my home office and at my campus office, I always need to spend some time cleaning up, organizing and rearranging my stuff before the new semester starts. I do this as well every time I finish a writing piece. I need to reorganize […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 1, 2015
I was going to write this blog post a long time ago, every since Ryan Briggs (Virginia Tech) alerted me to these posts by Tom Pepinsky (Cornell University), Ken Opalo (Stanford University) and Chris Blattman (Columbia University), but then the “worm wars” debate happened on Twitter, I got pulled into it (inadvertently and unwillingly) and […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 1, 2015
If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I requested help both on the Facebook Political Scientists page and on Twitter on how to integrate more female scholars’ writing in my State and Local Government syllabus for this fall. As I’ve explained before, I teach in English at CIDE even though the main […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 24, 2015
About two years ago, Kim Yi Dionne (Smith College), Tom Pepinsky (Cornell University), Steve Saideman (Carleton University) and myself engaged in a really fun conversation on how much content by female scholars did our syllabi have (you can read the whole Twitter thread here). Being perfectly honest, the whole issue of gender parity rarely occurred […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 18, 2015
Last July 1st I celebrated my first 3 years with CIDE (Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas, the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics). I joined CIDE on July 1st, 2012, after spending 2006-2012 teaching in the Department of Political Science at The University of British Columbia. I have extremely fond memories from UBC […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 11, 2015
Every so often, the issues and questions of whether “social sciences are relevant” or “how can we social scientists impact how policy is made” come back to academic circles, both online and offline. Recently, Don Moynihan, Michael Horowitz and Jay Ulfelder have written about this issue, and I would encourage you to read their posts. […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 21, 2015
When I was in undergraduate (I studied chemical engineering), it was bizarre for my male colleagues that I would have such neat printing and that my notes were always drawn in different colors and clearly differentiated. For example, when I drew distillation towers, I would use purple for the distillate and pink for the vapor […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 3, 2015
Sometimes I get random emails asking me “but, how do you do what you do?“. Most of these emails refer to my academic writing strategies. I’ve written about what I do to get my writing unstuck, what I do if I feel like I need to kickstart a writing session, and how I am disciplined […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 12, 2015
As I’ve written before, the more experience I gain in my academic work, the more I realize I’m still learning. Even though I’ve reshaped my research trajectory through time, every time I publish (or I have a rejected manuscript), I learn something about my research, about where my work is taking me, and so on. […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 7, 2015
When I wrote my post on why I believe it is important that we take holidays and weekends off, and how overwork really tired me, I mentioned 5 goals I had for this year. Among these, I mentioned how I wasn’t planning to publish book chapters, and write in Spanish. A few Mexican colleagues of […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 27, 2015
Last year, I committed myself to a manifesto: Seeking peace and balance. In 2013, I launched new projects, assembled new datasets, and started teaching new courses. For me, 2014 was supposed to be the year where I would be able to balance my personal life with my professional (academic) life. This was a lofty goal […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 9, 2014
As I’ve noted elsewhere on my blog, I am very much far from perfect. Despite my ability to speed-read, touch-type about 100 wpm and have quasi-eidetic memory, I can (and often do) procrastinate. Having a very rigorous routine (as established on my weekly schedule) reduces distractions quite a lot. But when I do get distracted, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 22, 2014
I never claim to have done the right thing in academia because I think what I share on my blog and my Twitter account is what I have done wrong so that nobody else repeats my mistakes. One of the mistakes I think I’ve actually committed has been to publish so much in Spanish (both […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 21, 2014
While I’m still a fan of handwritten notes, and I do have a paper-based fieldwork notebook, I’m also someone who believes in how information technology can aid scholarly research and university-level teaching. This fall, I am teaching Regional Development (for fourth year undergraduate students) and State and Local Government (for third year undergraduate students). I […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 20, 2014
When I was doing my doctorate, I took a variety of methods courses. Seeing as I had taken economics during my Masters and that I was originally a chemical engineer, I thought it was advisable to do coursework that would actually help me in a variety of situations. I took quantitative methods, qualitative methods, spatial […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 12, 2014
When I did my MBA coursework at The University of British Columbia, we used the case study method for several courses. In particular, we (students) purchased a course packet with photocopies of Harvard case studies, produced by the Harvard Business School. These cases were written accounts of challenges facing corporations and firms and we were, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 18, 2014
I can’t believe I had to spend some of my time (that I so jealously guard to do academic writing) to write an actual defense of a social media site and its use in academia, but it surprises me how many times I have had to explain why I am on Twitter, as a busy […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 14, 2014
Anybody who knows me is well aware that I’m extremely protective of my time. It’s not that I am participating in the “Busy Olympics“, as my good friend Janni Aragon calls them. I’m not “perpetually busy” as most academics, because if you look at my rather regimented (and sometimes rigid) schedule, you will see that […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 10, 2014
By some people’s standards I could consider myself a very successful academic. I have a job I love at a prestigious, internationally-recognized institution, I have a low teaching load, have successfully raised extramural grant money to execute projects, I have brilliant students, both undergraduate and graduate. I absolutely love my research and have fantastic collaborators […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 20, 2014
Meeting “civilians” (aka non-academics) is incredibly fun because they always ask me challenging questions that sometimes I struggle to answer. These past two weeks I had meetings with Mexican bureaucrats who work for the Secretariat of Environment in Mexico (SEMARNAT), civil society representatives and many academics at a social studies of water conference. These folks […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 12, 2014
If you were on Twitter and were following me around the time of the recent International Studies Association (ISA) conference in Toronto (Canada), you probably knew I was ill for most of it. I wasn’t feeling well (from food poisoning to lack of sleep to general malaise) and thus, I missed perhaps the best opportunity […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 5, 2014
Whenever anybody complains to me that I focus on urban water governance (and yes, there ARE scholars in Mexico who question me because I am interested in how water in cities is governed), my first impression is to want to send them to read scholarly literature. This is often not the best idea, because our […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 19, 2014
The recent discussions on academics’ engagement (or lack thereof) reminded me about a particularity of my own circumstances now that I reside in Mexico, and after living in Canada for over 15 years. Both in academia and in my personal life, I am (for the most part) immersed in a Spanish-speaking world. My parents speak […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 18, 2014
I have no shame in admitting that I’m completely old-school. I take handwritten notes. Despite my inherent interest in, and continued use of, technology tools (particularly online ones, like Mendeley, Evernote and Dropbox) I write my To-Do lists by hand. Not only that, but also when I am editing a paper (or writing a first […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 8, 2014
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