Search Results for: writing
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
Given my physical and personality traits (I get tired incredibly fast, have enormous amounts of energy, love focusing on a broad variety of tasks and projects), I have designed my days in such a way that I can focus on doing the stuff I need to get done and still maintain some degree of sanity […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 3, 2014
2012 and 2013 were great for my research in that I got to create new datasets, explore new field sites, undertake new fieldwork, and write, write, and do even more writing. The second part of the semester, though, was simply insane. I travelled to 9 countries, presented papers in Ireland, Uruguay, Portugal, Canada, the United […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 12, 2014
The end of the year was even more hectic than I thought it would be, so I really didn’t have much time to actually sit down and write what I had learned in the past semester, let alone the entire year. I started the year hitting the pavement running, so I haven’t had much time […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 12, 2014
I often write and tweet about my quest for that elusive notion of balance. Not only in academic life (e.g. the tricky process of juggling research, teaching and service, or the need to work in many multiple research and writing projects so that I can get stuff published in time for, you know, tenure reviews […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 14, 2013
Two recent pieces by Rebecca Schuman and Mark Sample have made me ponder again something I wrote about last year: what exactly are professors supposed to be teaching their students? I should begin by disclosing two facts: One, I am terrified at the job prospects of my students, both former and current, given the current […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 14, 2013
One of the challenges I face as a multidisciplinary researcher who doesn’t accept the traditional, discipline-based boundaries rigidly set by traditional academic standards is to find the right balance of focus and diversification (and the right balance of writing what you want to write right now versus what you need to finish). For many years, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– October 27, 2013
I’m having an intense and really challenging week, one where I am feeling really conflicted. My weeks are usually like this, but this week I’m facing an interesting conundrum. I have a number of projects I need to finish off (not the least, changes to my book that I lost in the last round of […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– October 24, 2013
This may sound trite, but I’m really thrilled that I am working at CIDE. The truth is, in the last 12 months I have received more institutional support than I had in more than a decade (both as a PhD student and as a faculty member at my previous institution). I am never shy to […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– October 17, 2013
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