A few days ago, I saw a post in a discussion forum on how to write a Research Trajectory document. The conversation that ensued prompted me to consider how *I* viewed the different documents that we produce not only for job-seeking purposes (the Research Programme) but also for advancement reasons (the Research Trajectory), and for […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 17, 2020
Because of the COVID-19 lockdown, I have been working from home now basically every day. Since I’m staying at my Mom’s for the duration of the shelter-in-place period, and I have a full-fledged home office complete with bookshelves, desks and a desktop computer, printer, and wireless internet, I have been able to focus a bit […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 6, 2020
The more theses I supervise, the more essays I read and the more papers I have to peer-review for publication, the more I realize how important it is to teach how to craft good research questions. Many students of mine come with a general idea of what they want to study for their thesis, but […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 4, 2020
The choices we make on whom to include and whom to exclude as we choose the readings for a syllabus are important and can be a political act as well. One of empowerment or one of exclusion. I strongly believe that we have a responsibility when designing syllabi. Developing a syllabus for a course/class requires […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 23, 2020
Writing about academic writing, planning and scheduling, organizing and time management has led me to ponder the best ways in which information can be organized and retrieved. I am, after all, someone who wanted to be a librarian since he was a child, someone who organized his parents’ personal library using the Dewey system and […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 2, 2020
I suspect everyone on this planet has had similar ideas to others, and come to the exact conclusion and concept independently. This is the case of similar approaches to my Everything Notebook concept. Someone asked if what I did was a “Commonplace Book”. When they asked, I had no idea what a commonplace book was, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 1, 2020
Two scholars I really respect and whose writing I follow quite meticulously are Dr. Pat Thomson (University of Nottingham) and Dr. William Germano (The Cooper Union). Both of them have independently developed and/or promoted ideas on how to make your full argument coherent, cogent and readable. When I first started editing my doctoral dissertation to […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 26, 2020
As I mentioned earlier on my blog., two of my PhD students are THIS CLOSE to finishing their draft and defending. This week, I sat with one of them to go over her entire doctoral dissertation. I just wrote a Twitter thread on how my (close-to-defending) doctoral students are writing their Global Dissertation Narrative (GDN), […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 17, 2020
Because of the similarity of both concepts (one notebook to organize your life), a lot of people online confuse my idea of the Everything Notebook with the Bullet Journal. I’ve tweeted about the differences between both systems quite a few times, but on this occasion I want to keep these tweets in more permanent form. […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 14, 2020
I’m often asked to discuss one of my most popular techniques, the Everything Notebook. I have considered making YouTube videos explaining how to make one, how it operates, etc. But I end up running out of time. But over the winter break (this past one, December 2019-January 2020), I was asked what kind of stuff […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 14, 2020
I have long admired Professor Bent Flyvbjerg for being an economic geographer who speaks methodologically and conceptually to many other disciplines. As someone who has been trained both in political science and human geography (with a concentration in economic geography), and who works in public administration/public management/public policy as well as comparative politics and international […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 13, 2020
Even though English is my first language (contrary to what many people may think because of my name and last names) and I was trained in English-language institutions (The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and University of Manchester, in Manchester, England), I have published A TON of Spanish-language journal articles and book chapters. […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 28, 2019
I won’t tell anyone what to do, but as I close out a terrible year, health-wise, I want to share a reflection regarding MY OWN EXPERIENCE with overwork. I think everyone can do whatever they prefer, I’m just using my experience to reflect on the profound inequalities and inequities of the higher education system and […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 28, 2019
I have had a very diverse life and with that, I have developed various networks of friends who do NOT work at all in academia. These friends and colleagues have enriched my life enormously. John, Rebecca, Ryan, Tanya and myself when I was in graduate school. All of them worked in the tech industry, while […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 27, 2019
One of the things I find most challenging to teach is the skill necessary to map out scholarly debates. I find that most professors offer a list of articles, book chapters and books that (in theory) map the field as they see it. However, I find that very few if any provide any guidance on […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 10, 2019
One of my biggest problems, as I have openly said everywhere, is that I often prioritize other people over myself. This is partly because I’m overly generous by nature, partly because I also know that helping others will come to me naturally, whereas sometimes tackling my own work is hard and difficult. One of the […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 1, 2019
One of the biggest challenges I find when reviewing the work of my graduate students is that their work is often not situated within the broader landscape of scholarly literature. They have made an important contribution, but it does not show clearly in their writing. I tell them “you need to put your research into […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 30, 2019
I often give keynote lectures and present invited papers at seminars. This page links to several recent ones where I’ve been captured on video. I have divided these in three general realms: * Talks about my research * Talks about research methods * Talks about academic writing, planning, and the mechanics of conducting research. Research […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 18, 2019
One of my main concerns when I see students seek advice online, as I’ve made explicit in earlier blog posts of mine, is that many folks recommend that they should ALWAYS SKIM EVERYTHING and later (at some undetermined point in time) they should choose which readings they must come back to and read in more […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 13, 2019
I get stuck, all the time. Even though I write a lot, and I write about writing as well, I often feel stumped. There’s a particular paper that I am having a really hard time finishing, and I’ve been trying a few different techniques to get myself to complete it (I’ve written about all of […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 21, 2019
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
I wrote a traditional, book-style PhD dissertation, mostly because I actually knew nothing about the three-papers model, and when my advisor saw how far ahead I already was, he decided to just keep my thesis as a book. In hindsight, I wish I could have reformatted it as a three-papers thesis and publish it in […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 13, 2019
I have read A TON of books on writing over the past few years, and I had vaguely remembered that someone recommended Eric Hayot’s “The Elements of Academic Style” to me, but I could not for the life of me remember who it was (Bertha Angulo, at ITAM, now I remember). Anyhow, this thread summarizes […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 4, 2019
Someone on Twitter asked me for a “Popular Blog Posts” page or listing, but truth be told, I never know which post will be popular, so I figured I could store a thread I did a few months ago. These blog posts should be of interest to doctoral students but my resources can be used […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 4, 2019
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
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