Understanding and solving intractable resource governance problems.
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 […]
– 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 […]
– 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 […]
– 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 […]
– 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 […]
– 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 […]
– 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 […]
– 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 […]
– September 2, 2019
I am very much on record with my view that books should be read in-depth, and that skimming is an important strategy out of a broad repertoire of reading heuristics. Although, I’ll admit that after reading “How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading” by Adler and Van Doren, my priors have […]
– August 31, 2019
In a previous blog post, I explained how, after having done all the reading, I plot the literature (yes, by hand and doing mind mapping techniques) and then, based on this map, I write full paragraphs of the literature review. In this short blog post, I reverse my approach, and instead I show how you […]
– August 25, 2019
My conversations on Twitter with Dr. Pat Thomson (The University of Nottingham) are always delightful. Pat is someone I deeply admire for her research and her commitment to graduate students and scholarly collegiality. I have had the fortune of interacting with her on a regular basis and she’s someone whose blog I refer my own […]
– August 24, 2019
This morning, I woke up at 4 am (as I normally do) and started writing. It’s a Saturday, and I really do not like working on weekends nor long hours. However, this week I’ve been putting in 12-16 hour days, just to catch up. It’s the beginning of the semester. This pace won’t be sustainable, […]
– August 24, 2019
Continuing with the series of “challenging questions my students ask”, this is perhaps the one I get from students that I am always wary to respond. “Professor, how do I know which articles I should read in more depth and which ones I should just skim (i.e. do a quick AIC Content Extraction)?”. Well, now. […]
– August 21, 2019
I have been writing a lot for a very long time, and I *still* find myself dreading the process of opening and facing a new document template. The Dreaded Blank Page. For many of us, facing The Dreaded Blank Page is an exercise in self-loathing, frustration and hand-wringing. Even though I write a lot, and […]
– August 15, 2019
Every few weeks, somebody asks me for recommendations of books on academic writing, “how to do a PhD”, or research methods. Most of the time, I answer based on what I have available either at home or at my office, or what I can recall from memory. And as I noted in my Twitter thread […]
– July 17, 2019
This fall, I’m going to be teaching my Public Policy Analysis class (as per usual), but I promised the 4 cohorts of our Bachelors in Public Policy that I would give them a few tips on how to read better/faster/absorb the material more easily/in-depth. I had noticed that my blog had fewer resources for undergraduate […]
– July 12, 2019
My undergraduate students often tell me that it’s really hard for them to discern how to read a paper, particularly dense articles written by people with PhDs who often speak in “academiquese”, but that their faculty assign them to read. This frustrates me because I know that there is nothing I can do to change […]
– July 8, 2019
NOTE: This post is aimed both at undergraduate students AND educators. Obviously graduate students can also draw some insights from this post. I’ve always thought that one doesn’t really learn “how to read” until one practices for an extended period of time with a broad range of sources. I think that the biggest challenge we […]
– July 7, 2019
While I have read three of the best books in the business on how to write a book (William Germano on how to transform your dissertation into a book, and how to write an academic book that is not your doctoral thesis aka your second book, as well as Rabiner and Fortunato’s guide on how […]
– June 27, 2019
I recently wrote a 24-tweet-long thread that summarized some of the life lessons I learned the hard way in the past few months, and thanks to the work of ThreaderApp I am able to summarize them here. I am going to share the core, key lessons I have learned in the past 5 months, in […]
– May 15, 2019
As a qualitative researcher who mentors students in conducting research using these methods in a primarily quantitative institution, it’s hard to do both mentoring theses and teaching them skills if you don’t teach the methods courses (which I couldn’t do even if I wanted to). Therefore, with all the pain in my heart I have […]
– May 1, 2019
Two of my quasi-doctoral students (Cesar Alvarez from University of California Los Angeles and Mariana Miguelez from The Ohio State University), have asked me a few times whether I could write a blog post about how to plan a summer. As doctoral students in the United States, their summer is approximately 4 months (from May […]
– April 14, 2019
This is one of the most challenging questions people have ever asked me, because after looking through dozens of journal articles in my Mendeley database, I could not find a lot of them who used Discussion sections. I believe this idea of the Discussion component of an academic journal article (or book chapter, in some […]
– April 10, 2019
I did my PhD in Canada, where doctoral dissertation defenses are public, so what I’m going to narrate here is how I prepared for my own defense under the rules and standards of the school where I graduated from (The University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada). I won’t cover other systems as I don’t […]
– March 13, 2019
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