In the early 2010s, there was a lot of pushback from up-and-coming left media figures like Owen Jones and Laurie Penny to criticisms of their PMC and educational backgrounds.

I’ve had a fantastic MSc experience (almost done!) and have been talking to a lot of incoming or current students. Some topics / questions come up a lot. Here’s what I know!

🧵 Tips for an awesome MSc experience.

#AcademicTwitter #AcademicChatter @OpenAcademics @academeology

1/ Ok to start, some context: I started my MSc in September 2019 in Organizational Behaviour. I start my PhD this September.

A lot happened in my MSc: I won several scholarships, my Dad died, I submitted my thesis work to a major conference, annnd there was the pandemic.

2/ Let’s get into it!

Choosing a thesis topic: Read read read.

What are you interested? Pick an umbrella topic and start reading. Follow the rabbit holes. Write questions, answers, more questions. When you find questions you cannot answer, you might have a thesis topic.

3/ Don’t get stuck on the idea you came in with.

My first semester a professor said “if your research ideas don’t change, you haven’t learned anything.”

No one is going to pull up your SOP and hold you to whatever you said you were interested in upfront.

4/ Pin down a thesis format

What will you do, broadly? One study? Two? A review paper? Meta-analysis? As early as possible, find out what YOU actually need to do to complete your thesis. ESPECIALLY if you’re in a lab with lots going on. What is YOUR requirement?

As my Christmas present to you all, here is a list of my top-10 metal tunes of 2020, in no particular order. It's a mixed bag of genres and styles, but they're all bangers!

First up, The Terror Begins by Make Them Die Slowly. Horror-movie inspired grind/black/industrial from Mick Kenney and Duncan Wilkins.

Next, Northern Irish thrashers @gamabomb, with Lords of the Hellfire Club from their excellent new album Sea Savage.

Now for something a bit off the beaten track: brilliant New York black metal experimentalists @imperialnyc's City

Time for something a bit more accessible: this year's best symphonic metal from Sweden's @eleine. Here's the title track from the fantastic 'Dancing in Hell' album.

APPLYING TO GRAD SCHOOL, POST #18: INTERVIEWS (PART 4)

You've finished your interview(s) and you're tired, but it's not over quite yet! What should you do after interviews?

@OpenAcademics @PhDVoice #AcademicChatter #AcademicTwitter #phdchat #gradschool #firstgen #nontraditional

Firstly, congratulate yourself for making it through the interview! Take some time to relax and reflect on your experience, especially if you have forthcoming interviews for other programs. Take note of questions and positive and negative moments that stuck out to you.

*Huge note: PLEASE try not to beat yourself up too much if you didn't know the answer to every question in the interview. Depending on the type of interview (and interviewer) you had, there might have been many difficult questions presented to you, specifically for the purpose...

of not only seeing how much you know, but also seeing how you think and process problems when you *don't* know the answers. If you can, reason your way through the question and explain yourself as well as you can, so that they can see your way of thinking, but if you truly...

have no idea, it's perfectly fine to just say that you don't know, as opposed to rambling nonsensically and hopelessly.

That was all to say, try to make notes of tough questions so that you can be prepared for similar questions in the future, but don't beat yourself up if you...

Many of us are about to begin a new semester of online teaching. The learning curve for moving my lecture units last semester was STEEP, so I compiled some sort of hand over notes to people approaching this for the first time. I hope it's useful for someone somewhere.

Reduction in the amount of content was important. What used to be 2 x 1 hr in-person lectures/week had to be condensed down into 6 x 10 minute prerecorded videos (aka aynchronounous content) with 1 x hr live zoom session (synchronous). Even that was too much.

For the sake of yourself and your students, SLASH. Slash your content down. This doesn't mean having to lose important stuff, but keeping it short and sweet.

10 minute video chunks was just about short enough to hold attention. Have you tried watching an online lecture? It is HARD to maintain focus. The shorter the better.

Importantly, each 10 minute video had an explicit Intended Learning Objective given at the end and in the associated text, so that everyone knew what the point was (and how this might relate to assessment later).