Posts by Anna Hutchens
Spring Cleaning
So today marks the ‘official’ start of Spring. The season has connotations of renewal, rebirth….and a good spring clean. And here at Postdoc Solutions, we’ve been doing our own spring cleaning, looking over what’s working, what we can improve, what we’re going to let go of, and what we’d like to change. More on that…
Read MoreThe Options Suite
One of the things participants in my courses notice is that I keep it ‘real’. I don’t portray life as a last-year PhD student or as a newly minted PhD graduate, or an early to mid career researcher, as a glamorous path, because it ain’t. It’s stressful, it’s exhausting, it’s anxiety-producing. And I help people…
Read MoreA burning question
Frequently in my courses, participants ask me some variation of the following question: If I submit a proposal on topic x, will my grant be (more) likely to succeed than if I go with my current topic on y? It’s a burning question for many. The activities we do in these courses invite participants…
Read MoreCopy Paste Grants?
Let’s be honest. Grant writing takes a lot of time – something you’re not drowning in, I know. So I’m often asked if there are ways to reduce the amount of time spent writing grant application after grant application. My answer is yes. There are a number of ways you can make grant writing more…
Read MoreConfident or not, here I come
In a recent online discussion in PhD2Postdoc, one participant asked what a ‘shy’ type can do to overcome her reluctance to put herself forward in a networking environment and, more generally, ‘promote her research’. We brainstormed some great networking strategies, but it’s the theme of self-confidence that I wanted to tackle more deeply here. …
Read MoreThe institutional narrative is your bridge
I was recently coaching a client – a female early career researcher in the visual arts – who lamented that her circumstances made her track record of outputs and achievements ‘completely uncompetitive and hopeless’. It was a statement full of frustration and anger, but I wanted to share it with you here because it highlights…
Read MoreFrom Chaos to Control
When I was in the late stages of my PhD and a total novice at grant writing, my approach was entirely personal and emotional. Am I good enough? What will they think of my idea? How competitive is the scheme (read: am I good enough for this?). But the more I rubbed shoulders with…
Read MoreThe Achilles’ heel
If you’ve ever written a Fellowship application, or for some schemes, a Project Grant application, there are designated sections for writing about your research performance and you as a ‘candidate’ for funding. This is by far the most sensitive part of an application for people to write, an Achilles’ heel of sorts in the…
Read MoreThinking bigger
At this time of year, hundreds of hopeful early career researchers around Australia are writing fellowship applications. In many fellowship schemes, the funding rules allow applicants to request project expenses. But often, especially for those in the humanities, arts and social sciences, this presents a stumbling block: the type of research being proposed ‘doesn’t…
Read MoreBuilding your Publication List Part 2: the (gendered) juggle?
In my last post, I wrote about co-authoring. I want to continue thinking on this topic by talking about something we hear about less often: how co-authorship tends to be a gendered phenomenon. You may recall that in my last post I shared with you the story of a male client who was co-authoring…
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