Welcome to Warwick. Congratulations on starting your research journey, and we wanted to give you a special welcome from the PhD Life blog. This blog is part of Warwick Library and is written and organised by researcher and for researchers. We publish a post every week, on Wednesdays at 2.30pm, providing you with all the advice, study hacks, experiences, and hints and tips you need to make your research journey a success. To give you a flavour of our blog, in this post editor Ellie gives you a tour of our site, pointing you to some of our favourite and most useful post to get you started at Warwick.
By Ellie King
PhD life is part of the Research Exchange at the University of Warwick. Our hope is to create an online PhD community not only for Warwick students but also for anyone and everyone in this lovely world of ours who identifies with any of the following: pre-PhD, PhD, post-PhD. We publish on a wide variety of topics, but for your easy reading, we have categorised them into four main categories, which you can access via the tabs at the top of each page.
PhD Basics is the place for everything you need for your PhD: from note-taking, working with your supervisors, the research process, writing up, or your viva. Here you’ll find posts like this one on your literature review, or about how you can set realistic goals.
And Beyond is for all the PhD activity that you get involved in beyond those necessities: from publishing to attending conferences, networking and social media presence. One of my favourite posts to have written was becoming a rounded researcher, and why it’s important to invest in your own development as well as your research. I also love this post on academic conferences and why they’re a great part of research.
Looking after you and your PhD is a blend of posts focusing on PhD support. This involves practical support, such as time management and organisation skills, to topics focused more on your mental wellbeing. Often, these two topics merge and the best advice involves a mix of both, which is why we’ve put them together. You’ll find posts like Take a Break (it’s ok) or about the Doctoral College’s work on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
Your Experiences is all the wonderful tales from our bloggers, featuring topics on everything and anything. Usually with a hint of advice, these posts are more personal and can be about reflections on experiences, musings on hobbies, or internal conversations about the PhD journey. A great post we had last year was from Pierre on things he’d wish he’d known before starting a PhD. We also shared personal experiences from our blogger Kayleigh who is researching with Bipolar Disorder.
We’re currently recruiting for new bloggers for PhD Life, so if you like the look of these posts and want to contribute your own experiences and advice, then make sure you apply through the Unitemps website. This is a paid position and you only need to write four blog posts over the academic year, so why not give it a go. One blogger last year said:
I liked the flexibility of the role and the freedom to write any article I thought be interesting to the readership
A 2021-22 blogger
If you’d like more information on the role, please email libraryblogs@warwick.ac.uk
What are you most looking forward to in your research journey at Warwick? Let us know in the comments below, by tweeting us @researchexchange or by dropping us an email. If you liked this post, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe to PhD Life
PhDLife Blog 