Student

Oh no, I said it. I said the thing that is the death knell for (primarily) women in academia. “But, but the citations!” or “Job market!?” or “How will they know who you are now!?” Beneath the hyperbole is an uncomfortable and difficult question: how does one change their name when progression in the academe is so tightly tied to your name, which subsequently becomes your brand? Not all of us will be public intellectuals, but all of us will be subject to the name that appears on a paper and subsequent citations of that knowledge that follow. ...

Or preliminary exam or prelim or A-exam or or or… Every PhD program has a number of requirements you must fulfill to earn your doctorate. While coursework should seem straightforward and you’ve no doubt interacted with TA’s (or taught already), there is one facet of the PhD program that has an unusually high level of ambiguity. The qualifying exam(s). See? I even had to put parentheses to cover for a plural because language and structure around this milestone are so inconsistent. The qualifying exam comes at a pivotal moment in the PhD experience. You will be formally transitioning out of a more familiar, structured student experience into an unstructured, self-led experience. ...

This is a deceptively easy question. It’s the person who got the grant funding to support the project! Or is it the person who did the most work? Or is it the person who wrote most of the paper? Perhaps the person who designed the research collection and methods? Fairly quickly this question gets muddled. This doesn’t even get into the intergroup politics of deciding on a set of criteria (if this happens) and then figuring out an equitable way to discuss authorship ordering. ...