Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:

The hidden curriculum of the final year of the PhD program

Writing your dissertation when you still have so much left to read about

Why the final year of grad school is uniquely challenging

How to determine if you should stay in your program or leave

Why finishing your degree causes both relief and grief

A discussion of the book Your PhD Survival Guide:Planning, Writing, and Succeeding in Your Final Year



Our book is: Your PhD Survival Guide: Planning, Writing, and Succeeding in Your Final Year (Routledge, 2020).
by Katherine Firth, Liam Connell, and Peta Freestone. Part of the 'Insider Guides to Success in Academia' series from Routledge, this book offers practical and realistic guidance to students. Written in short chapters, this book is designed as an accessible toolkit for final year doctoral students. Drawing on an understanding of the intellectual, professional, practical and personal elements of the doctorate to help readers gain insight into what it means to finish a PhD and how to get there, this book covers the common challenges and ways to resolve them. Written for students in all disciplines, and relevant to university systems around the world, this book expertly guides students through the final 6–12 months of the thesis.
Our guest is: Dr. Katherine Firth, who manages the academic programs of a residential college at the University of Melbourne, Australia and founded the Research Insiders Blog which has been running since 2013.
Our guest is: Dr. Liam Connell, who has worked in research training and education since the late 2000s. He works in research development at La Trobe University, Australia.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.
Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:


How to Fix your Academic Writing Trouble (Open University Press) by Inger Mewburn, Katherine Firth and Shaun Lehmann


Being Well in Academia: Ways to Feel Stronger, Safe and More Connected by Petra Boynton


A Field Guide to Grad School by Jessica Calarco


Level Up Your Essays by Katherine Firth

Katherine Firth, ‘Should a PhD be hard?’, Research Degree Insiders

Peta Freestone, ‘Valuing your writing: making a time budget’


You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.
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