Career planning: your future is now
Emily Troscianko Before you read any further, find a piece of paper or a notebook and a pen, set a timer, and give yourself ten minutes to write down what your current career plan is. Make sure to include some thoughts on the question, “Why this?” It’s easy to treat career thinking as a distraction from the important work of analysing data or writing theses, books, or papers. But zooming out to make a career plan provides essential perspective which helps with the everyday and the longer term. For one thing, thinking about research as a means to an end, not as an end in itself, often has a grounding effect. A recurrent theme in conversations I’ve been having lately is the problematic ways in which deep research – and especially intensive writing – on any subject can feel like being thrust into a vacuum with nothing but one’s own existential questions for company. Why this? What am I doing it for? A particular hazard for many of us in academia is that when our minds drif...