It wasn’t until I tried using a citation manager that I realized that I am not a citation manager person.
No, I won’t apologize for my choices, or my opinions about citation managers. And I can honestly say that I made it to the end of my PhD without changing my mind.
One additional caveat: despite my anti-citation manager stance, I have no problem with people who use them! You do you! Everyone’s experience with them is different, and I 100% can accept that. Hopefully you can, too. Otherwise, I’m not sure why you’re here.
So, why don’t I use a citation manager? Read on to find out!
My presentation received a generally favorable response. One person asked whether I would begin incorporating posts on the hidden curriculum aspects of being a new faculty member.
At the time, I couldn’t imagine what that would look like. I hadn’t yet started my new job, so I didn’t know yet what I didn’t know.
Although many of my questions have been answered, there are still things I figured out on my own.
This week’s post highlights some of the questions that I asked as I started my new faculty job.
Have you ever wondered what a day in the life of an archaeologist is like? Well, in today’s post, I’m answering (hopefully) some of your questions.
My favorite part of being an archaeologist is getting access to sites otherwise closed to the public. Here I am at the Villa of Good Fortune in Olynthos.
A quick caveat: although some aspects of my days are things everyone experiences, in general, my days will probably look pretty different from what you expect. This is because I don’t dig in the trenches. I am a member of the project’s pottery team. We are responsible for cataloguing and analyzing the ceramic finds that everyone else digs up!
Reflecting on my experience with funding in grad school, I wondered: what does “fully funded” grad program really mean?
Now that I’m on the other side of it, I think that the “fully funded” PhD programs that my professors told me to apply to are really a myth. No grad program will support you financially 100% of the time. It’s more like somewhere between 70-80%.
Ultimately, it’s up to you to figure out how to make up for the remainder. This could involve anything from applying for fellowships to getting a part-time job.
There are so many moving parts when it comes to funding in grad school. In this week’s post, I’m reflecting on my own experience with funding as a grad student. I’m also sharing some things to consider so that your own experiences are as painless as possible.
Want to know a secret? Although I’ve been asked to give talks and lead workshops on topics related to teaching, I haven’t taught a course since Spring 2020!
All the pedagogy-related public-facing work that I’ve done over the last two and a half years has been based largely on four things.
First, I’ve reflected a lot on my own teaching (and learning) experiences. You can find some of those reflections in posts I’ve rounded up here.
Second, I’ve heard a lot from my peers about the courses they’re teaching. Sometimes, I’ve even offered advice based on my own experiences teaching those same courses.
Third, since I’m almost always on Twitter, I get a lot of inspiration from discussions of teaching on social media.
All this reflecting and researching over the years, however, has (finally!) led to this moment. In the fall I will be back in the classroom as I begin my tenure-track position. This means that I can now practice what I preach – and have been preaching for years.
In this week’s post, I’m highlighting some of the ways that I am planning to make my courses equitable and inclusive of all students. Clearly, I haven’t had a chance to test these approaches yet, so you can take them with a grain of salt. But I think that they reflect my overarching teaching philosophy well.
One of the things that I wanted to do with Notes From the Apotheke was to amplify the voices and contributions of BIPOC scholars in ancient Mediterranean studies, at all levels and from all backgrounds.BIPOC in the field are invited to reflect on what brought them to studying the ancient world, as well as offer their opinions on the future of the discipline and share any work they are especially proud of or excited about.
This month’s installment of the seriesfeatures Hardeep Singh Dhindsa, a third year Classics PhD student in the UKand art historian of Early Modern Europe whose work interrogates the role Classics has played in the development of (white) British identity.
A month ago, I participated in the Presenting the Past Colloquium organized by Peopling the Past. The colloquium was held in Vancouver, British Columbia from March 23-25, 2023. The day before the colloquium started, I was also asked to organize a workshop on some topic related to pedagogy for the Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies (AMNE) department at the University of British Columbia. The topic I chose was rubrics.
In all honesty, I’ve never been the instructor of record for a course before. Therefore, I rarely had any agency over the grading scheme used in those courses.
As a graduate student I was a teaching assistant for five courses and only two incorporated rubrics. In this week’s post, I want to reflect on my experience with rubrics; how rubrics fit into my overall teaching philosophy; and some of the major takeaways from the workshop I facilitated at UBC.
In last week’s post, I provided an overview of what the dissertation defense is, and what my experience with it was nearly two months ago. This week, I want to unpack a part of my defense that, although virtually unheard of in my department, is common in others – defense presentations.
There are three main components of my preparation for this milestone in my graduate career: the outline, the slide deck, and the presentation.
Whether you’re preparing for a defense that is imminent or you’re in the early stages of your degree, I hope this post will be helpful!
There are a lot of examinations while earning a PhD. Many line up with major milestones of the degree. In general, these are: comprehensive exams, preliminary exams, and a thesis defense.
Of those, the defense was the most emotionally and mentally challenging.
The reasons why are summarized nicely in a blog post by Albert Kuo. Giving a public presentation, not wanting to disappoint anyone (especially your dissertation chair), and the unknowns of the closed-door session are all extremely anxiety-inducing.
In this week’s post, I’m revisiting that harrowing time in the hopes that it will help others going into this process for the first time.
One of the things that I wanted to do with Notes From the Apotheke was to amplify the voices and contributions of BIPOC scholars in ancient Mediterranean studies, at all levels and from all backgrounds.BIPOC in the field are invited to reflect on what brought them to studying the ancient world, as well as offer their opinions on the future of the discipline and share any work they are especially proud of or excited about.
Check out this brand new post written by Alex-Jaden Peart, an undergraduate fellow at the University of Pittsburgh studying the human body and its relationship with the environment in antiquity – the latest installment of this series!
