Welcome!

Welcome to my blog! When I was a grad student, I benefited a ton from people who were willing to share their professional development advice with me. Now that I’ve completed my PhD, I want to pass some of that knowledge on in the hopes that others will find it useful.

There are plenty of resources for perennially popular topics like time management, academic writing, and productivity. Academics like Raul Pacheco-Vega, Tanya Golash-Boza, Wendy Laura Belcher, Joli Jensen, Karen Kelsky, and Mirya Holman have social media accounts, books, newsletters, and blogs that I highly recommend checking out – they are wonderful resources.

However, it seems to me that there are still a lot of gaps about other aspects of academia too – things like writing your first academic CV, networking strategies, addressing mental health concerns, and the many soft skills, unspoken norms, and “hidden curricula” that are common to many disciplines and departments. I hope to address some of these topics in this blog.

If you have any questions, want to suggest a topic for a blog post – or are interested in doing a guest blog post! – please reach out. You can email me (gsneegas@tamu.edu) or find me on Twitter (@GretchenSneegas). I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

I’ll be kicking off the blog soon with a series on academic CVs – putting together and formatting your first CV, using your CV as a graduate school planning template, integrating your CV into a five year plan, and the major differences between a resume and CV. Stay tuned for the first installment in the coming week!