“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, August 18, 2011

Counter-Intuitive Ph.D. Advice

...if it's good enough: just start writing. Before you do your prospectus! I just gave this advice to a really great student.

It's how it works when you write a book. You write the book first, then you write the proposal. No one in their right mind would write the proposal first...

Warning: this only really works if you're very inspired and devoted to your subject. And it still takes some digging and some reflecting. But you do that already—because you're into it.

1 comment:

Gudrun Bielz said...

Can you actually make your voice heard and tell these bl++dy universities to back off; these places that want everything contained, controlled and measurable, as well as you finishing your PhD well before you had started (a miracle) and it does not matter what the subject or your passion is, as long as it has got enough words and nobody finds out that it might be plagiarised anyway. LOL