Grad Student Life

• No Digital Humanities, No Interview
  "there are also more and more people who see DH as a means of coping with the lack of tenure-track positions and a means of increasing their options for alternative academic positions. DH offers transferable skills that can land them in administration, coding, grant writing, and project management if they are unable to find permanent academic posts.
  
• The Sunday Meeting
  "the real secret to making a semester plan come to life is to use it on a weekly basis as the foundation for planning out your week. One of the simplest and most transformative strategies that I have seen graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and new faculty put into practice is what I call "the Sunday Meeting."
• Engaging early – changing direction before graduation
  "... the message I want to leave graduate students with is to think early and often about what else you might do besides academia. You may well decide to stay on the academic path, but you owe it to yourself to explore."
• Developing an Academic Publishing Strategy
  "The email stated that “We now have many more submissions for our refereeing process than we can cope with”. This annoyed me, not so much the rejection, more that it had taken me the best part of an afternoon to format the paper for this particular journals submission requirements and comply with the rather exacting requirements of Scholar One – when there was little or no chance of being accepted."
• The PhD Grind: A PhD Student Memoir
  "This book chronicles my six years of working towards a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University from 2006 to 2012." See also metafilter and y combinator thread for more discussion and related links.

Post-Graduation

• Planning ahead: post-doctoral fellowships
  "A post-doctoral fellowship is an ideal way to move on from your doctoral research, expand your networks, develop new skills and build your publications list. This is a normal career step in the hard sciences and becoming more common in the social sciences and humanities."
• Grim Job Talks Are a Buzz Kill
  "You were one of only a handful of candidates we invited to campus. We wanted to like you. ... But then your job talk started and my throat went dry and I felt that thumping in my temples."
• Turning 'Plan B' Into a 'Plan A' Life
  "... it strikes me that the true value in the continuing discussion about alternate career paths for historians lies in talking about what usually gets erased from such documents: the detours, wrong turns, time spent stuck in traffic, even the metaphorical car crashes."