how to finish your PhD

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Here are the slides + audio from the talk I gave this afternoon to the PhD students in the Business School. Despite what the clock says at the bottom of the slides, it only runs for 18 minutes. Hit the green button to start. If I sound like Jabba the Hut, then you need to upgrade your flash player (thanks to Sam for figuring that out!).

How to Finish Your PhD
View more presentations from Tim Kastelle.

While it’s designed for PhD students, it probably has some generalisability to anyone that is trying to do things that involve writing.

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Student and teacher of innovation - University of Queensland Business School - links to academic papers, twitter, and so on can be found here.

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Category: innovation
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3 thoughts on “how to finish your PhD”

  1. This is a good talk for PhD students, Tim. Reading it I was reminded of a similar talk given to me by Craig Littler when I was a PhD student. He had supervised dozens of PhD students and had distilled some key points out of these experiences. The best one was on the literature and literature review. We all know that most papers don’t get cited, but some key cites get heavily cited. His point from this was that not all of the literature in an area is of equal importance and that there are usually 20 or so papers that are central to a thesis and these are important to know well. The remaining 200 or so are back up.
    What I got from this is that it’s important to grasp the most significant 20 in your area, and then get to work on the research. He also thought that there was a literature trap with students trying to read more and more literature, sometimes as avoidance behaviour.

  2. I think that’s exactly correct John. We discussed this issue during the Q&A section a little bit and I made essentially the same point.

  3. Pingback: Three Informal Project Milestones « Time « Innovation Leadership Network

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