It’s official. I’m Dr. Erika Romero. Erika Romero, PhD. So exciting!! It’s been a hard 7 years as a PhD student, and I’ve learned a lot about myself during this time. In today’s blog post, I’m discussing 7 mistakes I made during my time as a PhD student and candidate. So if you’re a new PhD student or are in the early candidate stage, I recommend giving this post a read and learning from my mistakes. [Here’s my video about my 7 best decisions.]
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As a semester comes to an end, there are a few tasks that I recommend completing as a college instructor. With how busy this last month or so gets, I thought it’d be helpful to share a list of these activities along with a list of resources that can help you accomplish them without much additional effort. I’ve also created a checklist with these resources, which can be found in our resource library. But for now, let’s talk about some activities that will help you have a great semester’s end.
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Being stuck at home during this time of COVID-19 has definitely given me more time to do some extracurricular reading. Finally getting around to James Clear’s Atomic Habits was fantastic, since it gave me some new ideas on how to work with my bad habits, rather than just trying to get rid of them with no success for years. When reading the concepts in this book, it was so clear (no pun intended) to me that atomic habits can be a wonderful tool for teachers and students. In today’s video (embedded below), I go into detail on how the ideas in this book can apply to our academic life. Since it’s a longer video than usual, I also summarize it a bit in the rest of this post.
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The new year is here, which means a lot of us are thinking of ways to make this year the best year yet. For academics, this tends to mean wanting to find ways to be incredibly productive while still having a life outside of work responsibilities. In today’s post, I thought I’d share a few productivity tips that have worked well for me. I’ve got a video with seven productivity tips related to building routines, goal setting, planning, and more to get us started off. But, I also have a few other pieces of advice that I felt would be easier to describe in written form. Let’s talk productivity!
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At this point, you’re probably starting to get distracted more and more by the knowledge of how much you have to get done during this last month of the semester. Grading, final meetings, exams, papers, etc. are all going to be due pretty soon. So, how can you prevent yourself from feeling super overwhelmed? From failing to keep track of an important task and needing to scramble to get it done? In today’s post, I start with a short video with a few simple productivity activities to help keep you on track. Then, I offer a couple extra tips that will help you end the semester on a productivity high note!
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There are about four weeks left in the fall semester, which means times of epic stress and overwhelm are likely coming up in your near future. I’ve already written one post about how to carefully plan this time in ways that account for self-care, but I thought I’d write from a different perspective this semester. There’s a short video you can watch with my six self-care activities suggestions, or you can read the quick list in this post. In any case, let’s take the time to take care of ourselves as the semester ends.
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