I was lurking around the dashboard and stats at Research Whisperer recently, after our publication of Katie Mack’s (@astrokatie) hugely popular “Academic scattering” post (on the human cost of academic mobility). Jonathan and I are always interested in how people come to our blog, and where they go once they arrive.
A few of the pages readers went on to visit were at this blog – the slightly bitter’n twisted posts I’d written about research career opportunities and accommodating career interruptions.
Then a single click-through caught my eye.
It was to a Geocities site, which is positively ancient on the interwebs these days. I realised that the click-through was to a 2002 presentation about postgraduate futures that I’d uploaded because of one of the first blogs I ever started: the now-defunct Academia 101. That blog only ever ran to about 6 posts, and was very much like what I write for RW nowadays but in a more long-winded fashion (I think all the posts were at least 1000 words, with some at about 1500).
One of the first posts at Academia 101 was about academic networking, and how I did it (considering that I hate traditional ideas about networking). That post linked to this postgrad futures paper. That post also became my first post for Research Whisperer when we launched in 2011: Networking and other academic hobbies.
Anyway, the point of this post is to re-post and re-archive this presentation about postgraduate futures. I just re-read it, and so much of it still holds. I have a rant about why academic mobility is such an embedded (and loaded) part of the career, then go on to talk about academic collaboration and opportunities, and interpreting our skills for a general jobs market. I think it’s still got currency, even though it was written over 10 years ago.
Funnily enough, it doesn’t contain a skerrick of social media information or influence!
Here it is: No fries with that – TseenKhoo 2002 (.pdf)
And I’d have to extend my thanks again to the convenors of that UQ postgrad futures conference at which I presented, including @johngunders. Who knew it would have this much longevity?
Dr Tseen Khoo 
There’s so much good stuff in there, I’m sending it on to my 25 year old who’s looking for a job and wants to stay only in Melbourne;)
Thanks for that, Audrey. I can understand wanting to stay in Melbourne! 😉
Seriously though, it’s a whole new job market and the potential is huge – the hurdle, as always, is whether people can get past traditional (static) modes of working and collaborating.