In the spring of 2023, I received very happy news: Students of psychology at the University of Twente had selected me as one of the best and most motivating teachers. As my teaching career only started in November 2021, I was very happy to receive this honor. A nice ceremony was organized to celebrate all…
Author: hktoivon
Does my supervisor hate me? A look into tensions in supervisory relationships
Previously, I have written on the topic of how to make your thesis supervision work for you. Subsequently, I’ve noticed people find my website trying to find out an answer to the question “Does my supervisor hate me?”. Trying to accommodate to these “my supervisor hates me” searches, I will here give some perspectives to…
How to Use References Properly in Your Thesis
In this post, I am going to go through some of the most common mistakes I have seen in student assignments, theses, papers I receive for peer review, as well as even in published scientific articles, in terms of how literature references are used. Thus, today, we will take a look at how to use…
How to Make Your Thesis Supervision Work for You
1. It’s Your Thesis and Nobody Else’s This sounds like a self-evident thing, right? Surprisingly often, it is not. So what does it mean in terms of how to make your thesis supervision work for you to say that it is your thesis and not your supervisor’s? It means of course that you do all…
Storying the Global Crises: The Pandemic, Climate Change, and Now, War
Despite us living in a story economy where pretty much everything is either said to be a story or converted into one -if it is not already- the Covid pandemic has, in my opinion, remained a surprisingly understoried phenomenon. Social media stories everything, but the responses to Covid I have seen in my personal algorithmic…
Climate Fiction: The Literary Genre to Save the Planet?
For the past year, I have been professionally involved as a researcher in a project called NARMESH, short from Narrating the Mesh, at the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Ghent, Belgium. The project evolves around non-human centric, environmentally oriented literature. My part has focused on qualitative analyses of readings of environmental or…
How to Give a Good Conference Presentation
Are you preparing to give your first talk at a scientific conference? Or perhaps you are a more seasoned scholar wishing to polish your presentation skills? In this blog post, I give some pointers on how to give a good conference presentation. In all honesty, I also share some opinions on what not to do…
From Impostor Syndrome to Confidence: How To Be a Kick-Ass Professional Woman
Constantly feeling inadequate. Doubting your intellect and talents. Being convinced that sooner or later you are going to be exposed as a fraud -as the ignorant person you really are. Long nights sweating over the assignment, the presentation, the paper you are writing. Basically never feeling enough. The challenges of professional women, no matter how…
I Was Hacked -My Vastaamo Data Breach Story
If you are Finnish, you most certainly have already heard about the Vastaamo data breach case. In short, the client data records of a big Finnish psychotherapy company, Vastaamo, have been hacked, probably twice, and the data and session notes of 60 000 people have been stolen. At least parts of this huge data including…
Some Secrets to High-Performing Teams
What makes a team reach its best possible level of performance? How to make a collective truly outperform anything what its members could do individually? Here is a quick dive into literature on team performance and a couple of secrets to high-performing teams. Let’s talk about team goals and team identity. Traditionally, organizations have tried…