Summer heatwaves are here, and newspapers are reporting about tragic incidents with varying degrees of acknowledgment of climate change as the driving force behind the ever-escalating weather circumstances. Often, the picture that media and other everyday conversations paint of what humans could do about climate change is vague, distorted, or depressing -sometimes all of those…
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What Is the Grim Hustle: An Evolving Self-help Narrative for the Tough Guys
Receiving and Reading The Grim As we arrived to our summer holiday home this year, there was a weird little book waiting for me on the living room table. It was an unexpected gift that my partner had ordered for me; a paperback book he had bought because it is relevant to some of my…
Preparing for Pregnancy and Childbirth: A Quick Guide of an Academic Mom-To-Be
I very rarely share anything personal on this website, because I consider it rather a window to my academic self. (Well, one exception is this older post about my experiences of the Vastaamo data breach scandal). This time, I’m making another exception. When writing this post on preparing for pregnancy and childbirth, I’m 38 weeks…
Winning the Teacher of the Year Award
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…
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…