Discover 80 opportunities in research

Supervision is a difficult task, and there is often conflict between supervisors and their PhD students. Even if you find a supervisor with whom you have excellent rapport, there can still be problems. Here are some of the types of difficult supervisor which you might encounter, and tips on how to manage them.

The big day is here – you're finally ready to hand in your PhD thesis! Years of work have culminated in this one piece of work, and you're prepared to submit it to your university office. You're almost certainly stressed, exhausted, and very glad to be done. But there are a few quick points you need to check before you formally submit your thesis, so take a look at this checklist and make sure everything is in order.

If you're working your way through your degree, you may well be required to write a number of essays for your assessment. This can be tricky if you don't have a lot of experience in essay writing, so today we're sharing tips on how to manage the essay-writing process.

One of the great advantages of performing your research within an academic setting rather than a commercial one is the degree of research autonomy which you posses. This means that you have the freedom to pursue the work which you think is interesting and worthwhile, and to pick the methods and research approaches which you find to be most suitable. In fact, having flexibility and freedom over your work was identified as one of the top advantages of working in an academic institution in our 2015 Academic Institutions Report. Clearly, this is an important issue which is one of the major differentiating factors between academia and industry. 

For graduates of the social sciences, there is a wide range of career possibilities open. For people who are curious, self-motivated, and capable of both good organisation and creative thinking, research can be an extremely rewarding career.

Open access refers to materials which are publicly available without restrictions on access or reuse. To publish your research in open access means that anyone, including other researchers and the public, will be able to read your paper in its original form. In order to support this free access for users, journals which publish open-access charge a fee (often in the region of several thousand Euros) to the authors. But, this cost comes with advantages. Today we're looking at the case for making your research available in open access form.

Each year, thousands of university teachers leave their native environments to go and teach and/or conduct academic research in a foreign country. Indeed, in this increasingly globalized world populated by a highly networked mobile workforce, there are seemingly unending possibilities, incentives and occasions to teach in a higher education institution in a foreign country. Gaining such experience is encouraged to the point where it is now even expected on your CV. Personally speaking, having taught on 3 continents, I can attest to the value of gaining such international experience. Even as a student in higher education, I fondly recall that my most interesting, passionate and captivating teachers were those who had benefited from a similarly international experience.

Sources: Christmas Spending Survey 2012, Deloitte; NRF’s Holiday Survival Kit  (US only); HSBC Christmas Spending Survey 2012 (UK only)The Christmas Season is probably the heaviest burden for family budgets among all the annual holidays, and the best business opportunity for retailers. In the US alone estimations of spending on Christmas-related items hit $586.1 billion in 2012.

‘Open Access’ has been a bit of a buzzword in academic circles over the last couple of years. Its rise to popularity has come from a combination of factors including the increased price to access academic journals, as well as increased access to the internet, which has had the effect of speeding up the rate at which information travels.