Understanding and solving intractable resource governance problems.
I have been thinking about how I can help my students with their theses, particularly because our programs are rather compressed and they need to get a lot done in a very short period of time. I’ve been working on developing a strategy to discern “the gap in the literature” that I plan to test […]
– March 30, 2023
I recently participated in a doctoral candidacy exam recently (a student who asked me to sit on her committee, but whom I’m not directly supervising), abd my participation prompted me to reconsider what and how I teach my doctoral students. I reflect on this issue frequently because I am really trying to improve how I […]
– June 28, 2018
Three of my PhD students are close to finishing their doctoral dissertations over the course of the next few months, and I’ve begun accepting new thesis advisees, so obviously I’ve again been thinking, obsessively, about crafting research questions, finding a gap in the literature, making the contribution our research makes quite clear, etc. I’ve written […]
– June 28, 2025
As I write this series of blog posts on writing the thesis/dissertation, I get serious flashbacks of the period when I had to write my doctoral dissertation. The funny thing is, I have also had flashbacks from when I wrote my Masters’ and my undergraduate theses. Despite the fact that one was in chemical engineering, […]
– May 31, 2020
The more theses I supervise, the more essays I read and the more papers I have to peer-review for publication, the more I realize how important it is to teach how to craft good research questions. Many students of mine come with a general idea of what they want to study for their thesis, but […]
– March 4, 2020
While normally I write Twitter threads or blog posts in response to requests, particularly of my students and research assistants, but also when I hear from scholars across the globe, this post (based on my Twitter thread) comes from my own needs, both as a writer (I am writing and revising a literature review section […]
– August 14, 2019
I have three PhD students right in their second year, plus I informally mentor other 3. I love mentoring and supervising students, particularly doctoral ones, because this component of being a professor is really the one that allows you to build how other scholars think and you can see them flourish. All doctoral students I […]
– November 22, 2018
When I was in graduate school, I took several courses with Professor Anthony (Tony) Dorcey, Professor Emeritus with the School of Community and Regional Planning at The University of British Columbia. Perhaps unbeknownst to everyone but only those closest to me, my first interest was in water planning and governance using multistakeholder processes. Professor Dorcey […]
– August 9, 2018
I like inexpensive, easy-to-read, fast-paced, nimble books. Writing the Doctoral Dissertation: A Systematic Approach by Davis, Parker and Straub is exactly that kind of volume. My only complaint with it is that precisely because it’s so thin (150 single-spaced pages, regular font size), it misses a lot of trees in order to provide an overview […]
– May 18, 2018
One of the books I love the most is “Authoring a PhD Thesis: How to Plan, Draft, Write and Finish a Doctoral Dissertation” by Dr. Patrick J. Dunleavy. Dr. Dunleavy is a professor of political science at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in London, England, and someone whose research I deeply […]
– May 16, 2018
As anybody who reads my blog may know, I often write blog posts upon request. Many of them I’ve written because my own graduate students, undergraduate students or research assistants ask me to help them out with a particular component of the research process. Others, I write because faculty, students or practitioners ask me whether […]
– June 30, 2017
It occurred to me as I was writing my blog posts on reading strategies that some people may wonder how to find the most relevant information when reading. I had tweeted about it, but I hadn’t actually written about it. So, I thought I’d write about how I work to find the most relevant information […]
– January 28, 2017
There is a number of academics (and coaches and consultants) who have both a strong presence online and do a marvellous job of writing excellent blog posts as guidance for undergraduate, graduate students and early career professors. Two of my favourite who write specifically about literature reviews are How To Do a Literature Review (written […]
– June 15, 2016
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