Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #academic-life, aggregated by home.social.
🔬 Top 2% Scientists list: one of the few rankings where a lower number is great news. I made it in my first year after PhD… and I’m still skyrocketing! 🚀
#188,367 (2023) → #145,380 (2024) → #115,418 (2025) ‼️
*All ranks with self-citations excluded.
In Chemical Physics: top 1% (#1,274/121,889) ⚛️
No shortcuts — just steady work at the intersection of pharma and computational chemistry, and papers that others cite.
Ab sofort ist wieder Email-Triage angesagt. Vorlesungsbeginn, Fragenbeginn, Wünschebeginn, alles-Beginn #academiclife
A 10ª edição da Conferência José Medeiros Ferreira, que decorrerá a 9 de Outubro na FCSH, tem organização do IHC.
Este ano, assinalamos os 90 anos do início da Guerra Civil de Espanha, tendo convidado como orador Javier Moreno Luzón, da Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
ENTRADA LIVRE
ℹ️ https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/events/guerra-civil-jmf/
#Histodons #AcademicLife #SpanishHistory #SpanishCivilWar #GuerraCivilDeEspanha #GuerraCivil #Espanha #España #MemoriaHistorica
New week. This one is a bit moree special, as teaching for the new academic year starts, for us here it is on Friday.
#Academiclife
During today's bachelor exams at the University, I felt an powerful urge to apply to a regular bachelor+masters program in physics. I assign this to middle-age crisis in the academic variant. Hope I'm all-right and not alone with this.
🎓 For the past 3 days, our annual IMPRS-ESM retreat has been taking place at Altes Stahlwerk in Neumünster. The retreat gives our doctoral candidates the opportunity to present their research, receive feedback from fellow PhD candidates and supervisors across the graduate school, & learn about research beyond their own fields and groups.
We’re grateful to everyone who contributed to making this retreat such a lively & engaging event! 🌍
Credit: M. Schulz, MPI-M
#AcademicLife #PhDLife #IMPRS_ESM
"Klagen? Welche Klagen?" Was man vom akademischen" Hamsterrad hält, ist eine Frage der Perspektive … — Neuer #Cartoon, komplett in unserem Blog: https://www.laborjournal.de/blog/
#AcademicLife #ScienceHumor
Another day at **ACM Hypertext 2026**! 💻✨
Today, PhD students learned how to introduce themselves in just 40 seconds and how to create an effective academic CV. 🎓
Meanwhile, other sessions explored Knowledge Graphs and Hypertext, bringing together ideas from digital media, information science, and technology.
Another inspiring day of learning, sharing, and connecting! 🚀
#ACMHypertext #Hypertext2026 #PhDStudents #AcademicLife #KnowledgeGraphs #Hypertext
🆕 The new members of the IHC’s governing bodies and the coordinators of its research groups were elected yesterday at the General Assembly. Rui Lopes, Assistant Researcher at FCSH, was elected President of the Board, alongside Aurora Almada e Santos and Giulia Strippoli (Vice-Presidents), and Maria de Lurdes Rosa, Sara Albuquerque and Carmina Yu Untalan (members).
👉 The full election results can be found here:
https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/en/ihc-renews-governing-bodies/
Further Thoughts of Retirement…
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
from Little Gidding, Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot.
The start of teaching for 2026/7 is approaching at an alarming rate. new and continuing students are registering and today we had a staff meeting in the Department of Physics about arrangements for the new term. This all made me think again about retirement.
About three years, while I was in Barcelona on sabbatical , I posted an item about looking forward to retirement. Here is an excerpt from that piece:
The fact of the matter is, though, that I can’t afford to retire yet. I have a mortgage to pay and I’ve only had five full years of pensionable service in the Irish system, so won’t get much of a pension. I have the frozen residue of my UK pension, of course, but that is subject to an actuarial reduction if I take the benefit before I’m 65, which is also the standard retirement age for academic staff in Ireland. I can’t be made to retire here until I’m 70, in fact, but I think I’ll be well beyond my best-before date by then and am not keen to overstay my welcome.
So it looks like I’ll have to stay until I’m 65 at the earliest. In fact I won’t be able to collect the State Pension (SPC) until I’m 66, so I’ll probably have to stay until then. That means that when I get back from sabbatical I will have four or five years left until I can retire.
Since I posted this I made a firm decision that I will retire as soon as I’m able, which should be in June 2028. Having sold my old house in Cardiff some time ago, I have paid off my Maynooth mortgage which makes the financial situation much simpler. I am now quite confident that I can afford to retire before I’m 66.
I know many academics don’t like the idea of retiring. I suppose that’s because they’re afraid they won’t know what to do with their time. I’ve never felt like that. I’ve always had plenty of outside interests, but now there’s another factor. As I alluded to in an earlier post, and contrary to all my expectations of three years ago, there is another person involved. That person, whose name I won’t reveal, graduated this summer from an unnamed university, and is just about to embark on a two-year Masters degree (in a subject not to be disclosed) in a location I won’t tell you about. He will be finishing that course in the summer 2028.
For the next two years things for us will be pretty much as they are now: not living together, but spending as much time in each other’s company as possible at weekends and holidays. That arrangement suits us both very well in the current circumstances but we have already started discussing plans beyond the two-year horizon. Some of these are not at all serious, but amusing to think about. Others would be fantastic if they turned out to be possible. We have the best part of two years to decide what to do. In any event, I find it exciting to be able to think seriously of retirement as a beginning as well as an end.
#AcademicLife #MaynoothUniversity #pension #Retirement #retirementPlanning
🌳📝 So apparently, writing non-fiction is like channeling your inner Bob Ross and painting a happy little tree. 🤔 Just start with the trunk and voilà! And if all else fails, blame your professor for making your class the academic equivalent of drawing a stick figure. 🎨💼
https://devz.cl/posts/how-to-write/ #nonfictionwriting #creativeprocess #bobross #writingtips #academiclife #HackerNews #ngated
Sunday afternoon at the kitchen counter. Two lectures to build and one set of exercises to grade, both landing Thursday.
Four hours. No student ever sees this part, and there is no line in my contract that describes it.
It is just what Wednesday costs.
Five lectures. A two-hour lab. An exercise released. A quiz built. Two online courses with no room and no timetable. One lab I supervise but never teach.
None of it is visible from a seat in the room. When preparation is invisible, that means it was done.
Well, tomorrow I have a meeting with my boss to talk about prolonging my contract.
Right after I give a talk about how terrible the situation for #postdoc.s is (precarious work environment, high prevalence of mental health issues).
I can't decide whether the timing is great or terrible.
I made the talk with #Quarto, and uploaded it to #Github, so you can check it out at https://tsievert.com/au-section-08-2026/#/title-slide
First time I created slides in Quarto and first time I publish them
#AcademicChatter #PhDLife #PostdocLife #AcademicLife #earlyCareerAcademic #AcademicCareer
Have any academics out there received official emails from your senior “management” about the appalling Arday affair? I’m curious about the tone struck in the message, whether there were any hints of wider empathy beyond formulaic platitudes, any intellectual engagement/analysis of the current situation, and whether there was any suggestion for how to protect members of the university and wider community from the recurrence of such a situation. #Arday #AcademicLife #university
Whenever I learn about a new statistical method:
Do I know what I'm doing?
- Highly debatable
Do I hope for the best?
- 100%
It's not helping that I need to run things on an #HPC, so my failing forward is hogging resources.
I sincerely hope #Reviewer2 is not reading my toots, but at least the results look plausible.
#AcademicLife #PostdocLife #AcademicChatter #PhDLife #OverlyHonestMethods
Ok, so writing *is* happening. Not the way I usually spend the last week of my summer vacation, but perhaps I'll finally get this damn article out of my head…
Whether we are in formal education or not, we are all working with supervisors or managers on projects all the time
We often focus on ourselves in these relationships, but we frequently don't think or reflect enough about the importance of managing the other person, and what we can do in order to get the most out of the relationship
As the new academic year is fast approaching I thought it might be timely this #throwbackthursday to share a post from June 2024 which I hope might help in having a strategy to optimise these key relationships
لَا أَسْعَى لِأَنْ أَعْرِفَ كُلَّ شَيْءٍ، بَلْ أَسْعَى أَنْ أَتَعَلَّمَ شَيْئًا جَدِيدًا كُلَّ يَوْمٍ. أُؤْمِنُ أَنَّ الْعِلْمَ يَزْدَهِرُ بِالْفُضُولِ، وَيَرْتَقِي بِالتَّوَاضُعِ، وَيَكْتَمِلُ بِمُشَارَكَتِهِ مَعَ الْآخَرِينَ.
I do not seek to know everything; rather, I strive to learn something new every day. I believe that knowledge flourishes through curiosity, rises through humility, and becomes complete when it is shared with others. #Education #AcademicLife #LifelongLearning #Curiosity
Graduation ceremony at Modul University Vienna – congratulations to our students and all the best on your journey. A degree is not the end, it’s the beginning!
I'm very much looking forward to sharing this research and to the discussions that will follow. 🌿📜🎶
#UrbanCreativity #StreetArt #StreetPoetry #Haiku #LiteraryStudies #FanStudies #UrbanStudies #CulturalHeritage #ConferenceLife #AcademicLife #Research #Utrecht #JacobVanEyck #PublicHumanities
Over three hours of interviews for Marie Skłodowska-Curie doctoral network positions, one paper review, drafting a review article, and reviewing workshop proposals.
A busy day, but full of good academic things: interesting people, thoughtful work, and worthwhile projects.
I just wish there were slightly fewer worthwhile things at once.
What does academia look like through fiction?
Nature recommends 9 novels featuring PhD students, researchers and scientific workplaces.
Fiction can sometimes reveal aspects of research that papers never show.
🔗 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01730-2
#ScienceBooks #AcademicLife #ResearchCulture #SciComm #SummerReading
- Know your audience and your message before working on your slides
- Clearly explain the main concepts, so that everyone in the room can follow
- Make the title of each slide the main message of that slide
- View questions as a unique opportunity to get feedback and deepen the discussion
(2/2)
#Presenting #Conferences #Academia #AcademicLife #PhD #Postdoc #SciComm
AI may accelerate some research tasks by an order of magnitude, but science is more than productivity.
Mentoring students, developing expertise and passing on scientific culture remain central to the research enterprise.
🔗 https://physics.aps.org/articles/v19/74
#AI #ScienceEducation #ResearchCulture #Physics #academiclife
Multitasking?
Of course I can multitask!
Look at me, waiting for my #rstats code to run and looking for new jobs, because my contract will end in 6 months and there hasn't been a clear commitment to prolong it, and drinking tea all at once!
#AcademicChatter #AcademicLife #PhDLife #PostDocLife #AcademicMastodon
And just like that, I'm a tenured professor. #AcademicLife
Reviewing in the train, on the trip back from a conference: 1 done, 2 to go. #AcademicLife
One week of intensive but very fruitful discussions in Bertinoro Castle together with 18 top #AI researchers to shape the future of the International #semanticweb Research Summer School. Stay tuned for next year‘s upgraded revision! Kudos to all participants and your valuable feedback!
#KnowledgeGraphs #academiclife #research #LLMs #generativeAI @fiz_karlsruhe @fizise @tabea @AxelPolleres #Photography #BlackAndWhite #blackandwhitephotography #emiliaromagna
What a day! I finally defended my dissertation at Leiden University. I am so grateful to have completed thes journey. Many thanks to everyone who was part of this, especially my supervisors @sarahderijcke, Paul Wouters, Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner and also everyone at @cwts who supported my work.
Should researchers still attend international conferences in times of climate catastrophe – how many, under which conditions? And what would “conferencing well” mean once the planetary dimension is taken seriously?
@StefanTSiegel on three myths that keep us flying ⬇️
Here we go again… On my way to Bertinoro, Italy, to design the future of the International #SemanticWeb Research Summer School together with some of the top experts in our field.
#AI #KnowledgeGraphs #NeuroSymbolicAI #LLMs #summerschool #academiclife @AxelPolleres @tabea @sashabruns @fizise @fiz_karlsruhe #blackandwhitephotography #BlackAndWhite #Photography #trainstations
THE PAPERS APP: AN ORGANIZATIONAL REVOLUTION?
New Papers app helps scientists organize research files and notes, saving time. Launched today, it offers metadata matching and collaboration tools.
#researchtools, #papersapp, #academiclife, #datascience, #productivity
https://newsletter.tf/papers-app-organizes-research-data-faster/
