Claire Jarvis

It was the week before Christmas when I had to deal with an academic bombshell. Well, I might be exaggerating a bit, but it surely had many hallmarks of a bombshell: unsuspecting normality, followed…

In winter 2015, I broke out in hives. When I went to the university health center, they asked me about any lifestyle changes that could have triggered my full-on allergic reaction and I could only…

If I could distil 4.5 years of a PhD into a 4.5 minute song, it would be a tune I half-heard one morning at the gym. I hadn’t heard it before, and I was sufficiently intrigued by caught lyrics to…

Phew! I made it. Saturday marked the final set of tasks associated with Semester 1 of grad school. Having survived one semester, I know that I can survive the rest. And I think this is an ideal time…

It has been a little over a year since I said goodbye to Scotland. Next week, I will officially become a second-year PhD student. Although this was the right decision, there was a gap of 3.5 years…

I was warned about this in advance. When I applied to various graduate programs, current PhD students painted a rather scary picture of a typical first year experience. I thought my first semester…

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel after defending my PhD. Would I be disillusioned and depressed? Most people finish their PhDs in a flurry of advancing deadlines and semi-realistic expectations. But, I…

I’ll be leaving university with a PhD by December, and right now I feel like a falling cat. I’m hurtling towards the defense date trying to reconfigure myself in mid-air, hoping I can manage to land …

My postdoc hadn’t worked out. The first sign that things were going wrong came before my official start date, but it wasn’t until approximately 2 months into the postdoc that I finally admitted to…

After you receive the rejection email from a grad school program you applied to, the questions always come. What could I have done differently? Was my file extensively debated? Was it stupid applying…