aPhDinprogress

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” Anna Quindlen I am going to be doing a lot of reading in the next couple of years or so (probably swiftly followed by a lot of writing).  To prepare for submitting a formal application to undertake a PhD I need to marshal some coherent thoughts and ideas about the topic I plan to study. I also need to underpin my thoughts and ideas with references from published literature and that’s where the reading comes in. As a child I loved nothing better than to lose myself in the pages of a novel and, if I am given the chance, I will still fly to distant imaginary lands with my nose in a book. I’m lucky. I read quite quickly and can tune out the external world reasonably easily: although there is a down side to this skill as a numerous missed bus/tube/train stops attest and even one almost missed flight. Things we read that pull us in do so because th

"What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone?" Winston Churchill 10  October 1908 Dundee On the morning of the day that my father died I received a message through LinkedIn. It was an invitation from someone I had met at conference a couple of years earlier. They were about to take up a new post as Programme Leader in Industrial and Work Psychology at a university. I was invited to deliver a guest lecture to Masters students on “Values” the following term.   Under normal circumstances I would have been momentarily very excited and then enormously daunted. Under normal circumstances my mildly timorous reply would have read ‘that’s very kind, could you give me some more information about how many students, how long the talk would need to be etc etc’ and then I would have ruminated on whether I thought I was ’good enough’.  These we