JEN RICHMOND RESEARCH COACH What They Forgot to Teach You Issue #11 đź‘‹ Welcome It has been a few weeks. I would love to blame Bingo entirely (he is very cute and very bitey and very much a part-time job), but I have also developed a slightly unhealthy obsession with making Instagram Reels. I am pretty sensitive to the cringe and talking to my phone has turned out to be much harder than talking to a room full of real students. It is thesis season, so I have also been doing lots of Writing...
19 days ago • 7 min read
JEN RICHMOND RESEARCH COACH What They Forgot to Teach You Issue #10 đź‘‹ Welcome Hey! There are a lot of new people who have signed up to get this in their inbox in the last couple of weeks so before we get into it, a quick hello. I'm Jen. I'm a developmental psychologist and a former A/Prof at UNSW, and these days I run Reveal Research, where I coach Honours, GradDip and PhD students through the hidden curriculum of research training. That's all the stuff nobody actually sits you down and...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
JEN RICHMOND RESEARCH COACH What They Forgot to Teach You Issue #8 đź‘‹ Welcome This newsletter is 8 issues old and it is SUPER fun to put together but sometimes I feel like I am talking to an empty room. I write the thing, I hit send, it goes off into the void, and I mostly have no idea whether any of it actually helped anyone. And then this week, I got two emails that made my day. One of you hit reply and wrote: "Luckily in my undergrad we were taught to run visual plots, but this has given me...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
JEN RICHMOND RESEARCH COACH What They Forgot to Teach You Issue #7 đź‘‹ Welcome I have read a lot of results sections over the last few weeks, and something keeps jumping out at me. Or rather, something keeps NOT jumping out at me. The figures. Draft after draft, I get a results section that is tables all the way down. A table of means and standard deviations. A table of correlations. A neat block of regression output pasted straight from the software. I can count on one hand the number of...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
JEN RICHMOND RESEARCH COACH What They Forgot to Teach You Issu đź‘‹ Welcome I often recommend that students try and write for their mum. That is, try and imagine a reader who is smart and interested and wants you to do well, but happens to know nothing at all about your thesis topic. When you picture your mum as your write, you stop writing to impress and start writing to be understood. You get rid of the jargon, you define your terms really clearly, and you explain why the study matters instead...
2 months ago • 4 min read
JEN RICHMOND RESEARCH COACH What They Forgot to Teach You Issue #5 👋 Welcome We moved house a few weeks ago and there are still boxes in the garage that I have not opened. The pegs for the clothesline are unaccounted for, so everything has been going in the drier. I did have a plan for the unpacking. It was school holidays- tons of time! Reckoned it would be definitely done before school went back but no… it has been three weeks. I am not lazy. The problem is that when I made the plan I...
2 months ago • 6 min read
JEN RICHMOND RESEARCH COACH What They Forgot to Teach You Issue #4, đź‘‹ Welcome I love a good spreadsheet. My teenage daughter knows it and she is using it against me. Her campaign for a puppy has a large spreadsheet component. She has built a Google sheet listing every single thing we will apparently need (crate, bed, vet registration, food, insurance). Each item has a URL link to where we can buy it and a cost. The items are colour-coded into what we pay up front versus what we pay forever....
3 months ago • 4 min read
JEN RICHMOND RESEARCH COACH What They Forgot to Teach You Issue #3 đź‘‹ Welcome I have done a lot of Writing Reviews over the last couple of months and there are a few patterns starting to emerge. Last issue I told you about the most common piece of advice I give: assume your reader knows nothing. The other problem that is more common than I wish it was, is not really about the writing. It is about the design and measurement decisions that were made months ago and how your marker might view...
3 months ago • 5 min read
JEN RICHMOND RESEARCH COACH What They Forgot to Teach You Issue #2 👋 Welcome It is my birthday tomorrow and we are moving house next week so things have been a bit busy around here. Moving is horrible but there is value in looking at everything in your cupboards every now and then and deciding “do I need this in my life?” You can ask the same question about words in your thesis. When you work on a thesis document for many months, you can get a bit attached to words because they were SO...
4 months ago • 4 min read
