Author: bogart

In my previous posts, I discussed about investing your time in Ph.D. training aiming as a return to get a (full) Professor position at a University. I also commented on how similar tenure can be with a technology startup.

At the closing event of the “Postdoc Forum Austria” in June 2017 (LinkedIn group and Facebook event), we discussed about the apparent lack of numbers in Austria. As a follow-up, I did some desk research. There are indeed nice numbers produced by the Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Wirtschaft (BMWFW, Federal Ministry for Science, Research, and Economy) under their unidata initiative. And I guess this is the nice part of it. To boldly summarize:

“The Austrian system outputs every two years more Ph.D. holders
than all tenured professor positions available in the country.” Continue reading “The Game of Thrones in Austria”

How similar is a tenure to a startup? In a previous post, I discussed about the postgraduate factory. There are multiple studies at different level of detail indicating that the probability of landing into a tenured professor position is less than 30% or even 1%, depending on the scientific field. Continue reading “The tenure and the startup”

The old-school approach on scientific knowledge discovery (i.e., “research”) draws from medieval ages. The stereotype of “crazy” scientists has evolved over time to include bright minds isolated from the real world to study and advance our knowledge. The are still exceptions that validate this rule (e.g., the cases of Shinichi Mochizuki and Grigory Perelman). Continue reading “Academia and industry – an outdated stereotype”

Postdoc. Who is actually that?

The question struck me once more while attending the Postdoc Forum Austria 2016 event in Vienna, Austria. And once more while listening Episode 14: Are you still a scientist? of the Recovering Academic podcast. Continue reading “The many names of a postdoc researcher”

The “postgraduate factory” produces highly-trained scientists of all sorts. In the process, education degrees are offered, such as Master in Science (M.Sc.), MBA, Professional Doctorate in Engineering (PDEng, popular in the Netherlands), Ph.D., postdoctoral training (informal), or habilitation (particularly in German, Austrian, and Swiss universities).

Not only the number of study programs is expanding (e.g., there are more than 900 M.Sc.-awarding programs in Greece) but the number of Ph.D. holders is globally expanding. Continue reading “The postgraduate factory”

My very first post on this blog is about coaching itself. There seems to be some confusion on the term, often used interchangeably with other terms.

Coaching is a future-oriented co-creative process involving two roles: the coach and the coachee. The coach is offering the listening ear for the coachee to develop their own solutions. Coaching roots back to the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates and his Socratic Method (also referred to as “maieutics”).

Continue reading “Coaching, mentoring, counselling, consulting – what’s the difference?”