Things that Should Not Be in Your PhD Resume

When it comes to apply for an industry job, many PhD scholars think that more is better, but the fact is less is more. Adding unnecessary things to your resume will not impress a recruiter or hiring team. You must remember that all the years that you have spent in completing your PhD will come down to a few seconds when your resume is presented on the table of recruiters. They will scan through your resume in hardly five to six seconds and pick your skills that will help them analyse whether or not you are suitable for a position in industry. Here are the things that you should not include in your resume when it comes to put in for a job at industry. 

Your Job Duties

Your industry resume is not like an academic resume. You should talk about your achievements instead of what you did during academia. Recruiters always try to know how you can give benefits to them. Your hiring by an industry is a cost, and recruiters will scrutinise whether you will give them return more than the cost or not. So when you prepare an industry resume you should mention your accomplishments, not how you achieved them. Don’t include keywords like job duties and responsibilities included. You should read some books that help you understand how to handle recruiters, prepare an admirable resume, industry resume templates, behavioural preparation, and of course salary negotiation ways.

Objective Statement

Don’t write an objective statement in your resume otherwise it will box you into a corner. You should emphasise on your achievements instead. Present them in an attractive way to grab recruiters attention. Use bullet points and numerical digits. You should mention your all-round achievements, industry-related skills, and summaries of successful projects. This style presentation of a resume instantly grabs attention of managers. So if you don’t want to be overlooked by a quick glance of managers, follow this strategy.

Publications

Always bear in mind that you can’t leave a mark on recruiters with your publications. Even R&D managers don’t pay attention to publications. They want to know your experience and skills over your academic performance. So avoid bragging about your publications. Emphasise on your skills instead. 

Impersonal Greeting

Don’t use impersonal greetings such as Dear Sir or To Whom It May Concern on the top of your CV. you should use personal greeting instead. Most time industry jobs are given to referrals. You should try to know about the hiring manager of a company where you are applying for a job. However, this is possible only with the help of networking. Expand your network on social media platforms, attend face-to-face conferences, events, and job fairs. You will come to know about several companies, and then you can find HR managers of those companies. Try to connect with them on social media platforms like LinkedIn. Start a professional chat with them. You will be able to know more about companies and vacant positions. This will help you give personal greeting on the top of your cover letter. 

Writing Your CV as an Article

As recruiters spend very short time on scanning resumes so your CV should not be brimmed with long tedious paragraphs. Instead of writing long and dense texts you should note down everything in bullet points. This will help recruiters to quickly glance at your skills. Don’t use small fonts and styles that are difficult to read by recruiters. 

So bear these points in your mind while drafting an industry resume. 

Cover Letter: Sell Your Manuscript to a High Factor Journal at First Attempt

Are you an author, looking for a journal publisher’s approval? Are you a research/PhD fellow and want to publish your research paper in some prominent journal? If the answer of the questions are in ‘yes’, then you must know how to sell the manuscript to the publisher and get it approved. You might have put your best ever efforts in accomplishing the writing of the manuscript. But, all your hard work may go in vein if you can’t reach to your targeted readers.

Everyone wants to publish his or her write –up in some prestigious and important journal, but sometimes authors fail to catch the eye of the journal publisher. The reason lies in the approach of how you present yourself to the publisher. When, you approach a journal publisher, you need to write a cover letter.

The cover letter is the first impression that the publisher will get about you and your work. But, it has been seen, majority people fail to write a proper and smart cover letter.

Cover letter is not a place to show your linguistic skill; rather you have to describe your knowledge, abilities and thought process here. There should be a personal touch in the tone of the write up. You should neither use too generic or too complex words; try to keep it simple, straight forward and crisp.

Apart from this, each and every journal publisher prefer the cover letter to be written in their specified format, you have to keep it in mind too. Following are some of the tips for writing a proper cover letter:

  • Include the name, contact details, qualification, designation and places of work of the author
  • Include your subscription number of that particular journal
  • Mention the title of the study and year of completion. Generally, some journals don’t publish an article if its more than 5 years old

The Etymology of PhD and Its Essence

How many of you know what does PhD stand for? It is a word with a Latin origination “Philosophiae Doctor”. Some wonder why PhD in any stream is explained as Philosophy. The answer here is tricky and may not be known to many. The use of the word philosophy here is not connected to the branch of science but rather to the original Greek meaning which says “Love of Wisdom”. It is a degree that highlights that the scholar has contributed to existing knowledge with his hard work and wisdom.

The only way one can find out how to do a PhD is to do one!!

In light of the above statement and the etymology of PhD that has been explained, I wonder how relevant would all tips and advices be? But we still do not refrain from giving them. I suppose there isn’t any harm also, as long as we pick up ways to simplify a journey that otherwise would be herculean for many.

As much as we dream to celebrate the end of our PhD journey, I say the beginning needs to be celebrated as well. With plenty of novel experiences and opportunities coming way, it may be over whelming. A great percentage of people quit from their PhD half way because they cannot adapt to the requirements and challenges. Even if it isn’t rosy, I say do not quit. There are good reasons for not doing so.

The requirements and challenges of PhD are distinct for each country while keeping in mind the core essence of the degree. In countries like the US and Canada they call for a specific course work before starting pure research work. In the UK things are changing, there is focus on other activities such as contribution towards teaching and other activities. The conclusion or as we say the culmination of a PhD requires to submit the original contribution to research in the form of a thesis. It has to be of standard to be reviewed published in journals of repute. To maintain the worthiness of the degree it does not end here, in the end the candidate is expected to defend work in front of a panel of experts which is called as VIVA. The word VIVA has been taken from the Latin word “Viva Voice “meaning “Live voice”. Only once the panel is satisfied with the work and the defence given by the candidate do they finally allow to award the degree and the person may get the word Doctor Prefixed to his name.

At the end, it isn’t the end. In fact a PhD is a beginning of one’s professional journey that will require you to use not just the academic skills you have mastered through the course but also the patience, determination, tolerance and capacity to hard work to move along to lead you to your path to success.

Steps for Preparing Empirical Evaluation for Dissertations

One of the things that students will have to do when they are preparing their dissertation is write the empirical evaluation. So, what are the steps that they should take for completing this task?

1. The first thing they should do is to state their hypothesis. This should be done clearly and cogently.

2. The second step to take is to explain and justify the statistical processes and research methods that are employed for the project.

3. The third thing to do is to present the results in an attractive and interesting manner.

4. Tables can be used. But they should be used judiciously. They should not be used where they are not needed. Too many tables and graphs can ruin the project.

5. The tables that are being used should be relevant to the theory and the hypothesis that is being tested. If they are not relevant then do not use them.

6. If the results have been replicated with some other data or technique then that method should be mentioned in the footnote.

7. The researcher should tell the readers very clearly how his hypothesis fared. Was it successful or was it not successful. Was he right or was he wrong. No information should be held back from the reader.

8. There will be literature references in most chapters. They should be either parenthetical or they should only be limited to technical matters.

9. Many students would be doing some kind of qualitative research. This could be in the form of case studies as well. In this case also the results should be presented in the same manner as it is presented for other kinds of studies.

10. Finally the writing should be clear and cogent, which at the same time uses the jargon that has been prescribed for that particular discipline.

Evaluate your report constantly to make it perfect

One important thing or advice which no gives for a student preparing for PhD is to constantly monitor the thesis report. Although a PhD is done over a period of three to five years, often students neglect the final thesis report and do not lay much importance on it. One must constantly monitor the progress of the report which will surely help in submitting the thesis well before the dead line. But most of the students start preparing the report just a few weeks or few months before making the task more complicated. This leaves them with tight schedules making them with less concentration on quality and more tensed on meeting the deadlines. By putting down a hard and perfect schedule and following and sticking to the plan will help students accomplish the task of thesis writing more easy and finally save a lot of time and money and reduces the burden also.

Scheduling helps not only in finishing the report week before the deadline but also leaves plenty of time for corrections and additions. Sticking yourself to the schedule is really difficult but once you keep doing it. you would be finally relieved of tensions and targets. Even if you have outsourced your thesis to some professional, make sure you keep in touch with the writer and get weekly updates or daily updates if possible. If you just get a monthly update and finally if you find that the deadlines are approaching you would be really tensed. So keep yourself sticking to the deadlines. Also keep posting the report to your supervisor constantly. This will helps you in getting the perfect feedback at the right time so that you can rework on it immediately without any delay. This also leaves a good impression on the supervisor. With so many advantages, it’s better to lay out a plan, stick to the deadline and constantly monitor the progress of the thesis to gain good grades.

Role of Supervisors

Conducting a research work is a critical task that each and every researcher across the world has to undertake and most of them complete the work successfully. In this journey, there are many predicaments, which a researcher has to encounter, and in most of the cases, the researcher does not have any clue to overcome those predicaments. The predicaments can be in terms of review of literature, collection of data, rectifying the errors present in data, choice of proper research methodology, interpretation of complex results, etc. Therefore, in the course of this journey, every researcher requires a proper guidance, and this role is being played by the supervisor of the research work.

In order to carry out a research work in the smoothest way, a researcher has to communicate with the research supervisor on a regular basis, as that person is already having ample amount of experience regarding research in that field, which can assist the researcher in the due course of the journey. First, a research supervisor knows the existing body of knowledge on the broad area of that particular topic. Therefore, he / she can suggest the suitable literature for the specific research area. Second, due to the experience of the supervisor in the field of academics, the network of the supervisor with other academicians and researchers across the world is supposed to be strong. Any researcher, working under the supervision of that faculty, can exploit those networks for the betterment of the study, for finding out best conferences in that domain across the world, for funding opportunities, and for finding out possible publication opportunities. In a nutshell, a supervisor is not the one, who will only review the work, but a person, who will facilitate the study in all possible ways. For more information about importance supervisors in academics, kindly browse through the pages of www.phdassistant.com.

Respondents’ biasness during interviews

There are few errors committed on part of the respondents during interviews which could bias the results. The aim of the researcher should be to minimise the probability of such mistakes.

It is because of respondents’ poor recall that they may give incorrect answers. Such questions should be avoided that put a strain on respondents’ mind and he/she feels stress while answering. Any inconsistency should be cross checked regarding respondents’ exaggerated and dishonest answers. It may also happen that the question may not be clear to the respondent and may get inhibition in asking again thus giving wrong answer. In such a case the investigator should be making sure that the respondents clearly understand the content and context of the questionnaire.

There are times when respondents do not understand the purpose of the study clearly. Therefore, to avoid such a problem the objectives of the survey should be clearly made to understand so that there is no scope for ambiguity left. The identity of the interviewer and sponsor, requirement from the respondent should be explained before the interview. Sometimes the respondents may give answers that are expected by the researchers and it may get prejudiced as the interviewees may not like to be discourteous. Therefore, a good environment should be created for the interview to be conducted properly giving comfort to the respondents. This would give fair response to the interviewers.