’tis the season – A 2024 throwback and a glimpse into the future of 2025
Welcome, dear readers. Happy Holidays!
I hope you have a nice and quiet Christmas break – no matter what, where, and with whom you celebrate. Have a good time, stay healthy, and get a good rest!
This year, we posted 23 blog posts—or, I should say, Sarah posted. My modest achievement this year relates to this one. (But that’s academic life; sometimes real-life problems drain your energy, academia takes its toll, and you end up struggling through your regular workload and fun projects like this blog lie abandoned – but that’s why we are a team!)
A lot of new and great things happened these past months. We laughed, cried, got angry, fought small and big pitfalls of the academic world, and got through 12 months of 2024. So, it is time to reflect and reconsider some of our actions, think about new ways of thriving in our academic life, and brainstorm new content. We start with reflection and a short overview of this year’s posts and topics.
This year, a big focus of our interest was academic writing. It’s not a new topic for us and our blog, but this year, Sarah dove deep into the main point of our academic existence – getting our research “out there”. Because, let’s be serious, we want people to know about our research and our results, whatever they may look like. And we get our stuff “out there” through communication. Academic writing is one of the most essential ways of communicating in science. We have to introduce our research to other academics in our field, and this happens through hardcore academic writing, which means journal articles, books, data sets, etc. Then, we can start communicating it to the broader public; that’s the usual form of scicomm that you may know from social media platforms etc.
But back to our reflection on 2024 in blog posts:
Academic Writing. We all do it – Wendy Belcher starts her book “How to Write Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks” (read Sarah’s book review) with a comparison: writing is like sex in Vienna during the time of Siegmund Freud. Everyone does it, yet nobody talks about it. 😉 I confess, this was one of the best starts on this topic I have ever read.
When looking for advice on writing, especially in academia, there are many books, podcasts, blogs, and online tools you can use, read, and follow. To name just two more, Josua Schimel’s “Writing Science” (Sarah’s review on J. Schimel) and Paul J. Silva’s “How to Write a Lot” (see the book review) sparked our motivation and interest. Next to the book reviews, Sarah wrote posts on writer’s block and how to write good endings, and she filtered all her knowledge in a four-part series in writing for PhD candidates (click here for Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV).
Topics like (slow) productivity, procrastination (how to stop it to start writing finally and Sarah’s top takeaways from her reading list on fighting procrastination), and time management – the pitfalls and ubiquitous things that make a PhD or PostDoc life hard – can also be found in some book reviews. Again, the primary author this year was Cal Newport (and Sarah did a post on her top takeaways from his books so far). Sarah and I are big fans. We have read or listened to many of his books, and some of his methods have played massive roles in our routines.
2025 – What will be new, what will happen, what will change and return to a normal state?
As I mentioned before – and most of you may have noticed it – I was not that active during this year on our blog. I’ve had some pretty heavy issues this year – both professionally and personally, some things came together that exhausted me. In the meantime, things have got back on track – thankfully. Luckily, I have a great colleague and friend like Sarah, who has had my back during this time, both here on the blog and in my private life, and has often offered me advice, a hug, or coffee. I have a wonderful community around me. Without my friends, family and colleagues, I wouldn’t have gotten through this year so well despite all the (negative) excitement.
But there were also positive things: I’ve been back in Austria since November this year – after 4.5 years, I left Bamberg and am now employed as a postdoc at the University of Vienna – which not only means a big move, lots of boxes of books, a completely new team, lots of new people, a complete upheaval of all routines and slowly getting back into a new working life with a new apartment, new commutes, etc., but it also means that I’m closer to my family and friends again. And it also showed me how difficult it was to be so far away abroad. Some posts will summarise my personal experiences on this (yes, there are already existing drafts… ;)).
So, I am back in Austria, excited to start teaching next semester, begin with some new research ideas in general, and finally get some publications out of my academic writing pipeline. Sarah has also very exciting news on her side – she will tell you about it herself.
So, let’s get started with this 2025! There will be lots of new, exciting work and research! I can’t wait to see all of this happen! Things will change. But this is (academic) life. 🙂
Your epigrammetrists wish you a very Happy New Year! All the best to you! <3
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Astrid Schmölzer (December 30, 2024). ’tis the season – A 2024 throwback and a glimpse into the future of 2025. Epigrammetry. Retrieved February 12, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12zyw