Tips for PhD Students & Postdocs

Consider Your Purpose Passion for a research topic can get you through some tough spots when you’re struggling with your hypothesis, buried under articles for your literature…

What is Basic Research? In simple words, basic research (also known as pure research or fundamental research) is conducted with the sole objective of contributing to existing…

The Transformative Consumer Research (TCR) Movement Academic researchers, especially in the field of marketing, have been studying consumer behavior for decades.  The promise of…

Beyond How Often and How Many Human beings have always been difficult to research. Unlike the natural sciences where we can use quantitative methods to capture how often things…

Even the longest stays in grad school go by in a flash and most of it seems to be filled with reading, research, and writing. I interviewed a group of recent PhDs and asked them,…

A Very Plural Bias Speaking in terms of a singular cognitive bias is an inaccurate but widely accepted practice. The term is used to describe inherent errors in thinking and…

“Branding is for Products, Not People!” Sound familiar? You have reached a point in your academic career where you have a solid body of work, a track record of well-received…

The Most Commonly Wasted Opportunity When the stressful interview comes to its inevitable end, it’s either gone really well and you think it’s in the bag, or you “ummed” and…

What Constitutes Basic Research? Basic research (also described as fundamental or pure research) categorizes any study with the objective of deeper understanding of the…

Writing can be boring, hard, and stressful by itself. This coupled with deadlines, peer review, grading, etc., can become a truly daunting process. Writer’s block is not a state…

What Is the Purpose of Science? Answering this question in full would probably take up several volumes of a large textbook, but in laymen’s terms, scientists conduct research to…

The Declining Art of Good Research We seem to be compromising our commitment to good research in favor of publishable research, and there are a combination of trends that are…