Resources
I love when others share readings, tools, and other resources that they find useful, so here's the beginning of my attempt to do the same. This page is very much a work-in-progress.
Productivity
For PhD students
Environmental Policy and Governance
International development policy
Public administration and management
Other
Productivity
- "The Imperfectionist" (blog), by Oliver Burkeman. Wonderful perspective. Burkeman's book, Four Thousand Weeks, is also great.
- Evernote (document and media storage app). Since getting this, I've cut the time I spend searching for PDFs by roughly 95%.
- Freedom (app). Easily block specific websites on different devices, with custom schedules.
- Overleaf (browser-based typesetting app). Relatively easy way to learn/use Latex, the typesetting program. Since becoming decent with this, I've decreased by ~50% the time I spend formatting papers and importing tables and figures from R. My drafts also look much more professional.
- Zotero (reference management software). There are several good ones out there, but I've been using Zotero for more than a decade now and have been very happy with it. Very useful startup instructions here. (Fellow grad students: please just use some kind of reference management software. It greatly pains me to come across mid-advanced PhD students who still don't use reference management software. That's many, many hours down the drain.)
For PhD students
- The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your PhD Into a Job (book), by Karen Kelsky. Frank advice on what it takes to succeed as an early-career academic. Wish I had read this in the first year of my PhD. So far the single most useful source of job market advice I've found, by a longshot.
- "How to Conference" (article), by Turner et al. Practical advice on why attending academic conferences is valuable and how to get the most out of them. The chapter on conferences in the Kelsky book (linked above) is also very helpful on this.
- A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum (book), by Jessica McCrory Calarco. Incredibly useful grad school "how to". Also wish I would have read this in the first year of my PhD. (Would recommend reading this before the Kelsky book, but both early on.)
- Blog of Raul Pacheco-Vega. Legendary source of practical advice on every stage of the research process.
Environmental Policy and Governance
- Earth Negotiations Bulletin, by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. Frequent and thorough reporting on global environment/development negotiations.
International development policy
Public administration and management
- "Can We Still Govern?" (Substack blog), by Don Moynihan.
Other
- OverDrive (app). Very functional app for checking out and listening to/reading audiobooks and e-books. Many public and university libraries have registered with it. The San Francisco public library's collection is amazing.