How to Be a Happy Academic
A Guide to Being Effective in Research, Writing and Teaching
- Alexander Clark - University of Alberta, Canada
- Bailey Sousa - University of Alberta, Canada
Want to be an effective, successful and happy academic? This book helps you hone your skills, showcase your strengths, and manage all the professional aspects of academic life. With their focus on life-long learning and positive reflection, Alex and Bailey encourage you to focus on your own behaviours and personal challenges and help you to find real world solutions to your problems or concerns.
Weaving inspirational stories, the best of research and theory, along with pragmatic advice from successful academics, this book provides step-by-step guidance and simple tools to help you better meet the demands of modern academia, including:
- Optimising your effectiveness, priorities & strategy
- Workflow & managing workload
- Interpersonal relationships, and how to influence
- Developing your writing, presenting and teaching skills
- Getting your work/life balance right.
Clear, practical and refreshingly positive this book inspires you to build the career you want in academia.
Supplements
Visit Alex and Bailey's website The Effective Successful Happy Academic for information about their workshops and publications.
The authors not only illuminate the realities of academic work, but also provide brilliant wisdom for keeping one’s pilot light of passion constantly ignited, despite the challenges. This book is an excellent resource for doctoral students; it provides an inspirational process for success!
Drawing on influential, contemporary thinkers, this work explores the fears, compromise and intrinsic drive that underpin a scholarly career. It delivers a blue-print for career success and personal sustainability that places one’s own values at the core of academic practice. I couldn’t put it down!
In a postsecondary climate of stress, disillusionment, and faculty burn out, this book shines light on the possibilities for value and meaning in our work – it is very welcome and long overdue.
Does what it says on the tin. The authors aid the reader in exploring and reflecting personally on the quagmire that is academia both explicitly and succinctly in a highly engaging manner. Reading this text could seriously enhance your personal and professional well-being!
It’s always hard to distill general lessons on how one should approach academic life that can be applicable to different areas of scholarship. In this excellent book. Alexander Clark and Bailey Sousa do a superb job of finding those key lessons we can apply to be happy and reasonably balanced scholars.
Similar to most self-help books, How to be a Happy Academic offers its target readers a training manual on self-empowerment. In particular, it provides an insider perspective on seeing, doing and – most importantly – taming academic work.
As a super fan of post it notes, the cover of How to be a Happy academic made me, well – happy (well played cover designer!). The slightly unconventional vibe of the book’s title is reflected in the rest of the layout, which is cleverly designed to reward the quick flick through. Key messages are printed in huge type throughout, sometimes taking up half a page so that the physical book kind of screams affirmations at you. The layout also helps you find key sections really easily...
Instead of giving you ‘tips and tricks’, How to be a Happy Academic encourages you to first define what success looks like for you – and work backwards from there.
