Coaching for Academics

Stop procrastinating. Stop spinning your wheels. Start making steady progress toward your goals. The world deserves to hear what you have to say!

Are you an academic or graduate student who’s having trouble designing and meeting your goals?

Graduate students working on masters and doctoral degrees often have difficulty managing the task of researching and writing a thesis or dissertation.

Post-docs and faculty may struggle with defining themselves as academics or setting goals that will help them get a job or reach tenure.

OnTrack Academic Coaching will help you set concrete, achievable goals and support you as you meet those goals in a timely manner, without procrastinating, aiming for excellent, not perfect.

Recommended Planning Resources

In my coaching practice I often refer clients to free resources, available online, including the following:

Recommended Books for Academics and Dissertators

There are many “how to get it done” books out there. Several are very good. I particularly recommend:

  • Bolker (1998). Writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day

  • Fiore (2007). The Now Habit: A Strategic program for overcoming procrastination and enjoying guilt-free play

  • Darley, Zanna & Roediger (2003). The Compleat Academic: A Career Guide

  • Silvia (2007). How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

  • Boice (1990). Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing

Recommended Grad Student and Dissertation Web Resources

Every day new webpages appear about or by dissertators working through the process. Be mindful that blogs by dissertators can become a distraction and an opportunity to dwell in the bad stuff rather than a motivating force for getting things done. Here are a few that I recommend:

  • How to Be a Good Graduate Student offers helpful ideas particularly useful for pre-dissertation graduate students including how to pick a masters thesis topic and solid ideas for how to become a part of your research community.

  • Academic Ladder offers great material on writing and managing your academic career

  • The ABD Survival Guide offers a free web-newsletter with motivating tips and a rotating list of guest authors (mostly dissertation coaches).

  • Phinished is a discussion and support group for people working on their dissertation.

Recommended School-Life Balance Resources

There are quite a few web resources on finding balance between graduate school and the rest of your life.

Resources for Post-Docs

Information for post-docs is relatively sparse. I’ve pulled together the best of a limited pool here: