Summary: <br> Sometimes, your humble HelloPhD hosts forget how narrow our experience has been in graduate education. We’re both biomedical PhDs, and while we trained in different departments, there was a significant amount of overlap.<br> <br> <br> <br> For us, a PhD meant classes, comprehensive exams, rotations, lab meetings, experiments, seminars, and so on. <br> <br> <br> <br> While those experiences were common across biomedical programs, the similarity starts to fade when discussing other bench-sciences like chemistry, or even patient-focused fields like epidemiology. <br> <br> <br> <br> If those adjacent fields reveal unique and instructive differences, how much more exciting to explore the distant reaches of the PhD universe – the Humanities PhD!<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="http://hellophd.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/macdonald_a.jpeg"></a>Alexandra Macdonald, Historian and PhD Candidate<br> <br> <br> <br> Thread Count<br> <br> <br> <br> This week, Josh sits down with Alexandra Macdonald, a Historian and PhD candidate at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.<br> <br> <br> <br> Alexandra’s dissertation, provisionally titled “The Social Life of Time in the Anglo-Atlantic World, 1660-1830,” takes her to museums and university collections around the world to study art and materials and what they can tell us about the people who made them.<br> <br> <br> <br> We hear more about Alexandra’s fascinating research, but also about how she’s working to improve the training experience for other PhDs.<br> <br> <br> <br> Humanities PhDs can sometimes be isolating – the candidate may travel for months at a time, and be the only person in their department working on a particular question. That often means that they don’t receive guidance in the skills they’ll need to progress. Project management, professional networking, writing a book chapter, and myriad other skills are left untaught, and the student either sinks or swims.<br> <br> <br> <br> Alexandra is working to change that. She recently launched a ‘monthly check-in’ group where students can gather to share their experiences and provide support to keep their projects on track. If you’d like to participate, you can find her on <a href="https://twitter.com/AliMicMac" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/alexandrammacdonald38/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Instagram</a>, or on her website: <a href="http://alexandrammacdonald.com/">alexandrammacdonald.com</a>!<br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="https://www.promega.com/resources/student-resource-center/intermediate-techniques/?utm_source=hellophd&utm_medium=banner_april_may&utm_campaign=academic_src&utm_content=protein" target="_blank" rel="noopener"></a><br>
