HeyJaredThe Steady Letter
For people doing serious doctoral work along a non-standard path: letters that recognise the hard parts as features of the work, not faults in you — and make them something you can act on.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 11
- Latest publication
- Sep 10, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 13, 2026
Latest issues
The kaleidoscopic world of PhD research (opens the original)
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Last week it felt like every student I spoke to was deep in the midst of a piece of work that was clearly going to take a long time. I don’t mean ‘I’ve got another thousand words to do by the end of this week’ long, I mean ‘I’ve been working on this for months, it’s been to my supervisors several times, and I no longer know which way is up’ long: ethics applications, methodologies, literature reviews and the like. And it’s easy, in these phases, to feel that this section will never be any closer
The gradual threshold of the new academic year (opens the original)
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It’s a strange time of year in Oxford. Lots of US institutions have started their new academic years already and colleagues at other UK universities are on the cusp of their autumn term/semester, so communication and collaboration with colleagues elsewhere are starting up, yet Oxford has another clear month left before our term starts. There are no taught-programme students here, yet, and student accommodations are still hosting visitors and conference parties.<a class="image-link image2 is-view
Why does academic work so rarely feel satisfyingly ‘finished’? (opens the original)
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Over coffee last week, a good friend was trying to work out why she felt so dissatisfied with a book chapter she’d just finished and submitted. It wasn’t about time and effort put in (enough), or technical outcome (she met the brief for the chapter) What she was describing felt so familiar: a lingering sense that (‘after all that’) it didn’t have anything interesting to say, that it was not as well written as she would have wanted … overall that it just hadn’t turned out as she’d hoped.<a class=
How much time do you actually have to write, and when? (opens the original)
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Specific dates vary across countries, but we’re definitely into the final window of the academic summer, and some are already in the early days of the new academic year. This means that your project, which has been moving along on its own timescale for the last few months, is converging with the institutional calendar for 26/27, and that can feel weird … Read more
To do the work that next needs doing, I first need to get myself to a place I can think from (opens the original)
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So my projects all come to a head at onceI hit a wall in July, made entirely of open mental tabs. Too many work and personal projects (‘project’ here meaning ‘a piece of work with more than one step’) lit up at once, and the work that was needed required complete immersion, but often for only relatively short amounts of time. Timelines were external, stakes were high; I had – at earlier points, when time felt more elastic – committed to all the projects and they all mattered to me.<a class="imag
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