Is This Really What You Signed Up For? How to Do Meaningful Research AND Thrive

Join us for this webinar with Gayannée Kedia. To register, email us at postdoc(at)uni-graz.at or sign up in our internal booking system here: Training und Weiterbildung - Research Careers Campus Graz

What motivated you to start a PhD or pursue an academic career? Curiosity? The desire to understand the world? The hope of contributing something meaningful?

Many researchers begin their academic path with these motivations. Yet somewhere along the way, the pressure to publish, fierce competition, and career insecurity can shift the focus from pursuing meaningful questions to simply surviving within the system. In this talk, Gayannée Kedia addresses what often feels like the elephant in the room: the question of meaning in academic life. She approaches this question as a researcher who has spent many years within academia and who works closely with scientists at different stages of their careers. Through her own experience, as well as her background in psychology and neuroscience and work supporting researchers in their scientific writing and thinking, she repeatedly encountered this tension between the ideals that bring people into academia and the realities of the system they encounter. Rather than offering definitive answers, the aim of this talk is to open a conversation: to reflect together on how we experience meaning in academic life and whether we might begin to reclaim it.

Target group: This event ist part of Postdoc Appreciation Week Austria and open to everyone who is interested! Find more events: https://www.linkedin.com/company/paw-austria

FACILITATOR: Dr. Gayannée Kedia is a researcher and teacher in social psychology and neuroscience at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz, Austria. She has degrees in biology and psychology and has worked for several universities in France, the UK, Germany, and Austria. Parallel to her academic activity, she works as a writing coach. She is also the founder of abrilliantmind.blog, a blog aimed at helping scientists be more productive and happier in their professional activity.