This post was co-written by KD Shives and the excellent Emily Curtis Walters. Emily Curtis Walters is a PhD candidate in History at Northwestern University. You can find her on Twitter at @emilydcw or at her blog, dighistorienne.

When being thrown into the open-ended project that is obtaining a PhD, it is critically important to make consistent progress in completing the major milestones of your program.  This can be more than a little overwhelming for most students, and extremely difficult for those who are not familiar with the ins and outs of modern academia (first-generation students such as Katie can attest to this!). With so little structure, it is easy to get lost in the day-to-day goings-on of graduate school, and suddenly you might find yourself a 6th-year student with no publications and no conference presentations. So how do you stay on track—or even find the right track in the first place?

No matter what discipline you are pursuing your degree in, be it STEM or the humanities, there are common themes in making consistent progress within academia. The most basic three are: How do you identify important goals? How do you then set realistic goals? How do you track your progress in order to achieve your major goals? Coming from very different disciplines, we thought it might be interesting to compare how we approach each of these three questions. Continue reading Goal-Setting vs. Goal-Achieving →