The Fuel: Feeling Less Alone
Navigating the challenges and complexities of a PhD can feel incredibly isolating. Even after the PhD is done and dusted, academia can be very lonely.
But Professor Inger Mewburn’s world-renown blog, The Thesis Whisperer, has been transforming this experience for almost fifteen years. Inger creates space for connection and authenticity, breaking down common problems into manageable pieces and allowing the truth about difficult subjects to be explored. Her personal, conversational blogposts help budding academics feel less alone, and she too feels less alone and energised when she writes them.
With half a million words of content and 40,000 monthly visitors to the blog, her reach is, in her words, ‘wonderful and slightly terrifying’. The impact is powerful: she receives messages from people a decade into their careers reflecting on how her words had transformed their mindset and trajectory. These messages often arrive just when she’s thinking of giving up, serving as a reminder of how much her work matters.
The blog began in 2010 as an outlet for all her buzzing thoughts about PhD life that wouldn’t quite fit into conventional academic papers. ‘The blog format felt more like teaching – which I love – than academic writing,’ she explains.
Alongside running the blog and co-hosting her monthly productivity podcast, On the Reg, Inger serves as Director of Researcher Development at the Australian National University. In this role, she oversees professional development for all research students at the university while also contributing scholarly work on PhD education. Her research interests focus on PhD graduate employability, neurodivergence in PhD study, and the role of generative AI in academic writing (all of which we expand upon below!).
The Importance of Working Sustainably
Prof Mewburn is honest, and she is tired. Academia isn’t a job you can easily clock off from at 5pm – it ‘has a way of expanding to fill every available moment’, as our readers can likely attest to. Managing the emotional labour from her work and blog is a major challenge. Along with emails of praise and gratitude, ‘I also get a lot of sad, broken people writing to me. Responding to those is emotionally difficult work’. As a public academic figure, Inger learned the hard way to turn off comments to the blog after a bad episode of burnout in 2018. She also took herself off Twitter/X – a wise decision for mental health.
Boundaries are essential for everyone. This can look like dedicated writing time early in the day, before emails take over, which helps Inger protect time for her own research and writing – though she admits this is easier to preach than practice. Another boundary is being selective about what work she takes on by learning to say ‘No’, a skill that doesn’t come naturally to her: ‘The longer I work in academia, the more I realise that success isn’t just about being clever – it’s about sustainable practice. I see many brilliant people crash and burn because they try to do everything, please everyone, and maintain impossible standards’.
Sustainable working practice also involves openly sharing your drafts instead of obsessing over perfection, which is one of Inger’s biggest pieces of advice: ‘Perfect is the enemy of done, which took me far too long to learn – I now realise you have to get the ideas out there and workshop them with others to make anything good’.
Inger often works with students to develop their ‘meta-awareness’ of their thoughts, reactions and problems, which she was constantly forced to develop while teaching other PhD students during her own doctorate. This meta-awareness enabled her to see how much she got up in her own head – ‘countless hours fretting about quality and what other people would think, procrastination, perfectionism, imposter syndrome’, all incredibly common challenges in the emotional journey of doing a PhD (and beyond). But increased self-awareness of what’s blocking you is powerful: it allows you to create a plan for how to get out of your own way.
Academia Needs Structural Change
Then again, it’s not ‘just you’. The pressures on PhD students have intensified dramatically. While previous generations could focus solely on their thesis, today’s doctoral students are forced to juggle multiple demands: publishing papers, presenting at conferences, developing an online presence, building industry connections – all while conducting their primary research. ‘It’s like being asked to build the plane while flying it,’ Inger observes.
When Inger completed her PhD in 2009, many graduates could find an academic job ‘if they really wanted one’, pretty much guaranteeing an academic career. In contrast, the academic job market of 2025 is brutal, with far more PhD grads than positions available. Universities are ‘in constant crisis mode’, yet want the ‘complete package – someone who can teach, research, win grants, engage with industry AND manage people’. Every aspect of academic work is now measured and ranked with ‘impact factors’ and ‘h-indexes’. It creates intense competitiveness, making it even harder to admit when we’re struggling, and a ‘kind of permanent anxiety that wasn’t there before. We tell ourselves this pressure produces excellence, but I’m not convinced it produces anything except burnout’.
Inger continues on the soapbox to our applause: ‘We need structural change, not just wellbeing workshops. The academic workforce is increasingly casual, precarious and metrics-driven. The ‘sink or swim’ mentality means we lose talented people who just need a bit more support or flexibility. What makes me feel strongly about this? I see the human cost every day in my inbox. Brilliant people questioning their worth because they can’t maintain impossible productivity targets. Students having breakdowns because they feel they can’t admit they’re struggling. Early career researchers giving up because they can’t see a sustainable future.
‘The irony is that academia claims to value diversity of thought, yet our working practices often squeeze out different ways of thinking and working. A kinder academy isn’t just about being nice – it’s about creating conditions where genuine innovation can happen. Good ideas don’t only come from people who can work 60-hour weeks or conform to narrow definitions of success. What if we valued collaboration over competition? What if we measured success by the quality of our working relationships rather than just our outputs? If we want to keep doing good work and helping others do the same, we need to build systems that support us rather than burn us out.’
Careers Hope
Looking for silver linings, Inger emphasises that PhD graduates today are more employable outside of academia than ever before. The key is developing what she calls a ‘portfolio career mindset’ during your PhD, seeing every opportunity as professional development, not just academic training. ‘Those tedious committee meetings? They’re building your governance experience. That conference presentation? It’s developing your public speaking skills. The literature review? It’s showing you can synthesise complex information – a skill that’s gold in the consulting world.’
She encourages students to do some ‘academic career parallel parking’ – keeping one foot in academia if desired, while exploring other options too. This might mean joining professional associations in your field, attending industry conferences, or writing for different audiences. Build connections outside of academia. Most importantly, learn to talk about your research in ways that make sense to non-academics. ‘Your PhD gives you deep expertise in something, but the real value is in the transferable skills you develop along the way’. The trick is learning to recognise and articulate these skills.
Inger’s top tip? Visit your university’s careers advisors – and do it early. ‘Most PhD students will never visit the (free!) careers advisors at their universities. This is the best thing you can do for yourself – go early in your degree, and go regularly. Buying this kind of advice afterwards is super expensive!’
Accessibility & Game-Changing Tools
Intensely deep focus and excellent attention to detail are valued traits in academia, traits that often come naturally to neurodivergent people. Yet, as Inger points out, most academic support systems are designed for neurotypical brains, with exhausting unwritten rules and expectations. ‘Take writing retreats – we put people in a room for hours of sustained writing, which might be torture for someone with ADHD traits. Or supervision meetings – we expect students to process complex feedback on the spot, which can be overwhelming for more autistic scholars.’
Creative adaptations for neurodivergent students often benefit everyone. ‘We need to move beyond the medical model of disability in academia, where we expect individuals to “cope” or seek diagnoses to access support. Instead, we should be creating flexible systems that work for different kinds of minds. Why not make the viva questions available in advance? Why not offer alternative ways to demonstrate progress besides traditional writing? Why even have the dissertation?’
Artificial Intelligence tools are particularly game-changing for accessibility. ‘For someone with executive function challenges, AI can help break down complex tasks into manageable chunks. For those who struggle with sensory overload, it can help filter and organise information.’ Inger likens AI to having a tireless enthusiastic research assistant who helps manage your cognitive load – and occasionally makes things up, so you need to be on your toes.
The current fear and moral panic around AI in academia fascinates and depresses Inger. ‘The “laziness” argument particularly riles me up,’ she says. ‘Using AI tools thoughtfully actually requires more intellectual engagement, not less. It’s just like having a really good whiteboard session with yourself. I still do all the critical thinking and make all the decisions about what actually goes on the page.’ She draws parallels to past technological fears: ‘It reminds me of when people worried that calculators would stop students learning maths, or that word processors would destroy writing skills’.
Rather than banning or demonising these tools, Inger advocates for teaching students to use them ethically and effectively. ‘We need to shift the conversation from “Is using AI cheating?” to “How can we use AI to make academia more accessible?”’ Because right now, she notes, we’re creating a situation where students who could benefit most from these tools might feel reluctant to use them openly.
Final Thoughts
Thank you so much to Inger for letting us hear more about her journey and her amazing work, which has been tremendously impactful on us here at The PhD Place.
You can find Inger Mewburn on most social media platforms (excluding X!) as @thesiswhisperer.
For ease of reading, Inger compiled the best bits of The Thesis Whisperer blog into books, found here.
