Communicating with Clarify

By Allyson Sim | Jade Phoenix Training & Consultancy Introduction: Why Work-Life Balance Is Especially Hard in Academia Work-life balance is a persistent concern for researchers and PhD students, yet it is often framed as an individual responsibility: manage your time better, set boundaries, be more resilient. This narrative overlooks the structural realities of academic work and the unequal ways in which these pressures are experienced. In academia, work often blends seamles

Time Management for Researchers and PhD Students: Working With Time, Not Against It. By Allyson Sim | Jade Phoenix Training & Consultancy

We’ve all been there: sitting through a research presentation where the slides are so dense, cluttered, or confusing that it becomes almost impossible to follow. Researchers don’t make bad slides because they lack intelligence — they make them because academic training rarely teaches anyone how to present information visually.

Feedback is essential in research — but often uncomfortable. In this post, I share simple ways to make feedback constructive, confident, and collaborative.

After 13 years in academia, I’ve seen something that still surprises me:so many brilliant research ideas go unheard — not because they lack quality or impact, but because they’re hard to communicate clearly.