#academiclife

hi loves! mindy here to share how i turned boring assigned books into something actually fun…

why traditional reading methods don't work:

trying to read everything at once

highlighting without purpose

reading when super tired

forcing yourself to finish chapters

my actually helpful method:

first impression ritual

quick flip through to see chapter lengths

read first and last paragraph of each chapter

check for dialogue vs dense text

identify main themes quickly

breaking it down cutely

divide chapters by your deadlines

create aesthetic chapter summaries

make character relationship maps

note interesting quotes in a pretty journal

making it enjoyable

create a reading playlist specific to the book or chapters

find a cute cafe or study spot

reward yourself after each chapter

discuss interesting parts with friends

memory tricks that work

voice record your thoughts while reading

create mini stories connecting themes

draw simple scene sketches

Ever wondered what the PhD journey really looks like? Here’s a simple visual that breaks it down into 5 clear stages — from Topic Selection to Final Defense.

Each step takes you closer to your research goals and academic success! 💡

✨ PSA for anyone applying to college, grad school, scholarships, or literally anything that needs a recommendation letter ✨

ASK. EARLY.

No, like—right now.

Not next week. Not after midterms. Not when Mercury goes direct.

Now.

Your teachers, mentors, supervisors—they’re not recommendation-writing robots waiting in a dusty closet to be summoned when you finally remember the deadline is next Thursday. They’re humans. With jobs. And lives. And probably ten other students asking them for letters too.

And guess what? A rushed letter sounds rushed. A thoughtful, detailed, specific rec letter that actually helps you stand out? That takes time.

Time YOU give them when you ask early.

So do future-you a favor:

📅 Make a list of who you need recs from ✉️ Send a polite, warm email asking if they’d be willing to write one 📎 Include your resume/brag sheet and deadlines 🙏 Thank them like the recommendation gods they are

Be the student that makes their job easier—not the one who sparks a mild existential crisis on Sunday night.

🔗 For more information on the importance of asking for recommendation letters, read this post.

Buongiorno, miei “Briganti della Lettura”!

"Ora egli, andando, senza più pensare alla strada né alla sua faccenda, entrò in una latrina, la quale era in un luogo stretto e buio... e di subito cadde giù, e senza potersi attenere a cosa alcuna, precipitò in una stanza piena di lordura."

Con queste parole, Giovanni Boccaccio ci getta nel cuore della sua novella, dove il povero Andreuccio da Perugia compie la sua prima, umiliante caduta.

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go." —Dr. Seuss *̥˚✧

Reading an academic paper can be as much of a challenge as finding the source in the first place, if not more so. Knowing how to approach the process can help take you from struggling through it, to learning what you need to know in the least terrible way possible.

Structure of a Paper

Academic papers tend to follow a similar format.  APA is as follows:

Title 

The name of the paper, authors, dates, etc.

Abstract 

A short summary of the paper.

Introduction 

Introducing the paper. Sometimes this is written before the experiment starts. You often find the hypothesis here for an experiment. Sometimes it’s written after, but they’ll usually write it as if it was written before.

Methods and Materials 

How they did it and what they used.

Results of the Study 

What they found and how they analyzed it.

Discussion

What they concluded from the results and why, often with sources from other similar papers.

Conclusion 

What this means and what they concluded.

(No Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion [IMRaD] you are most certainly not RAD. >:( )

How to Read Papers by Type

Different papers from different fields can present unique challenges to reading and understanding.

Start with the abstract. Once you’re done reading the abstract mosey on down to the conclusion!  Ignore the middle bits! Most of the time the middle bits are there to tell other researchers “I gotta make sure this is up to the standard of academic research!” Once you’ve read it once you can go back to the Method and judge how they performed it.  However, at first this is a lot so go read the conclusion!  It should be short, sweet, and tell you what they have spent the last so-and-so pages arguing. This will make it easier to understand.

It may seem counterintuitive to go in this order because we are taught to read books top-to-bottom left-to-right, but academia is full of clowns who speak in code.

Humanities Papers

Humanities papers are the most likely to dunk the format of a research paper.  They are also usually based on the researcher’s interpretation of a primary source.

Because humanities papers are often based on the researchers' (albeit very educated) opinion it lends itself to a critical analysis of everything from translation to cultural or social bias from the researcher much more easily. (What primary sources did they base their conclusions on?  Would you have done the same? What have other researchers said? In the cultural context of the time, does this translation make sense?) However, this tends to come after you’ve successfully understood what the researcher is trying to say.

Primary Source

A primary source is first-hand knowledge of something. These can include a writing from a time period by someone who was there, a record made at the time, a photograph, or even an artifact.

Secondary Source

A secondary source is second-hand knowledge. These are the papers written on the subject, textbooks, and accounts written by the people who were not around when it happened. They are not inherently worse than secondary sources, and are very important for spreading knowledge, but research based on secondary sources tends to be a compilation of a lot of research rather than direct investigations. [See: Historiographies. Synthesized studies. Meta Analysis.]

Scientific Papers

The abstract is your best best friend!!! They are not hiding the ball, it’s in the abstract.  Then once again take yourself on a trip to the conclusion. Scientific papers almost never deviate from this format. Read it once, twice, and thrice again until you understand what the abstract is saying.  This will help you understand the whole paper better.

Additional Complications for Scientific Papers

Experimental design can be, and has been, the subject of many an entire college semester for many people.  Don’t expect to understand it outright if you’re new! For the results of most studies, the relevant concept is going to be "statistical significance". This is the probability that the results were found by chance.  It is generally decided ahead of time based on what is being measured and notated similarly to p<.05. This means that the statistical probability of getting those results by pure coincidence is small enough to be significant.

Often in the discussion section you’ll see the author talk about their sample size, their potential biases, and the limitations of their experimental design (if they don’t the other academics will laugh at them). While you can look at this yourself and decide, this often gives a good idea of where there could be room for error.

Qualitative vs Quantitative

Qualitative data is the how, what, and why of research. Quantitative is the numerical measurements. [Think “quality vs quantity”.] There are different statistical terms and analyses for these different types of measurements, but that could be a whole course, let alone document, in and of itself. They use big words like they’re being sponsored by WebMD and Webster both.

Think of it like this: if you do an experiment and adding something to someone’s drink causes it to taste sweeter, that’s a qualitative measurement.  If you’re adding something to someone’s drink and it raises their blood pressure from 100 to 120, that’s a quantitative measurement. Differentiating between them can be tricky, but a good tip to keep in mind is if it’s studies with people is that qualitative research is usually done with small groups of people - often 100 people or less, while quantitative research will often be upwards of the hundreds. This is because with quantitative research you often need large sample sizes for the data to be meaningful. 

There are many types of qualitative research, including interviews, ethnographies, oral history, case studies, focus groups, record keeping, different kinds of observations, etc, while on the quantitative research side of things, we have our surveys, descriptive research, experimental research, correlational research, comparative-causal research, and more.

Causing you Problems

Those are the general rules and advice, now let's talk about how they are broken.

Style

The structure of an academic paper differs by style. APA sticks to this format very strictly.  However, Chicago (my mortal enemy) is going to have footnotes to contend with, but could still have an abstract and a conclusion. If it has neither of those, lament them, shame them, and curse the author to the pit before skirt skirting your way to the first paragraph (approximately the abstract or introduction), and the last two or three paragraphs (approximately the conclusion). They tend to have generally the same information as would be found in a labeled heading.

The code clowns not only said “make it complicated”, they made it complicated across several different paper writing formats. If by some unholy tragedy you find a writing in MLA? Bite the author with your real teeth, and hope your highschool prepared you for this. At the very least MLA tends to be easier to read by starting at the beginning.

Jargon

Academic papers are often incredibly dense! Academia knows this!  Please don’t be afraid to look up words you don’t necessarily understand!  It’s not shameful! Shame them for using big words, like the pompous elites they are, and pull out a dictionary. Understanding is important! If all else fails, no one needs to know you looked up a word, you can just do a quick Google search and look like a pro.  I do it all the time.