Clarity Doctors is officially launching our academic coaching services! As academic coaches, our main focus is on graduate students in the late stages of their programs–that dreaded phase where all that remains is the dissertation. We’ve spent the last few months working with clients who have helped us beta test our coaching practices, and they’ve certainly helped us at least as much as we helped them! Here’s what they’ve said about working with us:
Megan and Alex bring an approach to editing and academic coaching founded in doing justice to both their clients’ struggles and their ideas. Their combined expertise enables them to work with writers whose interests and specializations are diverse and transdisciplinary. As someone who has struggled to overcome years of criticism and to find their way back to the passion and joy of writing and thinking again, it has been both a relief and a gift to have my thoughts and struggle held so patiently and expertly by them. From the nuts and bolts of writing, to the struggle to overcome conceptual impasses, Alex and Megan can help you to identify how to move forward with kindness, skill, and tremendous insight. Highly recommended.
Kaitlin, Ph.D. student
Megan and Alex are both very qualified academics. They have been supporting me as a writing coach to think beyond a box and be creative. They give very practical advice and work with you holding your hands. Megan is a very good english language editor as well. I am very happy with their work.
Sujata, Ph.D. student
Our Approach
Our academic coaching approach is based on support, community, and confidence: we’re here to support our clients, who are all extraordinarily capable human beings doing very complex and difficult projects; we’re part of a broader community of support for the client, since writing and research are inherently communal; and we’re here to help our clients build their confidence and sense of their own efficacy. Since graduate programs have myriad ways of eroding people’s confidence through imposter syndrome, etc., we offer our clients support that really feels like support to them, each individually, to help remind them that they really are extraordinarily capable human beings!
We assume that folks in graduate programs know how they work best and what they need. We are committed to treating our clients as the experts on their mind-bodies, their specialized knowledge, and their skills. We see our work as helping to bring out our clients’ strengths and to help them develop the confidence that graduate programs undermine for many structural reasons. We are, of course, experts on editing, too, and we come prepared with our own skill-set for navigating academic projects, but our relationship with our clients is based on dialogue. We are here to help set up a structure within which our clients can overcome the barriers to their progress.
Fact Sheets and General Framework
To this end, our academic coaching page has two free fact sheets that anyone can use for self-help. The first sheet gives an overview of strategies for getting unstuck while writing, which draws on Alex’s cognitive science background. The second sheet gives a four-tiered approach to writing clearly and effectively, and it draws on Megan’s experience with teaching Effective Writing. Perhaps some of the information on our fact sheets is all that you need to get unstuck. If so, great! Our fundamental mission is to help others suffer less than we suffered!
The two fact sheets also give a general framework for how we work with our clients. In our initial meeting, we’ll go through these sheets to identify trouble spots and areas for support or improvement. Breaking down the amorphous difficulty of graduate school writing and research into more specific problems is always a good idea, and these fact sheets give us a research-based structure around which to build our plan for supporting you. Beyond this general framework, though, our relationship with each client is unique and guided by the specifics of their life.
If you feel stuck, feel free to reach out to info@claritydoctors.com, or if you know someone who might benefit from our academic coaching services, please pass along our contact info to the hard-working graduate student in your life! Getting a Ph.D. is an inherently difficult process, and we are here to help make it somewhat less difficult.