Thank you so much! I think that it is a profession that I can enjoy as a backup. Dear Marcus, more posts like this are extremley useful. I encourage more of them on this format!

Dear Marcus. It would be useful to talk more about the back-up career paths for mint philosophy PhDs. And how to switch to them. This is more necessary than ever since Covid19 will disrupt the already competitive academic job market. If people like me had some hope before the pandemic, now university cuts on jobs and post-docs lead us to face reality: fresh PhDs have passed from having little chances to zero chances — not only in Humanities. So, many would be grateful if even more space could be given to non-academic careers in either the US and Europe. At least, I see also the positive side-effect: the situation will push to think more about the prospectives philosophers have outside academia. Thank you in advance!

I am a 2nd year PhD candidate. I always suggest James Pryor's guide to Philosophical Writing to improve, it helped me a lot. https://philosophy.dept.shef.ac.uk/papers/PryorWRITE.pdf However, the best thing is looking at the papers that you consider at the top of your research field (i.e. logic, ethics, philosophy of mind, etc.); look at their structure and ask why they are very well-written paper. Afterwards, try to "emulate" the points that you considered stronger in them in your writing. Then practice, practice and revise your paper until you are satsfied. Eventually make read your piece of writing to a friend or colleague for feedback and then start again. I needed a long time to improve (and I am still improving), but in this way I enhanced my writing style A LOT.

a) Work-life balance during the PhD, and b) relationships and two-body problem while being in the academic job market would be warmly welcome topics.