The plan and the eventual reality

Tags

planning writing, Structuring time, Writing schedules

by Katrien Pickles

Today our guest blogger is Katrien, a family studies researcher, picture book author and swimming teacher. She was raised on the Big Island of Hawai’i and now lives in Wagga Wagga, Australia. Katrien’s doctoral research is on family wellbeing and public playgrounds. Here she reflects on how to plan for the unexpected in research and writing.

When I began my PhD, I read a lot about being organised: how to set up an EndNote library; how to save the impossible amount of articles you will end up downloading; how to securely store your data; and, most importantly, how to manage your time. I created a Gantt chart, included clearly delineated writing time, and felt like a super-hero. Truly, you have no idea how big a deal that is. My husband was confused because the person he married had a deep hatred of Excel. I even colour-coded the months and tasks!

Throughout my experience in doing the PhD, two seemingly opposing themes have emerged: the planned ideal and the eventual reality. You can start out with high hopes, rooted in your ideal version of the research.

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How many research languages do you speak? (The answer may surprise you)

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Academic languages and registers, Research languages

Our guest blogger this week is Ailsa Naismith, a third-year PhD student at the University of Bristol, England. Ailsa is researching the active Fuego volcano in Guatemala through satellite imagery and interviews, looking to discover why the volcano erupts and how previous eruptions have been experienced by local people. We have thoroughly enjoyed her thought-provoking reflections on “research languages”—and we’re sure you will too. 

Ailsa can be found on Twitter (@AilsaNaismith) and through the occasional blog post (www.reasoningwithvolcanoes.com).

What language do you do research in? If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that it’s English, this being the “lingua franca” of much of the academic world. So far, so conventional. But – wait! Could it be that you are secretly more talented than you think? (Based on the overwhelming proportion of doctoral students that reportedly experience Imposter Syndrome, versus what it actually takes to achieve a PhD, the answer is probably “Yes”.)

Despite our fears and reservations, throughout the years we spend studying we learn a wide range of research skills, from communicating our ideas with confidence, through networking, to presenting our arguments clearly in written form. I think these skills can be viewed as a group of “languages” in which we become fluent during our training.

It’s not over until it’s over: writing a doctoral graduation citation

Tags

graduation citation, Researcher identity

Today’s guest bloggers, Ana María Benton and Ian Brailsford, write to us from New Zealand. Ana María Benton holds a doctoral degree in education and is a language learning adviser within English Language Enrichment  (Libraries and Learning Services: Te Tumu Herenga) at the University of Auckland. She has long worked with university students and is passionate about language planning, second language education, and language revitalization. Ian Brailsford is an assistant with the University of Auckland’s Specials Collections (Libraries and Learning Services: Te Tumu Herenga) and was previously employed as a postgraduate learning adviser working primarily with doctoral candidates. Here they explain the identity work involved in writing the citation that is read out at New Zealand graduation ceremonies for PhD candidates.

By Drs Ana Maria Benton Zavala and Ian Brailsford

Introduction

This blog post describes the final piece of doctoral writing for a recently awarded PhD: the brief citation read out at graduation. Conventional wisdom is that the thesis abstract is the final (and possibly hardest) piece of writing. At our University, the official guidelines stipulate that abstracts be no more than 350 words. This equates to approximately three to four years’ full-time doctoral study honed down to three to four paragraphs. Good advice on writing the abstract is out there; this post attempts the same for a citation.

Top Terrors for PhD supervisors–things that make us wake in fright

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Care in supervision, PhD supervisor roles, Supervisor fears

By Claire Aitchison

It’s scary being a PhD supervisor.

Whatever the reason, there would be few supervisors who have not experienced anxiety and self-doubt at some point.

This post is about some of the ‘night terrors’ that can afflict doctoral supervisors. What scares you the most? Please feel welcome to add to this list—and share remedies!

Am I asking too much of this student?

During doctoral candidature there are inevitable ups and downs. Emotional turbulence for both student and supervisor can have their origins in the challenges of the research itself; the stresses around writing and giving and receiving feedback; or perhaps have nothing to do with the research and instead arise from financial, family or work concerns. Life gets in the way, damn it! It isn’t easy to know when to ease off and make allowances, or when to maintain the right level of pressure so that the PhD stays on the boil. How does one balance the personal vulnerabilities and demands on individual students against the institution’s completion-focussed priorities? Furthermore, sometimes the needs of supervisors come into the equation — we too have lives, challenges, workloads and vulnerabilities!

Managing supervisor/candidate falling out over doctoral writing

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Emotion & writing, Feedback practices, Researcher identity, supervisor feedback, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

It’s common for supervisory relations to grow tense somewhere during a doctorate. It’s also usual for the parties involved to work through such tension, and move on, that very usual process in most human relationships. Now and then, though, emotions grow intense, and the disagreement between candidate and supervisor threatens to obstruct the doctorate. And while some tensions may emerge from differing personalities, some relate to differences in writing processes or style preferences. A few times I have worked with supervisor/candidate couples in strife, and this post describes my suggestions for managing discord.

Supervision: the key relationship to get right as a doctoral writer and researcher

Tags

Researcher identity, supervisor feedback, talking about writing, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Ian Brailsford.  Ian is Postgraduate Learning Adviser in the Libraries and Learning Services at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. With doctoral advising as his core work, Ian has an insightful approach to doctoral writing and the personal context that supports it.

Postgraduate research marks a transition from structured teaching and learning, with the lecturer deciding the course content, learning outcomes, assignment tasks and schedule, to fully fledged academic independence. To manage this in-between space, universities have for decades adopted an academic apprenticeship model where the less experienced researcher works under the supervision of a ‘master’. When it works well, as it does in most cases, postgraduate supervision is ‘win win’: the emerging early-career researcher is guided through the project to completion and the supervisor, as one experienced academic, Professor Robin Kearns, once put it, gains a new colleague. In an ideal world the balance of power shifts towards the end of the project; the postgraduate researcher becomes the expert and teaches the supervisor about their new-found knowledge.

However, we’re all human.