Frontline research, or 'Rationale'

I've been a doctoral student for a whole month now, and I'm beginning to feel the need for a blog. On a day to day basis there are two major risks as a research student: the first is that you feel that you're not achieving anything or getting anywhere; the second is the risk that you really aren't doing anything much. This blog is primarily designed to protect me against both of these risks. It will be a record of what I've been up to, on a regular basis, and it will also allow me to reflect on some of the issues pertinent to social science research and to doctoral students.

Why not just keep a diary then? Well, one reason is that I'm vain enough to think that it would be nice if someone read this. And perhaps if they did they might be putative doctoral students or other doctoral students and sharing some experiences might be a postitive support: knowing you're not in it alone is a major help. Secondly, the blog has a major advantage over a diary: it's searchable. So if in a year's time I need to find all the mentions of literature reviews, for example, I can.

A third reason is my own background: it's quite natural for me to write through anything that happens to me. Two weeks ago our cohort had a session on academic writing, and one of the things that emerged was that to a large extent being an academic means being a writer. Writing isn't something that comes at the end of a study, it's something that you do all along. We were encouraged to write every day, to practice our academic writing and to sift, digest and rationalise our thinking. Professor Geoffrey Walford has described himself as a 'compulsive writer' (I think in Doing Qualitative Educational Research: a personal guide to the research process, 2001, London, Continuum), and I think I tend towards that camp too.

So here it is: part compulsion, part self-help, part support. Dispatches from life as a beginning academic; honest reporting of the perils of friendly fire from supervisors, coalitions of the willing with fellow students, and embedded reporting from the frontline of the doctoral experience.