Dispatches from a DPhil

What would you rescue first in a fire?

2011-04-03T03:12:00.000-07:00

Put yourself in this position: you come back after a weekend away. Your housemate meets you at the door with some bad news – the house has been burgled. Your computer’s gone. What’s the firs thing that comes to mind?

Yup – your thesis. My desktop had gone, and the extremely ancient laptop, and the only thing I could think of was, where’s my portable hard drive? Gone too, as it turned out. Three copies of your thesis? Not enough, if they’re all in the same house. I was standing looking at my desk, not allowed to touch the mess, hoping desperately the hard drive was under an unlikely bit of paper. It wasn’t.

A year ago, I heard of a friend of a friend who had obsessively backed up her work on four different computers in her department building, spread across different offices in case of theft or computer virus. The building burnt down and she lost everything.

Every research student I knew reacted in the same way to my news – sympathy, and then as one friend put it ‘pseudo testicular-retraction’ as they all backed up their theses onto multiple disks and pen drives, then went to bed with their USB pens under their pillows. Five separate people asked me if I’d heard of Dropbox, a free internet based storage system (http://www.dropbox.com/). Two pointed out there was a university back up service provided (yes, there is, and I recommend looking into yours, because most universities have them, but I hadn’t been able to install the virtual network onto my PCs, so I couldn’t use it). My supervisor turned pale, and asked what I’d lost.

In some ways I’d been very lucky in the break-in. Only electrical goods had been taken. Nothing irreplaceable, nothing of sentimental value. Only my thesis.

Of course, I’d paid careful attention when I’d heard that story of the girl who lost her thesis in the fire. It’s when I first became obsessive about emailing all my documents to myself. In my uni email account are any number of folders marked ‘data recordings’ ‘transcriptions’ and, most thankfully, ‘chapters’. As it worked out I hadn’t even lost the odds and ends of half written beginnings of things, because I tend to forget my USB drive, and therefore email things between the department and home. It took me a while to sort through the entire sent folder (my habit of never deleting anything has also been vindicated, it turns out), but I got there. So when you find yourself in my shoes, or the shoes of the girl whose department burnt down, what will you be feeling? Despair? Or suitably smug?

Confirmation and other deeply emotional tales

2010-03-13T02:16:00.001-08:00

So, as has become usual, I'm posting in an effort to avoid doing what I should be doing. But this is a worthy post, I promise, particularly if you are at a certain august institution that insists on calling its doctorates DPhils rather than PhDs, and therefore have to look forward to the pre-submission funfest that is called confirmation.

A few weeks ago we organised a 'Confirmation Panel' at the department, to try to gather some crumbs of wisdom from students who had already been through the process. For some of them it had been smooth, for some of them less so, and everyone had some very useful tips to offer. I'm not going to create a list of them here - for one thing they have already been circulated around the Education students, to whom they are most relevant, and for another it wouldn't make very interesting reading.

But I do want to pick up on one or two of the things they said. One of the themes which emerged again and again is that a doctorate challenges not just your academic ability but also your emotional stability and your tenacity. It's an exercise, sometimes, in just clinging on by your fingertips. But you can do it. It's not a sprint, this degree, it's a marathon. Sometimes you get a stone in your shoe, or your trainer comes off, but you have to keep limping on anyway. Or you can get a friend to give you a hand up, keep cheering you on. In the end, the people with "Dr" at the beginning of their names are the completely determined ones, who just keep slogging away. (I have to say that since beginning my DPhil my admiration for my mother, who not only completed her PhD while looking after a small child on her own, but managed to finish on time in 3 years, has increased exponentially.)

The other thing that came out most strongly from the panel was more specific to confirmation, but has general applications for conferences, papers, etc. In confirmation you are showing two or three completed chapters of your thesis to two academics. It is not the whole thesis, or even most of the thesis, and the chances are that it won't make sense without context. Give context! Make your research comprehensible with all the surrounding information that people need to understand it. If they can see the context, they are more likely to be persuaded by your analysis and conclusions. We're back to finding research we can trust - and at the end of the day that means finding people we trust, and if all you've got is 6,000 - or 30,000 words to convince people that you are trustworthy, you'd better make the most of them.

So, trustworthiness and tenacity. The two qualities that the letters DPhil or PhD guarantee you've got. In spades.

Well, I got busy... occupational hazards

2010-01-22T02:04:00.000-08:00

So, it's quite a long time since I posted that last entry, and in fact a lot has happened since then. I wrote the methodology section that was troubling me below, and indeed the whole 10,000 word essay (and then some), negotiated access, designed a pilot project, collected data for it and analysed it, completed the ethics review process (twice), passed transfer of status, and yesterday began collecting data. It's been a busy six months.

It's one of the hazards of the 'job', I think. For the first six months I was keeping myself busy, and then, around September, it all just took off. This term is going to be just as busy: the majority of my data collection is happening in the next six weeks, and then I have to be far enough through my analysis to be able to design a questionnaire for the summer examination series.

One of the major problems about doing a doctorate in the Social Sciences is the need to rely on other people. In Science you go to your lab and you look at your microscope, or you book your time on the computer. In Humanities you go to the library and you look at your books. [Braces self for hate mail... I am oversimplifying, I know.]

In Social Sciences you need people to agree to participate. You need people to organise for you to go to meetings. You need people to do what they said they would. It's incredibly difficult. If you think about what you do when someone asks you to do something (someone you've never met, usually), and think about what priorities you have, it's very easy to understand. If you're busy and stressed at work, then the thing that goes is filling in that survey, so that you have time to do the stuff you're paid for. If you're a teacher with three classes of books to mark this evening, you don't want to mark an extra three essays and record yourself doing it for someone's research project. If you've got a massive amount of admin work to do to co-ordinate the examining of two A level examination modules, the thing which slips to the bottom of your list is registering a researcher on a computer system.

And you know what: I completely understand. I am ridiculously grateful to all the incredibly helpful people who have done stuff for me and my research over the last six months. There are the wonderful PGCE students who came up and did think aloud with me. The amazing Sharon and Gemma, whose good nature and friendship I trespass upon shamelessly when I need urgent test subjects. The fantastically helpful people at my host organisation, which and whom I can't name for ethical reasons, have been incredible - in person and over my increasingly panicked emails to which they have responded promptly and calmly! The people who have agreed to participate in my research, despite the fact that they are busy examiners, have my undying gratitude.

So this post is for them: for the people who do things for Social Science research. Here's to you, thank you all. Without you there would be thousands and thousands of research students with no DPhils to do!

How to write a methodology section

2009-06-04T06:53:00.000-07:00

As I sit in front of my computer desperately trying to put together a methodology section for my 'transfer of status' paper, which is a 10,000 word document designed to prove that I really do have something which looks like a doctoral project, I'm led to wonder why there isn't a convenient guide on how to write your methodology section.

The easy answer is that there's no one right way to write a methodology. But there should be some common elements or easy patterns to follow, surely?

It's not like I don't know what my methodology is: in fact there is an irony in the fact that the theory section, which was not at all clear in my head, was relatively easy to write, whereas the design which I have been nurturing up there for months refuses to get out on the page.

Which turned out to be the problem. I thought I knew what my design was, but it wasn't until I'd sat down with another piece of paper and started to hammer out the specific details that I realised I hadn't had it all as clear as I thought. Scrappy bullet points might not be what my supervisor wants, but without that kind of 'thinking aloud on paper' I just couldn't get my head organised.

It was made more complicated by the fact that I am using 'mixed methods', as the well-worn phrase goes. This means that I essentially have three methodologies to write. But some of what I am saying applies to all three strands, so I need to combine them to make a sensible and yet understandable whole.

I think I'm on pretty safe ground starting with my research questions. Then I go on briefly to set the specific context for data collection. After that I've chosen to deal with sampling as a whole, and then divide the rest into the three strands, covering data collection and data analysis for each strand. After that comes the thumping great Ethics section, which is twice as long as the rest of the methodology section put together.

But I can't help feeling that there is something missing. And that's where a check-list would really come in handy. Or a convenient book in the library. Ah well, perhaps that's the next project: "a study of the process of writing methodologies in social science doctorates". Or perhaps not.

Publish or be damned Mark II

2009-05-23T09:17:00.000-07:00

So having decided to take my own advice, I set about trying to find somewhere that I could flex my reviewing muscles, half-way between the publications aimed at the teaching professions, which I already review for (and which 'don't count' as academic publications, as we learned from Geoffrey Walford below), and the scary world of real academic publishing.

What I found was ESCalate, the Higher Education Academy's subject centre for Education, if that isn't tautologous. That is to say, it's the bit of the HEA concerned with Education Studies at universities, with the purpose of improving teaching and learning in that subject. The exciting thing is that once your registration with ESCalate has been approved (which I assume is someone somewhere going "Yup, definitely someone to do with education. She's okay.") you can volunteer to review any of the books they have available. After which they send you the book and give you a month to submit the review. And there you have it, a almost academic publication. Certainly enough to give me a boost.

So if you're interested in the city academies programme, you might be interested in my review of The Great City Academy Fraud by Francis Beckett. Then perhaps, you might be interested in getting hold of your own book to review...there's some interesting looking new titles!

Publish or be damned

2009-03-20T14:10:00.000-07:00

One of the foci of STORIES this year was publication. We invited three speakers, each of whom is on an editorial board of a journal, has edited a journal, or in one case (and it was naturally our own department’s Professor Geoffrey Walford) edits, sits on boards, reviews, and has published every kind of work imaginable.

University departments are judged on the quality and quantity of their research output. That’s why a publication record is important for any student hoping to secure an academic appointment. The RAE that has just passed is the last one of its kind, however, and the next assessment will be a Research Excellence Framework, which will be metrics-based. What this means is that citation will be taken into account. It’s not just publishing that’s need, it’s publishing in journals that appear in the citation indexes.

There’s a definite hierarchy of publications, apparently. According to Professor Walford, articles in journals are better than chapters in edited books: they tend to be cited more. The exception is if someone famous is editing the book! He also stated fairly categorically that articles in professional journals or practitioner journals, good for the ego though they are, do not count towards getting jobs in academia.

The key, they all agree, is to target your writing to the audience you’re submitting for. Check out the journal you’re planning on sending your work to. What’s their editorial policy? Some journals have a smallish editorial board who all read everything submitted then decide among themselves. Others have a much larger board, and an editor who sends articles out for review to someone on the board and someone outside it. Think about finding out about the interests of the editorial committee: if there’s only one person in your field on the board, it’s a good bet that they’re going to be the person to read it. Perhaps it’s not a good idea to take a completely opposite position to whatever they’ve written previously. Though that is not as important as reading the submission criteria, and sticking to the length. However magnificent you believe your manuscript to be, the editor is not going to allow you to bust the word limit.

Once you’ve submitted, and your article has been reviewed, there can be one of three outcomes: accepted outright (which virtually never happens), completely rejected or they can suggest some changes. If an editor sends you back your manuscript with some suggestions, then indulge in some primal screaming if you need to, and get back to work. Act on the suggestions, and send back your amended manuscript with a covering letter explaining how you’ve acted on them, step by step. Even, if you’ve thought carefully about it, justifying why you’re not acting on one or two of them.

There can be quite a long lead time to publication – even once you’ve had an article accepted. That means that doctoral students need to be submitting articles based on their research by the beginning of their third year at the very latest in order to have some citations ready for job applications. Book reviews can be a good way to get started: write to editors and offer your services. Get your supervisor’s advice on your writing – indeed, get anyone and everyone to read and give you advice before you submit a manuscript.

The real key to getting published though, the experts tell us, is this: do good quality research and write it up well.

Conferring

2009-03-19T09:35:00.000-07:00

Well in the last ten days, it's all come together. I've made progress, written about five thousand words on my project, for a variety of reasons, made two different presentations on it, and helped to run a very successful student conference, leaving me completely exhausted and a lot happier with the whole study thing.

Conferences are amazing things. I've been to quite a few, and this is not even the first time I've helped run one, but this time, something just clicked. Usually if the word 'networking' comes up, a tiny muscle in my left eyelid starts twitching uncontrollably. But thinking about the gains from the last two days, the best way to describe them might be just that. Working on the committee has brought me a lot closer to several people I knew vaguely, and some people I'd never even met before. At the conference itself I spent time talking to lots of other doctoral students. The fact that my presentation was scheduled immediately before a plenary featuring lots of important lecturers meant that most of those lecturers were actually at my talk, and they gave some really useful feedback - one of them, a woman whom I hold in great awe, even going so far as to come to talk to me afterwards. Although there were substantive gains, both in terms of ideas and in terms of feedback on presentation style, the best thing was simply feeling part of a community.

It's all too easy as a doctoral student to feel like it's just you and the books (or, in this day and age, just you and the e-journals), stuck in the library fighting a lone battle. This was an opportunity to show that that just isn't so. We're all in this together, and the advantage of being in a relatively small department (although nowhere near as my first academic department, which had less than a hundred people in it total, undergrads, grads and staff combined), is that you can get to know a lot of different friendly faces very well. Going to listen to other people present their studies means an opportunity to offer your help to them, and a chance to make a connection, to feel part of an academic community.

The keynote address was given by Dr Nick Hopwood, a Research Fellow at the Department, who (whisper it) used to be just like us. He currently works on a project investigating what doctoral students are like, and how they work. One of the key findings they've come up with is that the most important people for doctoral students, the key to their survival and academic progress, are their peers. Student conferences are the kind of forum that enables us to make those connections.

One of the advantages of a student conference like ours, which had representatives from every year group presenting, is that you get to see other people at your stage. It brings home the fact that you're not alone in not having everything completely sorted, and that progress can be slow. It's also reassuring to find third years who haven't got the wording of their research questions quite right yet - when you've been agonising that only six months in, they're not sorted!

So on we go - bolstered up and ready to make progress, as part of a community of doctoral students, with friends and advisors, we'll all get through this.

DON'T PANIC

2009-03-03T01:53:00.000-08:00

When I was an undergraduate, we always talked about 'fifth week blues': the point in term where you were just about halfway through, and there was so much work to be done you couldn't even imagine ever finishing it all, and you were probably about to come down with something horrible.

Well, I'm thinking that in graduate terms, it happens a couple of weeks later. Both this term and last, at about this time, end of sixth week and beginning of seventh, I've started to feel as though the whole world is coming crashing down on me. I'm wondering why I started this, I'm raking through the job adverts to see what else I could do with my life, and I'm feeling like there's no way that I can complete a doctorate, or even at this rate get started on one properly. I suspect that the reason for this is that there are only a couple of weeks to go to the end of term, and when you sit down and assess where you are, and where you can reasonably expect to be by the end of term, it feels like you've accomplished sod all.

I was trying to guard against this at the beginning of term by completing a weekly DPhil log, showing all the things I'd done related to education each week, and highlighting the ones which were specifically relevant to my doctorate. Unfortunately falling ill for a week in the middle of the term meant taking a week off and failing to fill in the log document. I haven't done one for either of the last two weeks. It's all too easy as a graduate student, especially as a first year DPhil, to feel that you're not really making any progress. You go from day to day reading and writing about your topic, but not really achieving much in the way of solid work. I'm feeling this particularly because I'm still waiting for a meeting to try to negotiate access for my research. In four months time I need to be doing pilot work, or there won't be a project to do. This is making me very nervous.

So I'm here in the computer lab trying to write an early literature review to present to my fellow first years, and wondering at what point I should start to panic, which is preventing me doing much constructive reading and reviewing. On top of academic concerns are my worries about where I can afford to live next year, and what on earth to do about that. The only thing I can do to prevent myself from wanting to quit and run away home at the moment is relive over and over in my head the worst parents' evening encounters I ever had, to remind myself of why I'm doing this and not sitting in a cosy classroom reading a nice Shakespeare play right now.

Reviewing the situation

2009-02-24T13:03:00.000-08:00

So, having handed in my own abstract mere hours before the deadline, I'm now in the situation of reviewing other people's abstracts. And given the difficulty I had writing one, it's surprisingly easy to spot the strengths and weaknesses of those of others. In fact, it's a deeply educative experience. It's also surprisingly similar to, for example, looking at job applications or coursework essays. What makes or breaks any of these things is how well they hit the criteria: criteria which should be attainable by anyone.

1) Word count. If it says 200 it means 200. Not fifty. Not four hundred. Submitting anything by email makes it very easy for the recipient to check the length these days. With job applications it's more likely to suggest one or two pages for a letter. Change the margins, change the font, change the spacing. All fine. Don't go onto that next sheet.
2) Spelling. Spell check is easy. A quick read is easy. Do you really want your abstract out there in the world with a mistake directly under your name for everyone to see and hanging round your neck for ever more?
3) It's seems to be amazingly easy not to actually say what you're going to say. Abstracts have to tell prospective audience members exactly what to expect. When giving tips for theses abstracts, which are slightly different but not much, a lecturer pointed out that academic papers are not murder mysteries: you don't have to carefully conceal whodunnit. In fact, in abstracts, you need to give away all your major suprises up front. It might not be romantic, but it is good practice.
4) Explain what you're talking about. Don't assume people will work out your theoretical perspective, your definitions or your acronyms off their own bat.

In fact, I've come to the conclusion that you could do worse than use Goldilocks and the Three Bears as a model for writing abstracts. Not too big and not too small, it has to be just right. Not too hard and not too soft, it has to be just right. And then, if you're lucky, the three bears of conference organisers won't gobble you up (okay, so slight pushing of Goldilocks, but it's late, and I've just reviewed a bunch of abstracts).

Abstract thoughts

2009-02-23T10:09:00.001-08:00

I'll start with a small embarrassed cough. *ahem*.It's only been three months since my last post, I don't know what you're talking about. Although since everyone who speaks at our first year DPhil seminars keeps telling us that we ought to be writing 500 words a day about our research, it is a little embarrassing.

Speaking of embarrassing, so is being on a conference committee and being very lax in getting your abstract submitted. The deadline is about six hours from now, and I just managed to get it in, some weeks after the original call for papers. One of the problems of writing an abstract for a paper you intend to give is that although you may have some idea about what you're going to say, it's not all fully formed yet. An abstract can give you some ideas, but it can also tie you down once you've been accepted and have to sit down and actually write the whole damn paper.

Being a first year, I don't have any results (or indeed any anything) yet, so what's the point of giving a paper at a conference? Well, firstly, this is a student conference, designed to help us develop our presentation skills, get feedback on both them and our projects, and also to practice submitting abstracts for consideration. The abstract is blind peer reviewed, which is also a nice piece of professional development. For this conference, STORIES (STudents' Ongoing Research In Education Studies), the abstract length was only 150 words, but even that much was leaving me with serious writers' block. I'd taken the advice of a second year, and decided to present on potential methodologies for my study. But that was as far as it went.

Luckily that second year had some more tips: a secret formula lightly mentioned in passing by her supervisor. The recipe is as follows:

First paragraph = introduce the topic
Second paragraph = introduce the problem
Third paragraph = say what you're actually going to talk about

And just like that, it flowed from the keyboard. Now all I have to do is worry about what my blind peer reviewer is going to say about it.

Finding the literature - never mind reviewing it

2008-11-05T03:30:00.000-08:00

The first part of any research project appears to be extensive reading on and around your topic. Or any topic which might be vaguely related or in fact interesting in some way, or indeed extensive reading around a topic which is in no way related to your doctorate but looks jolly interesting, and it was okay to spend all day reading these two novels, wasn't it?

Finding the right kind of literature is not always easy. Lots of emphasis was placed on the importance of 'systematic' searching: that is to say making a search which doesn't miss anything and which could be repeated by someone else. This is jolly fine and good and totally necessary but often the most helpful search strategy is the entirely serendipitous one of finding something useful and then chasing up every reference within it and also, for the more advanced among us, finding all articles which cite it (Social Science Citation Index is useful for this, as is the more limited Google Scholar). There should be a name for this search technique, but there isn't one. Perhaps 'spiderweb searching' or 'node-based searching'. Because while systematic searching may be designed to ensure that you don't miss anything, in fact it can have the opposite effect, if you are not prepared to follow those results up with the spiderweb technique (I'm determined to coin this term).

There are perils involved in following up these kinds of leads. Last year I found a very interesting sounding article, which purported to be nice and basic and just the kind of thing I needed, cited by its author in a later paper. Searching for it on the internet I discovered that while the article itself was not available online, another eight or so people had cited it in exactly the same way as the original author. There was just one problem. When I went to the paper based copy of the journal, hidden away in my department's library's archives, the article wasn't there. The right issue was, and the right pages, but they were occupied with an entirely different article which, while not being entirely useless per se, was of no use to my research project whatsoever. After a laborious handsearching process I found it in another issue with different page numbers. But I must be the first person to cite it who has actually read it: the others all merely took what its author had said about its content and followed his citation. Which is a big no-no as anyone involved in any kind of research should know.

Well, that was last year, and last year's problem. This year's is entirely different: most of the work which has already been done in the area which I'm researching has been done by Cambridge Assessment, the lovely group made up of the OCR awarding body and Cambridge International Examinations, and their research arm. In another life, OCR was UCLES - the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (which strangely is the name all their money remains in) - and in that guise produced a report for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority on the reliability of marking in Key Stage 3 tests, in the course of which they did some experiments on the use of annotation. This report is cited over and over again by Cambridge Assessment people working in my field, and they presumably have copies of it kicking about in filing cabinets all over the place. If it was produced nowadays it would be bunged straight on the internet, but it's a few years old and it wasn't. And there are no copies to be found anywhere. Not in the copyright libraries, not on any catalogues, not on the internet, nowhere. Which leaves me in the not so comfortable position of wanting to cite a study which I can't actually lay my hands on... hypocrite? Moi?

I guess I will have to resort to something else which has been muttered about in the last couple of weeks (mostly by over-confident North American Continent students) which is emailing the people who wrote the articles I'm reading. I mean, presumably they had their hands on it? In fact, tomorrow I will be at Cambridge Assessment at a seminar on Equating (with the worrying instruction of 'bring your calculator'), so perhaps I can use my cover as mild-mannered DPhil student to do an Alias and search the filing cabinets while wearing impossibly tight clothes, stupidly high heels and an implausibly coloured wig. Ah well, a girl can dream.

Frontline research, or 'Rationale'

2008-11-04T15:21:00.001-08:00

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.