How is your uni work going?

This is a question I am often asked and it is hard to give a short answer.

If I had to, it would probably be: “Better”. I am in Year 2 now. Year 1 was stressful as per the blogs below. In the first year I found it difficult to get my head around the whole concept of what the PhD is and what you have to do for it, I found being back in Kindergarten again (ie knowing nothing and being the totally inexperienced one) confronting, it was challenging to not feel in control (always a major issue for me) and to feel that perhaps I was not really of the calibre to be a part of this academic process, particularly my writing skills which tend towards the informal and direct as opposed to formal academic speak and a philosophical discussion which just seems to me like you are going around in circles and would be better served by just getting to the point.

The other problem was that if I go back to my uni days when I was doing the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Maths together, I really felt the distinct differences between the way these two groups of people thought. Well, being in the education faculty for the doctorate, I have again found this dichotomy of viewpoints which means that at times I feel quite alienated from the people around me in this world as they all think in a way that feels foreign to the mathematical side of my brain (and unlike when I was at uni I don’t have the alternate set of people to go and get a good dose of logical left brain conversation with – shame I am not still teaching with the Maths staff at SCEGGS!). People in the ‘arts’ faculties are good at taking pieces and pulling them altogether, meandering along a path and trusting it will bring them into the right direction. I feel very uncomfortable working like this. I like to have the big picture and then move into the details – an approach that does not really sit well with this type of research. I also am very outcomes focused, particularly practical outcomes, and these people are much more all about the journey, which I admire them for, it is a good way to be, but does not resonate with my life paradigms.

Anyway, I have got through all this. Mainly by deciding not to worry about it too much. I know what I am supposed to do now and I am forging ahead with it. Plus last year my workload for the business etc was really heavy which made it difficult to find any time for uni work, this year I cleared my plate a bit plus I have a good space to spread out all my uni work so these two things have also made a huge difference.

So in the first half of this year I have done my doctoral assessment presentation (a half hour presentation + half hour of feedback to supervisors and other doctoral students) and handed in my 10000 word doctoral assessment paper. Waiting now for the feedback. This is a fairly big hoop to jump through where you have to outline after a year and a bit, your ideas on what you are going to research and how you are going to do it. So you need to demonstrate you have read and thought about your topic and have some clarity around your research question, the significance of what you are doing, your methodological perspective and approach.

Have prepared my ethics application, about 40 pages all up, will submit to the UTS ethics committee on Wednesday. Then again it is just a matter of waiting for the feedback like with the DA.

So at the moment I am going back and re-reading in a much less pressured way everything I have read to this point. I am focusing on all the methodology readings at the moment (50 library books out on methodology at the moment) then I am going to re-do self-regulated learning, then learning stuff, then digital generation stuff. But taking it at a pretty easy pace.

Hopefully doctoral assessment and ethics stuff will be back in time for me to do my pilot case study at a school in September and the online survey of schools in Sydney in Term 4.

Then next year I will select 3-5 schools to do case studies on and will spend 1-2 days per term in each school doing data collection. Year after that is analysis and write-up so may be able to complete the whole thing in 4 years. Just need to see how smoothly data collection goes, if I need to I am happy to factor in an additional year – we get 8 years anyway as a part-time student.

The other thing I have done is massively relax my personal standards. Although it feels uncomfortable for me not to do something to the best of my ability, I have accepted that if I try and do this PhD to a standard to which I feel totally happy with I’d have to kill myself with the amount of work needed – maybe if I was doing it fulltime I could do that but not while I am working. So I am having to hand in work that is a standard that normally I would think is pretty crappy, but it is doing the job and I am just trying to not cringe about it. Anyway perhaps it is more my perception, if I do it as thoroughly as I would like, I might feel better, but perhaps the standard wouldn’t be that much higher anyway.

So no animals this year as no zoo course, we did rescue a little bird though the other day. It flew into the apartment and landed on Mark’s shoulder, a little tame bird from the lorikeet family, obviously a baby and a pet. Of all the apartments to fly into choosing one with2 cats was not clever. The WIRES people told us to take it downstairs and put it in a tree and see if it takes off, but it just sat there and looked at us and then walked back onto Mark’s hand. So we had to take it to the animal hospital at North Sydney and hope someone comes to claim it.