Writing my first conference paper.
What a traumatic experience. I had agreed with my supervisor to submit a conference paper this year. Was so focused on getting the literature done, that I just couldn’t move forward until that all absorbing task was finished, I had to get my head around it all before I could even think about anything else. Which left me with a week to get started on the conference paper. I had already written lots of stuff so wasn’t like I was starting from scratch, but a week was not much time. So I put together something and sent it to him. Wholeheartedly rejected. So I had a look at the format of the conference paper (duh, should have done that first!, didn’t even think of it) and realised why. It had to be a completely different format, quite prescriptive. I now had about 5 day to rewrite it. I would have said forget it, but my supervisor was determined. I tried to explain I hadn’t even done any analysis at this stage so how could I possibly write up ‘findings’, just do some analysis he said. I had seen this to be a leisurely process with time to think, work through the 
coding on Nvivo, instead it was a rushed and hectic process with highlighter and bits of paper, a trial by fire for my introduction to coding and qualitative analysis. So began 5 days of writing writing writing, sending the draft to my supervisor, waiting for it to come back again. Press repeat the next day. This continued for 5 days even over the long weekend – talk about dedication, I was really grateful at how much effort my supervisor put into mentoring me through this, although I think his name should now be on the front of the paper too! It was stressful, but forced me to do something I could have dragged out for months, normally I would like a decent amount of time to edit and rewrite, but this time just had to submit, no time for the niceties. Will be very annoyed if the paper does not get accepted, but will also understand completely if that is the case.
Now I have to do an ethics amendment, urk, am moving to one case study instead of two and want to go in and do observations.
Also have a 1 day writing workshop coming up, the 2 day analysis one was great so looking forward to this one.
The pic has zero relevance, just thought it was funny.
A big milestone, though, I finally finally am pretty happy at where I am with the literature. Amen! Only took 3.5 years….. The hardest part at the beginning is that you have no idea who the key people are in the field and you keep getting side-tracked by other areas you find interesting but aren’t really related to what you are doing. So you start to see a thread then it is like being an investigator, one article leads to another, this leads to others and at first it just felt like I was jumping all over the place, I could not get my head around the field. So I ended up just focusing on finding absolutely everything I could around the field first, skimming articles to pick up leads to other articles. Around 350 journal articles by the end of this process. Next I put them in chronological order. Then I started reading them to get a sense of how the field of self-regulated learning evolved. I started to sort them into 2 piles, stuff that was not that particularly useful, that I could skim quickly and discard for now, and articles that were particularly pertinent. Then I started working through all the most relevant articles, starting to get a feel for the themes and areas covered. This of course leads to new articles and you may end up re-reading the pertinent ones many many many times. Then of course you have to synthesise all of this and write about it. To say this was a big undertaking is of course understating the issue. I felt that until I had a really good grasp of this I could not move onto the analysis as I needed to be clear in my conceptual framework. So getting to this point feels really good. Particularly when all this has been taking place when I am working on average 60-80 hours a week!