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.