Now that it is all over I can’t understand how I possibly managed to do the PhD while I was working full time. Seems impossible now but somehow I did it! So that’s it for the PhD blog. This blog started as an assignment for a technology subject for my Masters, and morphed into a PhD blog (see the previous 30+ posts – listed on the side of the page).  I’m not sure what it will be used for next. I’ll let it sit awhile until something new hatches. If you’d like to read the this abstract, or an executive summary (19 pages) or the full thesis (340 pages) then click here: http://www.enhanced-learning.net/studyskillsmainpage/abouteles.php#phd

Finishing your PhD and Finding a Job

(excerpts from the notes of a  presentation given by someone who did it just last year!)

To get to your academic career you need to finish your theses…

PP1 ‘The only good thesis is a done thesis’ said to be an ancient PhD graduate proverb; I heard it as a mantra from my Uncle, a Dean in an American University.

The world does change when it’s done. Successful examination means that you have been let into the academy, that you are now a colleague of your teachers and supervisors.  You can seek gainful secure employment, which for me has been an incredible reward having studied and worked since 2004 when I began my masters in the UK.

PP2: The big question is how to get it done.

This time last year I was heading into my last week before thesis submission.  Thinking about this talk brought up a few of the emotions I’d been experiencing at that time; excitement, terror and sleep deprivation while running on caffeine and sugar.

These are the practices that helped me complete and that I noticed in my friends who have now submitted and graduated.

• The first is making a conscious decision to finish and then to work out when you will do this. Make completion a goal. I noticed this in a friend who completed in 3 years, she took a working approach to completing so that it was her job every day to get up and work on her goal.
• Completing the thesis is about working on it consistently and regularly , making yourself sit at your desk and continuing on from where you left off last time. You’ve probably heard the mantra, ‘write everyday’. Writing 80 to 100,000 words is only achievable through the accumulation of many many days’ work. I took up the habit of writing up my findings while doing my research. For instance when I found a quote that illustrated a point I was trying to make so I would write the quote up in the form of a paragraph that I could insert with some amendments into a larger block of writing at a later point in time.
• Be meticulous. You may have heard academics say this before, but I need to reiterate it because I did suffer at times from my slack note taking. Whenever you read a book, note all of its reference details in Endnote or somewhere so you have them to hand if you need them. There is nothing worse in the last week of your thesis than going through the 500 piles of papers trying to find a quote that you feel just has to be in the thesis. I say this from experience –I bought a rather expensive online version of a book in the last week of my candidature to find a page number for a quote I’d noted.
• Endnote uses: Endnote is brilliant, in the end I used the notes section to write down all of my own notes on my readings as well as the quotations I’d drawn from the texts. It’s very practical because you can locate a quotation easily by doing specific word searches in Endnote. This isn’t possible across all of your other types of documents, eg word, excel, pdfs. Excellent locator tool.
• Another piece of advice that come from having made this mistake is don’t put referencing off for another time, do it as you write so that the footnotes are all there and the writing is complete. It’s just wasted time to have to go back and do it later no matter how laborious it seems at the start.
• Face doing the hard parts now: we’ve all mastered the art of procrastination to a certain extent, we know that putting things off doesn’t make them any easier to do later on. That chapter you’re avoiding or theory you can’t face reading is very likely to be what helps the rest of the thesis fall into place. No one is going to do it for you while you busy yourself with manually putting page numbers into your thesis.
• Think of the end: one day you’ll be done, it’s a day to work towards. And you’ll make your supervisors VERY happy. Ecstatic even.

PP3: Because we work alone a lot we often don’t get the opportunity to see that what we are going through is in fact a collective experience. I had a foreign student who is a friend of mine say to me that almost every day she felt like giving up.  When I told her that I often had the same thoughts, she was shocked and then also relieved to find out that she wasn’t alone.

• I felt I spent a lot of energy trying to do things the way books like ’write your thesis in 20 mins a day’ were telling me. But the example of using Endnote for all of my note taking is something that suited me and my purposes, it’s a question of individualising work and working methods.
• Coming across obstacles in your writing, in term of theory you’re using or even research questions is par for the course, figuring out how to work around these is part of the research itself. You might come to enjoy hitting these road blocks as it’s an opportunity to find the unexpected.
• Being tired, feeling isolated and sacrificing time with friends and family particularly towards the end is just the path that we all find we have to take in order to get it done. The fact is that you have to write it alone and without distraction.
• One of my supervisors kept saying this to me: ‘You need to find your own voice’ and I felt like I was groping in the dark until one day towards the end she said ‘You know you’ve finally found your own voice’. What she meant was that the purpose of the process was to find out what I personally was wanting to say about my subject and how I could express it in my own manner. This will come eventually through different periods of reading, imitation, writing what you think you’re supposed to write.
• Hating your thesis: I always found it strange when I heard academics say this in workshops, but during the last week of the thesis I could have taken it outside and burnt it in the barbecue, I found it boring and tiresome, because I knew it, knew back to front, period. You need to push through, because it’s not boring to others, you’ve just spent way too much time together – like feeling married to your flatmate.
• Nightmares about full stops and commas kept me awake during the last couple of months. Dreaming about Chicago manual of style is completely normal.
• Finally, something no-one ever tells you, maybe because you’ll never complete. But I feel that forewarned is forewarned. Once the thing you’ve been spending every waking moment thinking about has flown away you may have a sense of emptiness and loss. It may take months to get over the fatigue and stress of the final write up, give yourself a break and appreciate this massive project you’ve brought to a close.

Top tips:

1. Listen to what your Supervisors are telling you – they can see what you can’t, and follow their instructions to the letter. In the last 4 days of my thesis one of my supervisors told me to add a reference to my bibliography. At this point I was done, at her second prompting I put it in feeling a bit resentful, and then when I got my examination papers back I found out that one of my examiners was the person who’d written that very article. You can’t necessarily know why your supervisor is telling you to do something, they’re on the inside and you are on the outside, just do it, because they know better, they’ve been where you are and succeeded
2. Be prepared to write multiple drafts: My best friend, who got his PhD 5 years ago and now is a lecturer in exactly his domain in NSW said to me countless times, “Writing is a process of re-writing”. You need to expect to redraft your work endlessly even up until the last minute. You only know how to write a thesis once you’ve written it, and until that time the text is in constant flux.
3. For your own peace of mind, get a dropbox account as a last place to store your thesis, drafts and notes. I know someone who lost everything in the last week due to his flat being flooded, so learn from his example.
4. Find a therapist: jokes aside, you need someone you can talk through the process with, I had my best friend whose patience is infinite. Find someone maybe outside of your relationship who can listen to your angst, and find things that you enjoy to give yourself a break.

PP4: Getting a job, the point perhaps of all of this energy.

Luck – there has to be one out there.

1. Teaching experience:
   1. tutor during your candidature as long as it doesn’t interfere with your thesis too much- in my last year I taught 3 groups each semester and in some ways it prepares you for the job because the demands on lecturers are huge, may as well learn to juggle private lives, work and research now as that’s what is expected of academics
   2. University administration/LMS/Turnitin/Online teaching.
2. What would you teach?
3. Independence and organisation to manage admin, student enquiries, teaching, convening, research, community service, helping colleagues.
4. Collegiality.
5. Quality Publications:
   – Publish articles in reputable journals or books.
   – Take opportunities where you can, at conferences that have publications that aren’t just conference proceedings, can take up to 3 years for a chapter in a book to come out.
6. A Research Plan – 10 years down the track where do you hope to be in terms of your own research?
   – Look at publishers that you’ve cited in your thesis. Avoid vanity presses VDM, Cambridge scholars, you’ll know as they’ll send you an email after you’ve completed offering to publish your thesis, press delete.
   – Immediate post-PhD plan should be to publish a book derived from your thesis.

When Bron from the Research Den (http://researchden.com/) received our tips and advice as she began her PhD, this is what she replied with:

> Thank you for being the brilliant, generous and kind souls you are!

I’ve completed a thematic analysis on your survey responses and the findings are attached. Haha! (Oh God I’ve already fallen prey to academia!) Hope these Top 10 Tips are useful for your blog, Prue!

Today, as I sat quietly in a park, sipping tea and reading, I thought: “This is utopia.” Then I actually paid attention to what I was reading, which was, “Ayurvedic practices ever defer beyond themselves to orientalist images reverberating in indigenous imagery reverberating in turn in post colonial imagery”, and I realised: “This is bananas!”  

I am no longer in the real world.

Goodbye simplicity. 

Goodbye dear friends.  

Hello academia.

10 Tips of PhD Wisdom (from those who’ve made it) to Get Started

1. Ask Why?

Ask yourself why you are doing a PhD and why you want one? Answer yourself honestly. There’s no right or wrong reason for doing a PhD (a future career in academia; to become expert in a field; to please someone else; out of boredom; for fun …), but know what your reason is, so it can direct your movements during your candidature. The reason you are doing the PhD in the first place will shape all decisions you make from your research question down to how you spend your days. Do you bother going to a certain conference? Do you push to publish? Do you spend your time networking? Questions like these become easy to answer when you’re clear about your basic motivation.

2. Let the PhD be a PhD

Don’t try to mould your PhD into a general non-fiction book or a marketable product. Don’t be motivated by trying to monetise aspects of your research. Let it be a piece of rigorous academic research. Keep a record of your business ideas elsewhere. Groups like ThIncLab (at Uni of Adelaide) can help you commercialise your research product or service after you submit.

3. Make decisions

Get your PhD done. Don’t let it drag on. It’s not the only brilliant thing you will do in your life.

Record decisions you make as you go, including why you made the decision.

Set up a small support group of friends/colleagues from your cohort who can help you to:

1) Regularly process what you’ve done

2) Plan what you’re going to do next

3) Make decisions and move on

4. Use your supervisors

Don’t be shy; talk to your supervisors. Ask them how they work best and how you can best work with them. Express your hopes and expectations early. Adjust where they don’t match your supervisors. Understand each other’s roles. Communicate.

Think for yourself (obviously) but defer to the wisdom of your supervisors. They can guide you; let them. Have really good reasons for challenging or rejecting their input. Save your brilliant radical ideas (that disagree with your supervisors’ ideas and will likely get you caught up wasting precious time arguing with them) for post-doc work.

5. Know your reviewers

Know your university policy on selecting reviewers and think about this early.

Only five or so people will ever read your PhD ­ – you are writing for a very specific audience.

6. Have an exit strategy

What date will you submit? Know that date and work backwards to plan your time. Plan your time; don’t waste it.

What will you do once you’ve finished? Take a holiday and then what? Have a plan. Think about it early on. If you don’t, you leave yourself open to the post-PhD blues.

7. Have a clear strategy for conducting your literature search

Meet your research librarian and get a tour around the library system and main databases for your discipline.

Don’t jump in too early by reading thoroughly and taking detailed notes on the first exciting thing you come across. Scan the literature to help you refine your topic. Once you have your topic refined and your search terms selected, do a detailed literature search. Then, once you have every article you can find on your topic, scan them all to see what you really need to read (including reviewing their reference lists to see if there’s anything you missed in your own search) and what you can ditch. Then, spend a few days in bed reading and taking notes. Expect to read and re-read the key/seminal/brilliant articles you find multiple times.

8. Use conferences

If you go to a conference, present and turn it into a paper. If you don’t need that outcome, don’t waste your time going to conferences.

If you’re writing a conference paper, first look at previous papers from the conference to help guide you.

Conference papers give you a deadline to work towards and can be a great platform to jumpstart your analysis.

9. Stay practical

It’s an intellectual pursuit, to be sure, but the only way your PhD will become a bound and submitted document is through practical effort, strategic organisation and good administration.

Spend time getting yourself in order, create systems and establish patterns in your working habits.

Back up your work. Create a back-up schedule and stick to it. Use online resources like Dropbox so if something goes wrong with your computer or your backup hard-drive, you still have the latest copy.

Organising your references is one of the most important administrative tasks. Use software like Endnote. Be meticulous. Always cite where you got ideas and quotations from in your notes.

Expect obstacles (in ethics, methods, theory, fieldwork, writing … the whole process). In one sense, being a PhD student is all about finding and facing problems, and solving them.

10. Remember that the process is yours

Keep a sense of humour and keep well to (try to) keep some perspective in your life.

It’s your PhD. The things that exist to help you (your supervisor, how-to guides, survival workshops, other students further down the track than you etc) can offer nothing more than suggestions for you to adopt or ignore as you pave your own unique path.

Your goal is to find your voice as an academic writer. Read epic texts from your discipline and model yourself off them. Write as much as you can as often as you can just to practice writing. The more you write the more chance you’ll have of finding your own style.

A friend of mine was starting her PhD so I asked some of my other friends who had finished or were a fair way through for their advice.

Here’s what they said:

………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

My main advice is probably dependent upon knowing at the beginning what you probably can only know at the end… Which may not really be a possible thing?

1. It’s a good question to ask: what do you want to do with your PhD at the end? I think this shapes a lot of how you should then go about it. For example if you want to be an academic, publish publish publish as you go & reach out to & meet as many experienced colleagues as possible, as they are more likely to be open to students. If you don’t want to be an academic in your field, then I’m not sure what you should do but I guess there’s that type of strategic thinking.
2. Be prepared for it to change you. My sleep patterns are pretty shot to pieces & I feel constantly guilty for not writing.
3. Remember only max 5 people will EVER read your thesis. It is a task of work to get you to a new situation, not your grandest opus. So be really practical about your audience.
4. Along the way, think about who will assess it (lots of variations here as to how universities select examiners) but find out how & include their work in your literature review.
5. Don’t let it get out of control. If you have masses of stuff you can leave some for a post-doc degree, or not; just leave it out.
6. Go to conferences if you want to meet people & collaborate with them, otherwise don’t bother. For example if it won’t further your aim (#1), don’t waste time on it.
7. If you do go to a conference, always present & turn it into a paper. If you don’t need that outcome, don’t waste the time.

As you can see, I think it really depends on why you’re doing it & what you want to get out of these years. In my case it was leverage into a tertiary career but if I had been wanting to just return to a school as ‘dr’, I would not have pushed so hard and it would have been fine.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The two bits of advice I would give are:

1. Attend a Graduate Research School workshop on how to structure your thesis in the first year and begin to think of layout and chapters in completed work.
2. Read as many other theses in your area as you can before you decide on approach/theoretical framework. Be clear in your mind how you want your thesis to ‘read’ and on your target audience. There is a great range to work through!

………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The suggestion about strategic thinking is so important and you really need to be clear about why you are doing the PhD. With things like conferences and journals, I can certainly share with you what my supervisor has recommended but she assumes I’m looking for an ongoing role in academia – I’m not sure that’s your plan. As Prue said, I would aim to keep the thesis and the “marketable product” separate as they are completely different beasts.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Two quick things that are easy to do and nightmares if you don’t:

1)       Back up your work. Create and stick to a rigorous backup schedule

2)       Record decisions you make as you go, including why you made the decision. A few years down the track and you won’t remember the details! That includes recording the answer to the question about why you are doing the PhD in the first place – a diary entry I missed and for the life of me cannot recall what I was thinking when I started 😉

………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

I think the biggest thing that I found, particularly coming in as an, ahem, mature-age student is that you need to relax and just accept that sometimes you will have time to work on your project and it will all feel right and good with the world and sometimes life just gets in the way and you don’t get to it for a while – and that’s OK. I used to beat myself up a lot about not working in the way that the uni recommended until I realised that my supervisor didn’t care as long as I was getting somewhere and that I needed to carve my own path that worked with my circumstances. I’ve worked full-time, part-time, lived overseas, been a full-time student and had two kids during my candidature and my work style has had to shift to accommodate these changes along the way. Be flexible and kind to yourself!

On this idea of time I’ve also learnt that time for a PhD can be very elastic so it’s important to set some goals and due dates for yourself. In the beginning I relied on my supervisor for this, seeing him as a teacher who would set work for me. I was originally disappointed when it didn’t work out that way and felt hard done by for a while. In the last year or so I’ve realised that my supervisor is more of an advisor and that this approach has actually forced me to learn on my own to become a self-sufficient researcher in my own right. In terms of a PhD being an “academic apprenticeship” this is so important but the ability to be a self-directed learner is such a great skill to have generally.

One other thing I wish I’d paid attention to was that when people say “enjoy the process” it’s important to try and do that. There are not many opportunities in life to pursue your own interest with little or no input from others and to determine your own project so enjoy that process even when travelling through what the Thesis Whisperer brilliantly calls “the valley of shit” (follow the Thesis Whisperer blog – it’s very good).

In practical terms, here’s some stuff I’ve been thinking about now that I’m writing up:

• You don’t need to (can’t) read everything, be selective.
• Learn to speed read and touch type if you can, seriously, this will help you with time more than you know.
• Tangents are OK in moderation. Sometimes the topic tangent you follow will lead you to a new insight or idea.
• Write little and often right from the beginning.
• I find the Pomodoro Technique great for time management especially when I only have a limited amount of work time available. On that note, keep an eye out for little hacks that help you be more productive or feel more organised, There are lots. There are lots of blogs to follow with tips too like the Research Whisperer, Thesis Whisperer or Patter.
• Get some sort of system for managing references from the outset and keep good notes, you’ll need them at the end to save re-reading stuff – this is critical!
• If it doesn’t feel right don’t pursue it (e.g. theoretical models). You need to be able to love it for a long time so go with what feels right as much as what seems to fit the project best.

I hope this helps. Good luck!

Ok so you’ve read the last 6 years of blog entries and you think it’s going to be different for you and you’re going to go ahead and do the PhD anyway.

My tips for you are:

• THESIS AND BOOK ARE SEPARATE: Don’t try and make your PhD into a marketable product that you can use to help people or that will have completely practical outcomes. You can’t. I kept trying to make the PhD what I would like the book to be and realised it won’t work as the thesis has to be purely driven by the data, none of your own ideas or experience, and the academic process is so different. So instead I opened another document and chucked ideas for the book in there as I went or saved articles that were useful for later. The thesis and a book on the topic are 2 separate things – although you might use a bit from the PhD in the book – but really the PhD gives credibility for the book.

• CONFERENCE PAPERS: If you are writing a conference paper, first have a look at previous papers from that conference. Seems obvious now… https://psalter.edublogs.org/2012/06/19/year-4-phd-july-2012/. Conference papers are excellent also for jumpstarting analysis and making you do it. Each of my analysis chapters started life as a conference paper. Gives you a deadline you have to stick to.

• LITERATURE REVIEW: For the literature, go on a mission to find everything you can on the topic before you start reading it all properly and writing about it.  I.e. find an article, skim it, look at the references and see what else is useful there.. Just keep finding and printing. I wasted heaps of time reading thoroughly and writing notes only to discover as I read more that wasn’t a key piece of literature etc. So I would say find as much as you can  first. Here’s what I did in Year 3/4 that I wish I’d done in Year 1: https://psalter.edublogs.org/2012/06/03/year-4-phd-june-2012/ and also this one: https://psalter.edublogs.org/2011/07/25/year-3-phd-july-2011/. Start early, just start searching and hunting and find as much literature as you can so you feel you really have everything there is to know about the field.

• FELLOW SUFFERERS: Find 2 other people you connect with in the cohort. Set up a support group. Carmel and Susanne and I started together and have skyped every 2 weeks for pretty much the whole time. We would each take turns talking about where we were and what we were doing next. Doing this formally at regular intervals really helps – helps to talk through what you are doing and what you want to do next. And any problems that you encounter. We’d also read each other’s stuff now and then, give feedback – plus it is someone to whinge to that understands completely what you are going through. And then an excuse at the end to go away on 3 weekends as you all finish…. We also did some writing weekends (although there was lots of eating out and not too much writing). https://psalter.edublogs.org/2011/02/19/year-3-phd-February/

• SUPERVISOR: Another thing I thought of is working out with your supervisor early on how often you will meet. I arranged with mine that I would contact him when I wanted to discuss something – I wanted to be left alone unless I needed help. Carmel met with hers every week (that would have driven me mad). Also how will you get feedback. I would send Matthew the word document and he would track changes and add comments – then I’d do all that, save as a new version number and send to him again. But some supervisors print it out and write on it which I think sucks.

• FILE MANAGEMENT: Also consider file management and backup. I sort of wish I’d saved mine as thesis v1 thesis v2 so I could see how many versions there were by the end, I did keep a record in the first years of the different versions of my research questions – I think it’s on my wiki somewhere. Delicious was also good for managing the digital resources. I started with Endnote but ended up just using Excel as I decided it was just not worth the effort as I did not want to go into academia and so did not plan to use it again. Carmel was a big fan of endnote for her references. I couldn’t be bothered learning new software when I had no intention of working in academia. Same with Nvivo. I spent heaps of time learning it then decided to do my analysis the old fashioned way, coding the transcripts by hand.

• SET UP THE THESIS STRUCTURE EARLY: Other thing I did which was a smart move was get a whole lot of UTS theses and see the structure. Then I set up a word doc with all the headings and chapters etc. Then when I wrote stuff for different things I would cut and paste it in the document really early on – that way I didn’t have to build the thesis from scratch it evolved as I wrote stuff. I would cut that bit into a document and send to Matthew then put it back in. Means I didn’t have heaps of stuff in different files, was altogether. Only right at the end did Matthew read the whole thing all together after we had gone through and finalised each chapter.

Oh and I found a summary I did at the end of the first year with advice to people starting: https://psalter.edublogs.org/2009/12/05/reflections-2009-9/

And I forgot the most important advice. Don’t plan to do something strenuous the day after you submit like climb a mountain in Nepal (that’s what I did – totally nuts what was I thinking?). Instead go and lie on a beach for a week.

So despite everything, you are seriously thinking of doing a PhD. Are you really sure you want to do this?? So here’s what you need to think about:

• Why do you want to do it? The best reason is that you want to become a researcher or an academic. That is really the reason you should be doing a PhD. It is really all about training you how to do research. Another reason could be, maybe like me you want it for the added credibility it can give to you in your field. Not as good a reason. Or maybe you just think it would be interesting or enjoyable to do (so go back and read all the blog posts – I don’t think that’s enough of a reason to keep you going through the pain).

• Are you seriously prepared for the workload? I had done 5 degrees prior to this and the PhD was nothing like any of the previous degrees, or any of them combined. It is a mammoth workload that just grows exponentially throughout the whole process. You just can’t conceive of how much work it is, nor can you explain it to someone. So just a warning, if you decide to go ahead, then be prepared.

• Are you mentally strong and able to cope with the pressure? The whole process just makes you feel about a foot tall. You feel small and stupid and ignorant and lost and unsure and uncertain….it is mentally exhausting. It consumes your thoughts, it’s always there hanging over you like an ugly black cloud. You can never say ‘I have nothing to do’ cause there is always just sooo much to do. The path is always so foggy and unclear, you just don’t know what you are supposed to be doing or how to do it or if you are doing it the right way. It feels like it is never ending and you will never ever get to the end of it. It is only when you finish you realize how much of an oppressive mental cloud you were under – it feels like a massive weight has been lifted and you are immeasurably lighter.

So think seriously, are you really really really sure that you want to do this???

Well it is completely over – done and dusted. In the previous post telling the story of my never-ending submission process, Mark was collecting the a copy of the thesis from the printers. So he did that and brought it home. I couldn’t even bear to look at it that night. I couldn’t even bear to touch it. You are so over it by the end. Had a look through the next day and everything seemed fine. So I sent it off to the printers to get another 3 copies done. A few days later it was ready so off I went to collect the copies and hand them in. A bit of an anti-climax really. I’d done the requisite paper work as well, handed in the versions of the abstracts they wanted and uploaded the thesis to the digital thesis library.

Next step was to wait for the wheels to turn and an official email and letter to come. Waiting, waiting, –  nothing. Eventually I ring the graduate school. We don’t have all the requisite paperwork – that would be the paperwork I submitted a few weeks ago. Deadline is tomorrow! They say they never received it, faculty says they sent it. So I send it off to them direct and the next morning log in to the UTS online system – finally – it says I am passed! Eventually the email comes, eventually the letter comes. Time to decide re graduation. I am not that keen. Not really into traditions and ceremonies and the thought of dressing up in the robes and going to the ceremony is not appealing, I can’t be bothered, it will be boring and the reality is I would much rather go out to dinner somewhere nice.

When the date for graduation comes through the decision is easy, I am working then anyway. Excellent. Graduation is over and I feel regret for missing it. I’m allowed to collect the certificate from UTS from 29th April. I have a short window of time where I am near UTS before a parent evening and before I then go to QLD the next day. I arrive and there is a massive queue – unexpected. Turns out you collect from the student services centre so there are people there for all sorts of things. Finally my turn. It’s now here. Can you have another look. Nope not here. There goes the window I had to collect it. I show them the email that says it should be here. Someone else has a look. It is found! The next day on the way to the airport we drop it into the cranky man framer. A week later we collect it – he gives Mark a hard time as he didn’t have the docket and turns out he hadn’t even started it the day we were supposed to collect it. He did a dodgy job anyway. Oh well it is on the wall so that night we have a seafood dinner and salted caramel brownies to celebrate. Then a lunch with Mark at Sepia, lunch with the family at The Pantry at Manly, the dinner with my PhD friends at Malabar. Website changed, and letter sent to schools:

I wanted to write and let you know my plans for the next few years. Lots of teachers have been asking me, what are you going to do now you have finished the PhD?  (Topic was: Exploring a whole-school integrated approach to developing students’ self-regulated learning skills.) Well I have been thinking about this for some time. My plan over the next few years is to write a “how to” book based on the doctorate research to help schools implement this whole-school approach to developing students’ study skills. The problem with the thesis is it is not in a user friendly format – it is written for academics and I can’t include any of my personal experience or ideas. I’d like to write a practical guide to a whole-school approach based on the research, as opposed to the theoretical thesis discussion. Then I would like to work with schools to help them develop a systematised and embedded program for their school.

All done and dusted so that’s the plan from now!

Here’s the thing. I have learnt though the experience of doing the PhD that I don’t really like academic researching and I particularly don’t like qualitative academic researching. Basically I did not enjoy doing it. I didn’t like the focus on the minutia, I am a big picture person. Focusing on some small aspect does not do it for me. I also don’t really like what qualitative research entails. You have to be really interested in people in general, like talking to people, hearing their work stories, well to be honest that is not really something I enjoy unless it is people I am really close to. Maybe that’s why I like working for myself!  I can see why we need qualitative research, painting a picture of society, analysing how people think and feel about things, I know on an intellectual level that there is value in this, capturing snapshots of society for posterity, but really it all feels too wishy washy for me, too touchy feely. In the end researchers are not my ‘tribe’, we don’t look at the world the same way, we don’t find the same things intellectually stimulating or interesting. Neither of our viewpoints is wrong, we just view the world through different lens. I also feel there are not enough practical outcomes from this type of research, nor is it communicated effectively to the people who need the knowledge. My strength lies in taking large amounts of these studies done by researchers, and distilling out useful elements that can be turned into practical steps to be followed to achieve a particular outcome. Shame I did not know all this before I started all those years ago, but that is why it is a learning experience. I don’t regret the experience, even though it was a lot of hard work (I mean seriously a lot), it took me outside my experience and comfort zone, it was interesting to inhabit this world for a period of time, but I certainly don’t want to move in! I can read and synthesize research, but I don’t want to do it or analyse it or write it up.

So what are you going to do with your free time???

Have heard this a few times since I finished. Here’s some ideas on what I WON’T be doing:

– I won’t spend much of my mental headspace worrying about all the work I have to do for the doctorate and how to do it.
– I won’t feel guilty when I am not working on the thesis.
– I won’t spend every Sunday trying to do 10 hours of uni work (maybe I might even get a day off a week like a normal person).
– I won’t spend all the weeks of the school holidays forcing myself to do day after day of working on the thesis.
– I won’t be dragging my thesis all over the world and working on it on train trips in Japan or early mornings in Paris or late at night after a day of sightseeing in NYC.

What will I be doing? Maybe a bit more sleep, a bit more exercise, a bit more lying in bed reading a book. That would be nice.

I won’t do anymore formal uni study for awhile. I still have one more I want to do, a diploma in educational psychology or in some brain/neuroscience topics, but I need a bit of a break (at least a few years) before I think about doing study again. And then that’s it for university degrees (I think 7 is enough). Friends say ‘you won’t be able to help yourself, you’ll keep studying’ but anyone who knows me well knows that I know my own mind. There is one thing left I want to do, once that is done I am done.  I’m sure I will do more TAFE courses and community college courses for the rest of my life, but no more university study (doing a week or so at Cambridge or Oxford as an experience doesn’t count).

Well first I want to say it isn’t really 7 years even though I started Feb 2009 and handed in Oct 2014. I did have a semester off when my mum got sick. So 5.5 years to submission while working full-time is not too bad. Then another 6 months of admin etc. to get to the end. So to continue the story. I went to China in September 2014 for a holiday  (hence the panda pic here and yes it is real) and to do some work in HK. During that time the supervisor was reading stuff so I didn’t have much to do while away. Came back and 6 weeks to get it all done (see previous post). Handed it in and a day or so later headed off to Nepal.

Well that was stupid planning. I knew I was going to Nepal late November. So when picking a submission date 6 months prior I sort of thought it made sense to hand it in a few days before I left for Nepal, that way I had a hard submission date that I could not be tempted to extend and it would not get dragged out so it was still there when I got back from Nepal. It sounds sensible, but the reality was very different. We were climbing a bloody mountain in Nepal and I had to train for it. I am time poor at the best of times.

I don’t have time to fit both walking and proofing into the day – and keep the business running too. So this means that I had to do at least a few hours of walking every day if possible while SIMULTANEOUSLY trying to proof and finalise a PhD. This resulted in weeks of me printing out a chapter and walking up and down hills in Neutral Bay in my chunky walking boots and a day pack on READING WHILE I WALKED and making notes on the pages as I found errors that I would then fix when I got back home. I discovered that being able to read and walk at the same time is not a skill that everyone possesses – but then again I can read while having a shower, while sewing (except that one time when I overlocked off the bottom of my wedding dress as I was reading while sewing, still the insert piece I had to put in looked like a special feature as though it was meant to be there).

So I had the stress of trying to prepare and train and pack for Nepal and get the thesis finalised for submission. Not smart. And then really I should have gone and lay on a beach for a week after it was all over. Not climbed a mountain while staying in budget places (the only option) with questionable bathrooms and toilets (questionable as to whether it was really accurate to call that hole in the ground a toilet or that trickle of water a shower). Plus the walking was hard, like really tough. You just walk up and up and up for 5-6 hours a day. And what’s worse is Nepal only has 3 types of chocolate bars – twix, mars and snickers. Oh yes we were sick of those by the end. Still, the view is awfully pretty (see 2 pics below).

So when I got back to Australia in November I was pretty exhausted. Luckily the business is much easier in the second half of the year as I was sleeping 9-10 hours every day for months over November-January. Catching up on 6 years of missed sleep I think. I had read the examiners would take 6 weeks. Then I find out it can be up to 3 months. Bugger. I was seriously hoping I would hear back in early January at the latest which would be around 9 weeks, have January to do the revisions, get it all sorted then start work again end of January. But no. The examiners’ reports come back the day before I start back at work – 13 weeks after I submitted. And right in the peak busiest time of my business when I seriously struggle to keep up with all the seminars and orders and emails.

Oh, and the examiners’ reports are depressing. There is lots of sugar ‘this is great blah blah’, but all I can see are the amendments. It’s massive. I ignore the suggestions for future writing/publications (in their dreams) and just focus on what needs to be done. I highlight anything that is a specific recommendation. I put it in a table. Some things I argue against changing. Other things I change. It is so subjective. One examiner wants me to take out the analysis chapter on technology – this is the chapter that won the award at the conference in Canada. He does allow me to leave it if I add in some literature on tech. That is ok as I actually already have 20 pages of literature review on tech I’d been working on over the last 5 years. I’d actually taken it out in the last month before I submitted mainly because I was so over it by then I just couldn’t be bothered polishing it up to get it ready for submission so thought I’ll just take it out and see if anyone notices. Someone did. In fact 2 of the 3 examiners did. But it meant I could then cherry pick from that a new section. I do 2 Sundays on this. My supervisor reads and makes suggestions again. One gatekeeper to go.

Someone in the faculty has to approve the revisions and check you have addressed the examiners’ concerns. A new complication arises. If I don’t make the mid Feb cut off (as advised by the graduate school) I have to wait for August for this to be conferred. I just want it to be over. My faculty is amazing and turns it around in 2 days and it is all approved. Now the race to get the 3 copies printed to specifications, bound into the book and submitted. It is at this point that the faculty tells me the deadline is actually the end of Feb not mid Feb. Grr. But as I can’t get in to the printers to check before it is bound as I am running seminars out at Campbelltown and Penrith, I now have time to say print one copy, Mark will collect it in the 4 days when it is ready. I can then check and if it is OK then I’ll order the other 3 copies and pick them up on my way to a seminar and drop them in. So that is the plan for this Thursday. Fingers crossed it all goes to plan. Until I see the piece of paper and I have done everything there is to do (just finished an executive summary report for Dept of Ed, a condition of my ethics approval, sigh, will it never end) I won’t feel free from it. Or feel sure all the wheels are going to turn in time to make the autumn graduation not the spring one. So we’ll see what happens. Getting awfully close to freedom. Oh and there were elephants in Nepal too:

To continue the story…. The supervisor did want changes. Heaps of them. ‘Suggestions’ actually, ergo changes. Sigh. Made all the changes, took me two solid weeks – luckily it had fallen in the school holidays. Then he made some more changes. Sigh. I guess in the end he is just doing his job – trying to be picky so that he finds things rather than the examiners – which makes sense. For a final check I sent it off to mum and my friend Leah to read over a weekend. Leah is a killer editor, as she does this research stuff for a job she knows how to pick holes in it. And because she was reading it for the first time (unlike mum and the supervisor who have been reading bits of it for 6 years) she was looking at it with a fresh eye and had many good suggestions of things I could do to improve the thesis and makes things clearer for the examiners. I think the thesis has improved exponentially in the last month – I can see massive changes and you think ‘why didn’t I just do these things ages ago’. But I guess it has to all come together at the end. I then spent 9 hours on Monday working through Leah’s edits and suggestions. Had it printed – again. Picked it up yesterday morning and spent another 8 hours going through and still finding things to be changed or fixed! And of course it seems each time it is printed there is some new issue, how come that landscape table is facing the wrong way blah blah blah. So had it printed AGAIN yesterday afternoon. One last look through last night and this morning – and STILL found issues in the references and made some changes in the text. Aarrggghhh. What had not struck me until last night is that it is the PRINTING date not the SUBMISSION date that is the real deadline, as after you send it to the printer it is out of your hands. It was very nerve wracking hitting send. Have I got the right version, did I stuff something new up in the formatting when I made recent changes, what have I missed, will everything print ok…..It was like being obsessive compulsive about checking if you have locked the front door – I had the email open, file attached, ready to send, but just had to keep opening the PDF for one last check. Finally you have to say Foook it. Whatever errors are still there are there to stay. And no matter how many times you check it, the examiners are really just 3 new pedants out to pick to it shreds so you have to prepare yourself to accept that submitting is not the end – you have to wait for the examiners’ changes to come back and do all those first. So now to pick up the copies this arvo and hope everything has printed ok, submit tomorrow then wait 2 months. So here it is, all 321 pages of it.

How To Squeeze Finishing Your Thesis Into A Busy Life

So today I was up at 5.15am, did two hours work emailing out confirmations for next year’s study skills sessions to schools and going through the recent queries on my PhD from the UTS editor. Part of this two hours was also spent sitting in my dressing gown on the concrete floor of the underground parking for the building with my laptop (yes at 6am) so kitties could have a run around as it was pouring rain outside (yes crazy cat lady, I know). Dressed and into the city at 715am. Two study skills sessions with Year 12 at St. Andrews then help half a dozen kids there who stayed back for assistance with their study timetable for the HSC.

In between these two sessions I notice that the editor has sent an email saying  she has made the final changes to my thesis, and in the two minute changeover I Bluetooth Internet to my laptop, download the thesis, PDF it and send it to the printers asking them to have a printed and bound copy ready for me in 2 hrs.

On the way back to the car I notice there is a big sale on at the adventure shops in Kent Street.  I really don’t have time to look, but that stuff is so expensive. Dash around 4 stores and buy 2 fleeces, rain jacket, backpack. Sun is out, race back home and wake up kitties and herd them into the garden – get out and enjoy the sun finally after all this rain. Leave them to their adventures and dash off to Monte, get a park right outside luckily. Session with Year 9 on exam prep. Race home, hoping kitties are easily found as I have only a few minutes window to herd them up and get back them inside as Mark and I will both be home late.

Shove them inside, off to neutral bay shops, check post office box, pick up the thesis print out. Run into my brother on the street, he is a fireman at neutral bay station and they are patching up an old man while they wait for the ambulance – he had fallen in the street outside the fire station. Give him a quick kiss hello and goodbye (my brother not the old man) and off to St Augustines at Brookvale, post-trials session with yr 12.

Next I head to an afternoon tea in Allambie, meeting up with the people who put us in touch with our Nepal guide and going through a suggested packing list with them for our October trip to Nepal.

Back home at 6.30pm and straight into the thesis. I needed to read the whole thing tonight so that a) I can give the print out to mum to check references while I am in HK and China the next two weeks and b) so I can email it to my supervisor for one last read over the next few weeks before I submit – hope he doesn’t want too many changes at this point in time.

Thank god I am a fast reader. In 2 hrs I had found a string of errors. And that is after multiple proofings, chapter by chapter with the editor last week, a full print out and read earlier this week on Tuesday. Yes this is the second time this week I have had to read all 350 pages in one go. Sigh. Will it ever end.

Then 2 hrs of work emails. Shut down the computer. Forgot I needed to print the thesis reference list out separately to make it easier for mum to cross check. Sigh, computer back on again.

Finally time to prepare for another 5.15am start tomorrow (that’s when my brown kitty alarm clock wakes me).  But at least I should be thesis free for 2 weeks which is a relief, unless my supervisor gets super keen, fingers crossed let’s hope not.

Bath time where I type this out almost as a cathartic relief – don’t drop the iphone in the bath – and check my to do list. Had intended to pack tonight among other things, nope, looks like the usual rush just before we leave for the airport on Saturday.

And that’s how you do your thesis while working full time and leading a busy life – in little pockets. Almost 6 years of this, cannot WAIT for it to be over….

Finally finally getting to the point where I can make a list of what I need to do to finish. Prior to this there has just been so much to do a list would be pointless and overwhelming. There is still a huge amount to do, but the end is in sight….

Almost a year since my last post. I have just been writing writing writing. After the conference in Canada next job was the two analysis chapters. Write and polish write and polish. Managed to get that done by end January. Then the final discussion chapter. Since then it is just sending chapters back and forth to my supervisor as we discuss and change and edit.

Hmm, I think this is why I haven’t been posting, I don’t really have anything to say.

Just this – OH MY GOD THE PHD IS SO MUCH WORK. Had I even suspected how much work is required I would never have started it. But getting close now. Just do one step, then the next step and eventually you will get there.

My supervisor wants me to submit mid July. I have my doubts as to whether I will be ready by then but may as well aim for something!

Where has the first half of the year gone? Canada conference went well – see picture… So the conferences have been very useful, not for the feedback, but in making me do the analysis in a timely manner and getting it written up!  So I can finally see the end in sight, the list of what I have to do is not insurmountable anymore. Status of the thesis:

chp 1 – intro – written but needs lots of work

chp 2 – lit – rough draft but needs lots of work yet

chp 3 – methodology – currently working on this with supervisor

chp 4 – analysis 1 – done, presented at AARE last year

chp 5 – analysis 2 – done but working on edits with supervisor, presenting in japan in October

chp 6- analysis 3 – the big one, working on this now, did a paper on this for USA

chp 7 – analysis 4 – done, presented in Canada

ch 8 – discussion – haven’t started yet

So getting there! Hopefully in a few months time I will have a full draft.  Then need to:

– Read through the whole thing altogether for cohesiveness

– Check up on all the guidelines on what makes a good /bad PhD and make changes

– Check all references

– Check all formatting is APA guideline

– Get it proofed

Have to submit in January as no time when work starts again in Feb….

The start of the 5th year! Well I make myself feel better by saying well it is really only 3.5 years so far not 4 years as I had a semester’s leave and you get 8 years to do it so going ok. Conference at the end of last year was ok, I never enjoy them too much. I think the feedback you get is not always all it is hyped up to be. Have had another paper accepted for Canada in June, which also means another part of the analysis done. Have finally finished the report for the school that is not going to be included in the thesis, 50 pages later… lots of work considering I can’t use it! But they did the survey so it is only fair they get the value from it. But now I can start to focus again on the main data analysis – try and get as much of it as possible done this year so I can have a full working draft of the thesis by the end of the year. We’ll see.

Ticking along. Conference paper accepted with amendments which are done, one more bit of data collection to do, then gung ho into analysis. Had planned to do a half hour of coding each day while away in Spain. Ha! That so did not happen.

Had an insight today, have been struggling to progress with the coding, really not enjoying doing it. But have realised that it is not the coding that I don’t like, it is doing it on the computer. Even though I am very technologically literate, and do everything in the computer, online diaries etc., I much prefer doing the analysis and coding on paper – that is what I did to write that first paper. I have spent heaps of time learning Nvivo, so will not discount using it completely, but at the moment I am printing the data out of Nvivo, coding by hand and I actually am finding it much more interseting and enjoyable. No idea why, but will go with it!

Latest animal pic… Madrid Zoo, inside the lemur enclosure – for the bargain price of $3.

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.

It has been a busy semester. Nvivo course, qualitative data analysis course, online survey results coming in and getting processed, interviews beginning, writing a paper for AARE conference, uni work is getting a high priority at the moment.

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!

Now I will put the literature away for 6 months, focus on analysis, then in December I will re-read everything, just to make sure I haven’t missed anything or that there is nothing else I need to consider. But it should be much quicker as I have already done the hard yards.

Monkey picture: Japan outside of Kyoto. Was fab!