Induction conference

The Open University had its postgraduate research students induction conference this week on Tuesday and Wednesday. Monday was for registering. As when I started the Masters in Research Methods, there were hundreds of people gathered in the Old Lecture Theatre, which is both impressive and a bit daunting. However, this year I know that few of those people are full time students, and I'm unlikely to meet them again. Only about 50 are full time students who will be studying on campus. And some of the full time students will be starting, like I did a year ago, their MRes.

There was the usual speech from the Pro Vice Chancellor for Research and Enterprise, the networking and the food. I am well impressed by the variety of people we have. At lunch time I sat on a table with five Chinese, a Bermudian and 3 people from Africa (I think). As usual, I was the oldest, although I did meet some part time students who were around my generation.

There were three workshops, which turned out to be very much about what I had learned over the last year, so I skipped one of them. It is nice to realise how much you now know, like the difference between constructionist and positivist approaches. Nevertheless, the dreams and nightmares continue to exist because life goes on despite what you learn.

In the session on planning research we listed our dreams and nightmares:
Dreams

• Talk and coffee with like minded people
• Engaged for three years
• Writing well, writing easily
• Producing something meaningful
• Publishing a book
• Time to ponder
• Changing minds (others)
• Changing mind

Nightmares

• Being poor
• Everyone else being better than me
• Not thinking at a high enough level
• Too much reading
• Insufficient data
• Loss/death in family/at home
• Impact on relationships
• Supervisor problems
• Lack of access to data
• Changing tack half way through

One of the useful things was a reminder of the PhD skills web site at http://phdskills.open.ac.uk/

The timetable for the doctoral training workshop is at http://technology.open.ac.uk/phd-training/spring07.htm.These sites are only available though if you can log on to the OU site.