Slowing progress

There's been a hiccup in work. I've damaged my left wrist & can't use both hands to type. Bother! Wouldn't it be nice if I could hand write all my thesis and give it to someone else to type.

Progress

I gave my supervisor several chapters today. To my surprise, she commented on them being 'chapters'.

"but you told me to write chapter 4 two months ago, and the others just followed on"

I printed them out for her since we were both in the office and handed them to her in an A4 ring binder, which pleased her (and me) because it begins to look like a real thesis at last.

However, she and supervisor #2 could still say to analyse it a different way and set me back months. A fellow post grad had her supervisors do that. FPG'd prepared qualitative work, but when some number crept in, the supervisors suggested some statistical analysis as well, which set the work back two months. Then they realised that there wasn't enough data to get statistically significant results - well duh! Why couldn't they all have realised that a bit earlier instead of messing around?

Nevertheless, it's a week of progress because Sanjukta is through her viva and another OUBS research student will be submitting this week.

Hurrah!

Progress Monitoring Reports

It's time for PMR - the six-monthly chore when we have to complete our Progress Monitoring Report. So it's timely that in today's Higher Times Education Supplement Tara Brabazon writes here:

Motivated students and experienced supervisors build a successful doctorate. Any obstruction that separates students and supervisors slows academic progress. This is not a radical statement. It is obvious. If students attend meetings with administrators rather than academic specialists, or submit forms about their progress rather than progressing their scholarship, then their time is reduced for research.

Yes - waste of my time. My fellow third year was worrying about it:

"I have to update my training record and it's taking me ages."
"So why do you have to do it for the PMR?" I asked.
"Because there's a question on the PMR" she reads it out "Is your training record up to date?"
"Oh that! I just put 'yes'."

I got cynical about the PMR's worth the time the office forgot to send them out and a student had to ask for them. If only a student notices them missing, who are they for? If you go to the effort of creating something, and maintaining it but no-one or nothing else ever uses it then it is worthless, an inefficient use of time. Don't do it.

Real progress

Progress seems slow, but after plodding through some writing this weekend, I'm producing something useful.

The framework for engagement that I'm developing appears to work on one of my case studies, and is better at addressing my research questions than the social capital framework I've been using for months. It's rather exciting!

One step forward, one back

I thought I'd got the chance of another case study, spoke to one person involved with the IT project, but then was told that limited resources and business pressures prevented any further discussion.

One step forward, one back

It could be worse; it could be two steps back. Two steps back would be a person asking me not to use already gathered material.

In Alice in the Looking Glass, the red Queen advises:

"It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

To finish my PhD within the funded time, I need to go twice as fast. That means I probably need twice as many case studies as I have access to. Oh glum!

Silly progress

Silly March hares run now. Academic writing can be verbose, but as a fellow PG tweeted, you can't write the concluding paragraph as "C'mon, give us a PhD" - just doesn't feel right.

And it's time for the progress reports. Some of us have acquired new skills in using each other's complicated new coffee maker. That's not on the list at the PhD skills web site.

Yesterday we students met with our research director.
Agenda: accommodation and possible training needs.

Accommodation
This issue is gaining a life of its own so we needed to talk about it openly. There are around 28 of us but desks for only 21, and we need to plan for new students in October and the department next to us is poised to nab our space if we don't use it efficiently.

Solutions include:

• Hot desking: (see definitions here & here) with 2 or 3 desks available for people who come in only occasionally and who are willing to lose their permanent space. Research director wouldn't have suggested it and thought it could be an insult, but is now happy to consider it. There are technological and health issues to implementing hot desking. See this for example.
• Different shaped desks: these use the space in a different way & might be more efficient
• Another floor: encroaching on what we already have on another floor, getting desks to keep all the writing up students together. The advantage of a possible recruitment freeze is that we can get the empty desks! Someone commented that he'd like the fertilisation that you can get from sitting near each other. He isn't a native English speaker, but he liked the sniggers and even when corrected to 'cross-fertilization' he offered his green thumbs.
  
• MRes: none of these students came. We voted that they have smaller desks, share cupboard space, that they sit in the cupboard, or even perhaps outside.
  

Training:
We identified two needs, both concerned with writing:

1. writing long documents using Word and Endnote
2. writing at all

It was a satisfactory discussion that cleared the air on the rumours about space. Now we have some plans ready to implement either in October or earlier if we have to. Director is already looking into what writing help we can get.