Elephants never forget, sadly most PhDs are not supervised by elephants! How to deal with forgetful supervisors

We’ve all been there; walked into our supervisor’s office and they look at you perplexed, or enter into some kind of weird conversation and then look blank when you sit down because they have completely forgotten your meeting.

I’ve heard of more extreme cases which include the supervisor having to be reminded of the thesis topic at every meeting, even after submission! At the same time I remember seeing supervisor number two in the college coffee bar and sending her into a blind panic thinking she had forgotten a meeting (she hadn’t). We are all human, we all forget from time to time so here is my strategy for helping you help them to remember and stop yourself from having a nervous breakdown at the same time.

Keep emails succinct and to the point

Supervisor number two used to show me the hundreds she got on a daily basis. With that number it is no surprise most are skim read and sadly, that can lead to no end of problems. Try to be as succinct as possible when you email your supervisor. Use bullet points, or alternatively, number each point so they can reply to each in turn.

There are two schools of thought on ‘quantity’ of emails. Either send them one long one with everything you want to say in it or send them by topic. I’ve experienced people who prefer both so there is no hard and fast rule, my inbox today proves it. I have 8 emails from my supervisor all on different topics all sent within minutes of each other! You’ll soon be able to see what your supervisor responds best to or what annoys them and work with that.

When you have a meeting set an agenda … Always set an agenda prior to turning up to a meeting. This helps both you and your supervisor cover the topics / issues you need to discuss, go through them one by one and tick them off as you do so. This means if you do go off topic, and you probably will you can bring it back to the issue at hand easily. This makes supervision sessions more productive in my experience and also stops the ‘oh I wish I’d asked about xyz’ feeling ten minutes after you leave.

After the meeting send them an email

This is particularly important if you have agreed a certain course of action and if the supervisor needs to do something by a certain date. Make sure you outline what you agreed, who is going to do what by when etc. A PhD is a partnership; you need to do your bit as well. This should help both of you clarify what you are doing to move forward.

Set realistic deadlines

This is as important for them as it is for you. As I keep saying it is a partnership and so you both need to meet the goals you set yourselves but be realistic, sometimes life will get in the way, for both of you so the key is to keep each other informed and to change meeting dates or whatever if you need more time.

It is better to take more time and have a productive discussion over a piece of writing that is sub-standard. At the same time they need to be honest with you when they can realistically do things. If you know your supervisor is forgetful or swamped, take their proposed deadline and suggest one that is a week or so on from that. Make sure you can work within that framework but allows them slippage.

Remind them, politely if they don’t do something

You won’t be the only student that your supervisor is dealing with so, as my supervisor suggested in my previous post, it is perfectly acceptable to remind them, politely. It took me ages to actually get into the habit of doing this; I thought I was being rude however; waiting for work to be returned for 6 months is not acceptable. Make sure you give them plenty of time to do whatever it is you need especially if the request is for references. It is your PhD, you need to drive the process.

Make sure you know when they are away … This proved particularly important for me. So make sure you know when they are away, that everything you need has been done before hand and also agree what you should do if something crops up during their period of absence. Seems pretty obvious but it’s amazing the number of PhDs I’ve seen wandering around looking for supervisors who weren’t even in the country, let alone the department.

If you are coming in for a meeting make sure you have something else to do

I lived about an hour by train from my campus and remember how I felt when I had arranged a meeting with supervisor number one and came in specially only to be told he no longer had time. It is fair to say the air went blue. From this point on I always made sure I had several things to do when I came in and sent email or text message reminders of meeting dates to make sure they were ok.

Be visible

Make sure you are ‘seen’ around your department, it is surprising how chatting to another member of staff in the coffee line can lead to them saying to your supervisor I saw so and so and reminding them you are around! Visual stimuli come in all shapes and sizes

If it is causing you stress talk to them

If it is making your working life difficult then talk to them about it. A good supervisor will understand your concerns and should adjust accordingly, especially if you meet every one of their targets, requests etc. You can do it politely by saying what you need / want to achieve in a certain time and that it requires then to do X by Y or just be direct and say your forgetfulness is not helpful to me what can we do to change things. They may be aware of their shortcomings and be able to suggest things you or they can do to remedy it.

The key is communication, don’t let this get out of hand as forgetfulness can easily grow from a mild irritant, to you suddenly requiring my divorce article!

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The ‘It’s Time’ Talk

What is your dark side?

Sometimes I think PhD students have become the ‘problem children’ of academia. Governments around the world are not happy with how long some take to finish their degree, how often they drop out and how difficult they find it to get jobs when they finish. This debate has lead some people to question the point of PhD study at all.

One explanation I hear bandied about is that PhD students somehow have unique problems because of the kind of people they are: they are ‘bad communicators’, ‘think too abstractly’, ‘can’t write’ or ‘can’t project manage’. A lot of this is rubbish of course, but the perception is there and the attrition numbers don’t lie. While many of the problems PhD students are actually problems with the system and academia more generally, this blog wouldn’t exist if there weren’t some common complaints about doing PhD work . As much as I want to avoid simplistic arguments like the ones that started this paragraph, perhaps some of these common complaints do exist because of the type of people who are attracted to PhD study in the first place. I say this because I am beginning to wonder if it’s our talents get us into trouble, not the skills we supposedly lack.

A few years ago I had a few drinks with an old friend who got me thinking about this. He was annoyed with his partner, whom, it seems, was always complaining about people taking advantage of him (this is a gay couple, which makes pronouns a bit confusing).  My friend called this tendency of his partner to complain the ‘dark side of nice’ - the complaints were the price my friend paid for having such a nice partner in the first place.

Recently @themarquise clarified this idea of the dark side for me. She pointed out that some of the biggest problems we all encounter in life are caused by the things we are good at. She explained that when she worked at a fast food chain as a teenager she was always the one at the end of the shift who had to mop the floor. This was the hardest, nastiest clean up job which everyone else avoided if they could. One day she complained to her manager that it was unfair that she was stuck with the job all the time and he said: “Of course you end up mopping the floor – you’re really good at it”.

The dark side of your talents can creep up and smack you upside your head when you aren’t looking. As Yoda cautioned Luke Skywalker:

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” (If you have read this blog for awhile you may be getting the perverse impression that I am obsessed with Star Wars. I’m not… well, just a little bit).

What Yoda was saying is our natural reactions to the world, if not channeled appropriately, can have consequences which might be unpleasant – we can even fall into large pools of molten lava if we aren’t careful.

For example, good researchers are very curious people. They want to KNOW. The thirst for knowledge enables the human race to do amazing things, but it has a dark side for the individual researcher. To write a thesis you have to learn to channel your curiosity in productively narrow ways. But many students (including myself) find this hard. Their curiosity, once unleashed, is relentless. Some of them can barely finish reading a paper because they want to dive off in all the other exciting references and directions it suggests. A person who can’t finish their literature review might have have a curiosity problem, not a project management problem.

Likewise with scholarly confidence. PhD students are intelligent. They get used to using this intelligence to analyse arguments and look for flaws. Much of the work of the literature review is to sort out what, of all the writing in a given field, is worth paying attention to. The dark side of being intelligent creeps in when you start to turn this analytical power onto your own arguments and ideas. One of the things I like to do in the online Critical and Creative thinking course I moderate is give students a series of questions, based on this list of fallacious arguments, which they have to use to review an article. The students quickly realise that these critical thinking tools, when they are ruthlessly employed, destroy almost any piece of scholarly writing.

Of course part of the process of becoming a scholar is learning how to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of your work. But there’s a difference between trying to do good quality work and cutting your own head off with your scholarly lightsabre. As I eluded to in my previous post, a person who has trouble finishing chapters on time might have an  intelligence problem, not a writing problem.

So how do we conquer the dark side? I’m with Yoda on this one – remember that your reactions to the stresses of scholarly life, while natural, are not inevitable and should be examined closely. While we should hold ourselves to high standards, none of us can be perfect all the time. There is no such thing as ‘the right’ thesis – only good and bad ones.

Do you have a dark side? What talents do you think have the potential to get you into trouble with your PhD?

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How to write 1000 words a day (and not go bat shit crazy)

Recently I Tweeted a link to an article called “How to write 1000 words a day for your blog” which I thought had some good productivity tips for thesis writers. @webnemesis wrote back: “ would like to see someone write a blog post on how to write 1000 words of substance for yr dissertation every day”. Of course I answered: “Challenge? Accepted!”

When I was nearing the end of my PhD, I added up the number of words I had to write and divided them by the number of days of study leave I had left. Then I freaked out and had to have a little lie down. According to my calculations I had to write 60,000 words in 3 months.

After a  cup of tea (with maybe just a whiff of scotch in it) I contemplated this problem and made a PLAN, which was cobbled together from all the advice books on writing I used in my workshops with doctoral students. A case of eating my own cooking if you will.  This PLAN worked for me and I share it with you here.

The PLAN works best closer to completion, when you have absorbed a lot of information about your topic and have thought about it for awhile. The basic premise is: “there is no such thing as writing, only rewriting” and that half the struggle of a thesis is to get stuff out of your head and onto the page in order to start the rewriting process.

Step one: spend less time at your desk

Now close that Facebook window and listen to Auntie Thesis Whisperer for a moment. The secret to writing at least 1000 words a day is to give yourself a limited time frame in which to do it.

What’s that I hear you say? “Are you crazy Inger??”.

Well, as I’ve said before, just because Mr or Ms Bottom is paying a trip to Chair Town it does not always follow that productive work is being done. If you give yourself the whole day to write, you will spend the whole day writing and, in the process, drive yourself bat shit crazy.

One of my supervisors once said “Doing a thesis is like mucking out a stable”. His point was that you have to tackle it one wheel barrow load of shit at a time - if you stay in the stable too long, the stink will kill you. So dedicate less than a quarter of the day to making some new text and then take a break and return  later to clean it up. This sounds counter intuitive, but trust me – it works.

Step Two: remember the two hour rule

I think most people only have about two really good, creative writing hours in a day - two hours in which new ‘substantive’ ideas will make their way onto the page. Most of us are in the best frame of mind for this after breakfast and before lunch – whatever time of the day that happens to be for you. So writing new stuff should be almost the first thing you do when you sit down to your desk. Personally I find it hard to resist the siren call of the email, but if I am on deadline I do an emergency scan then close it until lunch time.

Step Four: start in the middle

When I am on deadline and need to generate words I don’t even attempt to write introductions, conclusions or important transitions. As Howard Becker in his excellent “Writing for Social Scientists” said: “How can I introduce it if I haven’t written it yet?”.This attitude is echoed in “Helping Doctoral Students to Write” , where Kamler and Thomson recommend that thesis writers think about their work in terms of ‘chunks’ rather than chapters.

A chunk can be anything up to two pages long – the text between each subheading if you like. No doubt you have some scrappy notes which you can transcribe or cut into a new file as a ‘seed’. Once you have planted the seed, just start adding on words around and over it – this builds a chunk. Don’t worry about where it fits yet – that’s a rewriting problem.

Step Four: Write as fast as you can, not as well as you can

This advice also comes from Becker, who points out that thinking happens during writing. The surest way to slow the process is to worry too much about whether your thinking is any good.So give yourself permission to write badly. If you can’t think of a word use another/equivalent/filler words: don’t slow down and start to think too much.

Do this ‘free writing’ in bursts of about 10 to 15 minutes. When you need a rest, review and fiddle with the text – maybe plant a new seed – then move on to another burst. It’s likely you will produce more than 1000 words if you do this for two hours – in fact I usually did around 3000. It’s grueling and bad for your back and shoulders, which is why the two hour time limit is important.

Step Five: leave it to rest… then re-write

Because you are writing without judgment, most of the words you generate in step four will be crap. Carving off the excess crap in the editing process will reveal the 1000 words of beautiful substantive text you are after. But take a break  before you attempt this, or you wont have the necessary perspective. Go and have a coffee with a friend, walk the dog, watch some TV – whatever takes you away from your desk for a couple of hours. Then come back – maybe after dinner – and start sifting through, massaging and editing.

Be strategic about this editing – some parts will be easier than others. But do try to pull some ‘finished words’ – even if it’s only a paragraph – back into your draft each day. This gives you a sense of achievement which is important for morale.

So that’s how I wrote 60,000 words in three months. When I present this method in seminars it invariably horrifies those people who like to write line by perfect line. I’m sympathetic to the reasons people like to write that way, but it seems to me that they suffer a lot more pain than perhaps they need to. I’d love to hear your views on this and any tricks you have to share.

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Living Happily Ever After (aka Maintaining a Good Student / Supervisor Relationship)

In my last post I wrote about what to do if you need an academic divorce during your PhD. This time I am considering the flip side of the argument: maintaining a successful student / supervisor relationship.

After my ‘divorce’ was finalised my secondary supervisor took over and we began the process of rebuilding and working toward submission. I think it’s fair to say we get on very well, so this post gives you advice from me with input from my supervisor.

Do your research (on your topic) … If there is the possibility of choice in topic (as with many social science and humanities PhDs, less so with the hard sciences), work out a topic with your prospective supervisor which really reflects what you want to do for the next three years or so.

There is always some flexibility and change in setting up a research project, particularly if it includes fieldwork overseas, but the core issues under investigation and the approach/framework of inquiry need to be ones with which the student (who will do the work and whose name will be on the PhD) feels comfortable.

The topic needs to be yours, and you both need to be on the same page when it comes to what you are doing and how you will do it. Getting this balance wrong is one of the main causes of requiring a divorce.

Do your research (on your potential supervisor) … Try to meet your prospective supervisor before you apply to the college.  This may not be possible if you are an overseas student.  However, it helps to see if you think you will probably get along.  If you do not feel this, then perhaps you should apply elsewhere.  Of course, if this is the only university where you will get funded for that topic, this is a dilemma.

That sounds simple, but believe me many students choose their supervisors based on the most arbitrary of reasons, including me. I’ve heard all sorts of stories illustrating how little attention people pay to how they choose their supervisor, even down to ‘they had a nice dog’. Just because they may be a leading light in your field, or have a nice dog, you may not actually get on with them. You have to work with this person really closely for a number of years and so it does help if you like the person and have some chemistry.

Be efficient … There are usually various hoops to jump through to prove you are worthy of completing a PhD – upgradings, presentations, methods training etc.  Ensure you jump through the hoops in a timely fashion.

Don’t give your supervisor a reason to be annoyed with you! These procedures, however time consuming have to be completed (although shhhh! I never did my final year presentation). If you don’t do them, you won’t get an email about it, your supervisor will!

Do your part … Try also to meet the deadlines for pieces of writing and research asked for by your supervisor and respond to their suggested edits and corrections in a timely fashion. Put your name, the title or topic of the work, and the date on each piece of writing etc you pass on to your supervisor or they (and you) can lose track of the various versions of chapters etc.  (remember you are not their only student so a file called Chapter One is inadequately identified!)

It took me a long time to get the hang of identifying my work correctly. However, if your laptop dies and you need to look for old stuff on supervisors computer it becomes really important. This tip also highlights the important issue of suggested edits. As you go through the process you take more responsibility for the shape of your thesis. You have to be aware they are making suggestions about your work not you (it took me a long time to get that).

You don’t have to make the edits but be prepared to justify your decision not to and also remember they have supervised many students so if they suggest a change probably a good idea. I have frequently been told I hide my light under a bushel, so most suggestions related to pulling the interesting bits out and also grammar!

Time is precious … Supervisors are usually too busy.  If there are bureaucratic forms and reports and references to be filled in, it helps if you fill in as much as possible, or send a CV and a general idea of what sort of reference is needed, and alert them some time before the deadline that a meeting, or whatever, is needed.   If they do not respond immediately, try again (politely).

You have to give your supervisor time to respond to your requests. You are one of many PhD’s, Masters and Undergraduates requiring attention. Supervisors have other things going on their lives not just your thesis, as you do, or don’t depending on whether it’s taken over your life yet? However, at the same time six months to return a piece of work isn’t acceptable or useful to you so you have to keep the process going. In the end it is your PhD so it is not unreasonable to expect the onus to be on you to get the best out of the relationship.

These tips provide the basis for maintaining a reasonably functional set up, providing there are no underlying issues, this is because every relationship is different and a lot of it boils down to chemistry between the supervisor and the student. If you can keep these ideas in mind you should have a very functional relationship with your supervisor leading to the satisfactory completion of your thesis.

Dr Sarah-Louise Quinnell gained her PhD from the Geography Department of King’s College London in 2010 and is currently the Managing Editor of phd2published.com . She also contributes to a number of blogs on issues relating to Higher Education and Research and is currently developing training courses for the King’s College London Researcher Development Programme

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Zotero vs Endnote 4: the battle is on!

This guest post is by Gabriel Oguda, who is studying for an MPhil in Health Promotion at the University of Bergen in Norway. Gabriel follows me on Twitter and told me that Zotero recently saved him from an epic thesis fail. I asked him to share his story …

I must begin by saying I am a very conservative person. Give me a lower version of SPSS and I will not upgrade unless it breaks down or loses my files.

Yet that is what happened last week when the EndNote X4 library I had laboriously assembled failed to turn up – two days before the final submission of my class assignment.

“Why not shift to Zotero?” a classmate suggested as I painfully hurried to reconstruct the library. I remember receiving a brief orientation on Zotero on the first week of my new course, but quickly forgot to follow up as I settled in. As I write this, I have just submitted my assignment with all the sources, properly referenced. So what did the magic? Here is my experience with both EndNote X4 and Zotero.

Cost

The University of Bergen pre-subscribes all students to EndNote X4, for free. You enjoy the freedom of referencing using EndNote X4 up until your graduation. When the systems stop recognizing you as a student, you have to buy the program online if you have to continue using it. Zotero is free for all. As long as you have the Mozilla Firefox browser, your library is secure. What’s more, you can access your library offline so you need not to worry about Internet connection. If you are the student who works with limited funds, Zotero is the program for you.

Installation

When EndNote introduced EndNote X4 compatible with Word 2011 for Mac, I had to contact the university IT department to configure it for me. Part of the reason why I lost my previous library is due to the complexities encountered with working back and forth to harmonize the settings before and after the upgrades. Moreover, the whole EndNote bundle can only be downloaded from the university IT website which often requires the help of a technician because it involves numerous steps that are too tedious for a student willing to stock a library limited with time. Zotero is readily available on their website and can be downloaded easily.

Importing references

Working on research proposals and theses can be time consuming. Students often want to utilize every drop of time available. Importing references has never been easier using Zotero. To use the words of one of my tutors, “…you can just google a reference, click a button and have all the pertinent info saved in the appropriate fields. It is so time-saving!” EndNote X4 also has this feature but it’s limited to specific sites with peer-reviewed articles like ISI Web of Knowledge, but even then you have to register on the website for you to enjoy this feature.

Interactivity

I still wonder why I was stuck to EndNote X4 despite all the hassles I had to go through. Zotero, one of my classmates observes “offers you a nice overview of your references with an easy drag & drop system, allows you to create folders and to attach documents, comments, tags etc., which some of the other free systems don’t.” If you are the student who likes keeping track of the references you have used, take notes and make comments within a reference library, then Zotero is the program for you.

Referencing village

From the term “global village”, “referencing village” is my new slang that denotes the interaction of all manner of referencing approaches on one platform. Everyday I learn something new. Today I have been informed that on top of Windows and Mac, students using Linux as their preferred operating system can also access Zotero. The admin at Zotero are not stopping at this, either. They have just launched a new application dubbed “Zotero Everywhere”.

 Zotero Everywhere, according to their site will have two main components: a standalone desktop version of Zotero with full integration into a variety of web browsers and a radically expanded application programming interface (API) to provide web and mobile access to Zotero libraries. As a student from a developing country, I couldn’t ask for more from a referencing program.

So that’s my story, fellow student struggling with #phdemotions. As we continue struggling in this world of academia, let’s remember David Brent’s words that “a problem shared is halved.” Let the sharing continue unabated.

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How to tell your supervisor you want a divorce

This week’s guest post comes from Dr Sarah-Louise Quinnell, who gained her PhD from the Geography Department at King’s College London in 2010. Sarah is also the managing editor of ‘PhD 2 Published’ - a blog all Research students should have on their list.  Here Sarah talks about the delicate matter of ‘supervisory divorce’

This post results from a twitter conversation I had with @thesiswhisperer about how someone could quit at the point of submission because they had a fundamental disagreement with their supervisor. This seemed unfathomable to many people; however, it made perfect sense to me as I had been in near enough the same situation in 2009.

The relationship had broken down spectacularly, there was no communication, and I sat in tears not knowing how I could get myself out of this. However, I managed to recover and submit my thesis, thankfully, and am now the proud owner of a doctorate, but I understand how isolating it is being in that position and feeling there is no way to turn. This can lead many people, more than you would initially think, to quit. However, there is much that can be done to resolve the situation should you wish for an academic divorce and allow you to finish and submit your thesis. Therefore I offer you some advice based on my own experience.

Your Dept / University will have a procedure for dealing with this …

You will not be the first or the last student to require a divorce from their supervisor and all Universities and departments will have a procedure for dealing with it.  Thus I would encourage all new PhDs to actively seek this information out when they start. This is not a doomsday prediction that everything will go wrong, as I am sure that for the majority of PhDs the relationships with their supervisors are perfectly workable. However, it is always worth being aware of what the policies are just in case. In many departments the impetus to request a divorce will have to come from you and so you will need to be prepared.

Be persistent and record everything …

I followed my department’s procedures and repeatedly documented my concerns on bi-annual progress reviews and in emails to the member of academic staff responsible for PhD students.  However, initially I did get told that it wasn’t anything too important. This is not because they didn’t believe I had an issue. I think it related more to the fact that a number of students whinge because doing a PhD is hard work and some just want to find a way out.

If you have a genuine problem (and they will be able to spot the difference) keep going back to them, make sure they know and record by email etc what you said to whom and when so there is a paper trail of concerns if everything explodes. Talk to your head of department, or go further if needed, especially if you are a funded student. The last thing they will want is for you to leave.

Talk to your second supervisor / another member of staff …

The nature of PhD supervision in my university meant that every student had a primary and secondary supervisor. The secondary supervisor was there to provide a third eye if you like, to cover when the first supervisor was away and of course to assist with problems like this. They can assist you in taking the right steps for you and I assure you from personal experience they will not let you quit!

My second supervisor knew there were issues but not quite the extent of the problem till we passed the point of no return. I had tried to deal with everything myself and that had caused me far more stress. Fortunately they were happy to take over and deal with the monumental task of getting me back in shape to finish and submit. It took 10 months to get the thesis ready for submission and 12 months in total from meltdown to viva. Quite frankly my second supervisor deserves a medal for what they had to deal with, the tears, the complete lack of confidence and the continual desire to give up but I did it and am very proud of the final volume.

 

Once it’s all signed sealed and delivered – COMPLAIN …

The impetus for a supervisory change generally has to come from the student. Even if you suspect your supervisor isn’t very happy with the situation either you will probably be the one who has to instigate the change and that can be difficult and make you feel that you are out on a limb and you may not want to draw further attention to yourself. However, once you have your doctorate then complain, it’s the only way you can make changes.

See your Head of Department, write to the head of the PhD Board of Studies, make sure they know what you went through, why it was not resolved earlier etc. If they don’t know they can’t change things and anything you do may ensure someone else doesn’t go through the same thing.

Don’t Quit …

It’s easy to say but don’t. You will regret it. Maybe not now or next month but in year or two from now you will. You’ve dedicated a huge part of your life to undertaking this research you owe it to yourself, to everyone you interviewed etc to finish it and submit.

Discussing the breakdown in the student / supervisor relationship seems to be one of the last taboos in academia and we have to do more to get students to talk about their experiences and enable them to feel they can request a change without being branded a ‘troublemaker’. You won’t get on with everyone you meet and yes, many students blame their supervisors for problems that are their own fault, but sometimes when two people don’t see eye to eye it is better for both to acknowledge the problem and agree to disagree and move on.

To successfully defend a PhD it has to represent you and your beliefs and ideas. At the department / university level there needs to be more support and procedures to spot the early warning signs so these relationships don’t reach crisis point and also enable another member of staff to step in and pull the student out if necessary.

For all those reading this currently going through the same problem you can get it sorted. I experienced some of the best supervision ever in the last ten months of my PhD and that will outlast any memories I have of the bad.

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Some light(er) reading

Thesis writers have to do a heck of a lot of reading. This is why one our missions here at the Whisperer is to take some of that reading load off your shoulders.

I had a short conversation with a colleague after a committee meeting this morning who told me she had started a fiction reading group for her students. I thought this was a great idea because we all know that what we read influences how we write. My colleague pointed out that reading only topic related journal articles which are generally limp and lifeless can make your writing, well – limp and lifeless.

When I was writing my PhD thesis I found it almost impossible to read ‘good’ literature for pleasure and got stuck into trashy novels in a big old way. Trashy novels are fun brain candy, but they are not ‘improving’ reads – for that I recommend all thesis writers find time to read popular non fiction.

What’s that I hear? You don’t have time to read more books? No problem – you probably have time to read an article or two. To that end I have done some pre reading and deem the following articles worthy of your spare ‘improving’ reading time:

The Information: how the internet gets inside us

I clicked through this link from @eloise_zoppos on Twitter because she headed it with the line ”Why doesn’t Hermoine use Google?”. The actual title is bland, but it’s a balanced critique of the role of the internet in our lives and some of the current debates about ‘information overload’. I enjoyed the way the author started with the Harry Potter analogy because, well I live with a 9 year old Harry Potter fan and I still think my Android phone is kind of magical.

What I tell my graduate students

Professor Tim Fry at RMIT kindly emailed me this link to an article in the careers section of the Chronicle. In it, Professor Davis, an academic at the University of Illinois, deals out some very sound career advice to PhD students. Unlike many other articles in this genre, Davis is specific about the number of articles he thinks students should publish and how to go about doing it. He sounds like a great supervisor if you ask me. I also wrote an article for PhD 2 Published blog this week on the role of journal ranking systems in a PhD publishing strategy if you are interested.

Pantser versus Plotter

I enjoyed this piece on www.terribleminds.com – but don’t venture there if strong language offends! Chuck Wendig rants about the reasons why you should at least try to map out the direction of your writing in advance. My favourite part is his observations on the role of planning in dealing with the ‘blank page’ syndrome.

The Shadow Scholar

This article, also from the Chronicle, rippled through the internet late last year and generated a lot of debate. It’s written by a person who claims to have made a living ’ghost writing’ student papers and even doctoral theses for quite a number of years. It’s in the best tradition of provocation pieces: entertaining and confronting all at the same time.

A revolutionary idea for your blog

I liked this article because it uses insights from marketing to talk about writing for specific audiences. Basically it encourages blog writers to respect the intelligence of their readers and not to be afraid of being too ’niche’. I think this blog is niche, and my readers are certainly intelligent, so I was nodding along. However, it occurred to me as I was reading that a thesis is the ultimate ‘niche’ piece, so the advice would apply to writing for a scholarly audience too. The call to action is to write “clear, useful and inspiring content’ – surely what any examiner would like to read?

I hope you enjoy these as much as I did. Have you read something that inspired you lately? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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Reading like a mongrel

reading like a mongrel

When I was in grade four I had to find out the name of the Japanese prime minister for a school assignment. I went to my version of Google at the time – my parents - but they didn’t know. They were a little shocked by this and tried to help me find information at the local library using the back issues of newspapers. When that failed we asked neighbors and relatives. No one knew. Finally my mother had the bright idea of ringing the Japanese embassy, who bemusedly supplied the information.

It’s hard to remember that in 1979 there was no ready source of real time political information other than the mass media. If the newspaper or TV didn’t do a story about the Japanese prime minister that week you were hosed.

Nowadays of course I could find that information in less than five minutes – even if I am wandering in a park somewhere thanks to my trusty phone. This ready availability of information is both a boon and a curse to scholars. There’s just so much ‘stuff’ out there which relates to almost every topic – it’s literally impossible to process it all.

I bring up this topic because all around the country at the moment there are new PhD students starting who are probably already feeling overwhelmed already. I often meet students who are stuck in some kind of reading death spiral; crushed under the weight of all this information. Most time this problem manifests as slow writing, but sometimes the problem is so bad that people become paralysed by doubt and can’t write at all.

Their dilemma is totally understandable. It’s not only the amount of information that is daunting, but the opinionated nature of academia which can be off putting. Consider the following quote from Kenneth Burke:

Imagine you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long proceeded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is all about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that have gone before. You listen for awhile, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponents, depending on the quality of your ally’s assistance. However the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress

Burke was describing the energetic play of ideas in writing which characterises academic writing. I like the analogy he uses because when you go to a party – especially one where you don’t know anyone – it can be tempting to just stand in the corner, awkwardly holding your drink. It takes courage to find your voice in the noise of other people’s thoughts – which is what writing is.

I like the way Burke talks about ‘putting in your oar’ – it’s an active metaphor which implies you are starting a journey, not finishing it. The overwhelming temptation is to wait until you have  ‘read enough’ before you risk putting in your oar. The problem is, if you are doing a PhD in the right spirit, you will never, ever feel like you have read enough.

There there are some who think that reading and writing should never be entirely separated; this means you should be writing from day one. I am not such an extremist, but I think these people have a point. If you are writing about an author you are creating a point of view on them at the same time as you are reading. Peg Boyle’s book ‘Demystifying dissertation writing’ has a great chapter on’interactive notetaking’. She claims that thesis writers should ‘collect notes, not articles’ and points out that photocopying articles (or downloading them) is actually a deferment strategy. The real activity should be focussed on squeezing the pertinent information out of the articles you have. 

In order to do this I suggest you have to learn to read like a ‘mongrel’ as my friend John Ting says. For those who are not up with Australian slang, a mongrel is a dog of uncertain parentage who is usually ugly, but survives by being cunning and tough. Reading like a mongrel means you forget about chapter order, reading the introduction or checklists to help you do proper ‘critical reading’. You scan the text rapidly, use indexes, the search function, google books or whatever and go straight for the bit that you absolutely have to know and leave the rest for later. It isn’t pretty, but it works.

I think the key to reading like a mongrel lies in knowing what it is you need to find out. My nine year old self had a singular focus: find out the name of the Japanese prime  minister. With a PhD it’s easy to lose focus and explore the side paths because there are so many bits of information you need to assemble. A certain amount of wandering aimlessly through the online journal catalogue is productive, but too much will leave you lost in the wilderness.

When I am feeling overwhelmed I try to identify the exact problem I am trying to solve, or the missing information I need to find, and write it down in a sentence. I put the sentence on a post it on my computer monitor so I don’t forget.  This is surprisingly effective at keeping me focussed.

So what works for you? Do you have any tips for our beginning PhD students on how to deal with the firehose of information out there?

If you are an RMIT student interested in finding out more tips, come along to our On Track session “Getting things done”

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Developing your inner Yoda, er – scholar

If you read the documents from your university that describe what a thesis is you will probably find phrases like this:

“The originality and significance of the contribution to the field, and the rigour of the independent, critical thought should be high enough to suggest that the candidate can initiate and conduct independent research leading to publication in a scholarly journal or equivalent.” (from the ‘guidelines to examiners of research theses‘ at RMIT)

In non bureaucratic language this means that you should be a ‘grown up’ scholar by the time you finish; able to judge the quality of your own work without needing someone to check it all the time.

While developing the scholar within is the aim of a research degree, I find this expectation is rarely talked about with students. Towards the end of your degree your supervisor should really be making suggestions, not commands, although some supervisors will keep ‘correcting’ work until it is finished. Of course, with masters degree students this is entirely appropriate, but as a PhD student, especially at the end of candidature, it’s vital to weigh up the advice you are given and make a conscious decision whether or not it is worth following. This is where you need a well developed inner scholar who can guide you.

It’s difficult to learn to trust your inner scholar because (and stay with me here) your inner scholar is a bit like Yoda. For those of you who have been living in a cave for the last 35 years, Yoda is the little green sage who helps Luke Skywalker discover and use the force in the ‘Star Wars’ movies. (I’m talking about the original Yoda from ‘Return of the Jedi’ here – I don’t really buy the ass kicking 21st century version!).

Here’s why I think so:

You’ve just crash landed on a foggy planet…

Luke sets off to find the legendary Yoda in order to become a Jedi. But the first thing that happens is he loses control of his ship and crash lands on the foggy planet of Dagobah. Then his ship sinks in a swamp, leaving Luke with only a few power bars and R2D2 for company.

Starting a research degree can be a bit like crash landing your ship and losing it in a swamp. You are probably used to having a successful professional career, or the comforting certainty of under graduate study where there are clear expectations and milestones. This does not put you in a position to immediately start trusting your judgment. It takes awhile to adjust to the research degree jungle where there are very few manicured lawns and neat hedges.

Yoda is an alien.

When Luke first meets Yoda he doesn’t recognise him for what he is. That’s because young Skywalker has an image of Yoda in his mind as an ass kicking warrior who lives in a castle somewhere with a whole load of sidekicks. Of course, when he meets the tiny green guy, Luke jumps to all the wrong conclusions and treats him with barely concealed contempt.

At first your inner scholar is an alien. A sign of its presence can be discomfort – you may be reading something and find yourself disagreeing, but not able to put your finger on why. At other times it might feel almost like a rush of excitement, where an idea or concept suddenly makes sense or comes into focus. These feelings may only add to your initial confusion.

Yoda has grammar bad.

One of my favourite Yoda quotes is: “Do, or do not. There is no ‘try’.” Yoda is telling Luke wise and sensible things, but the delivery makes it hard to understand what he is on about.

When your inner scholar starts to come out it usually happens in your writing. Phrases like “According to Miller et al…” and “Mewburn (2010) states that…” appear. The purpose of this language is to shift you into an analytical mode, but that may not be a way that you are accustomed to writing. It can feel like you are just faking it at first, but it’s important not to worry about these feelings too much. Eventually it will feel natural… then you have to unlearn it!

Yoda makes you do weird things.

Luke finds Yoda’s training regime frustrating. Yoda makes him run for long distances and do menial work – not the kind of high brow philosophical stuff which Luke thought he had signed up for. Most of Yoda’s training is aimed at breaking down Luke’s habitual ways of thinking and doing - unlearning him if you like. Luke, being a hot tempered lad, resents this and spends a lot of energy resisting – mostly because he’s in a hurry to save the universe and stuff.

Likewise with research you may find yourself doing strange things which appear to have no purpose or value. For instance, early in my degree I discovered a method I could potentially use, but every time I applied it to a bit of data I got no insights at all. A friend suggested I just needed to keep doing it, mechanically on the whole data set, without trying to guess where it would lead all the time. This turned out to be the best advice anyone gave me – eventually I started to see shapes in the data darkness.  Suspending expectations of what the process would lead to made me relax enough to see them.

Yoda is usually right, but it can be hard to do what he tells you.

Once Luke is open to the Force he starts to be able lift rocks and other cool stuff, but his powers lead to a disturbing premonition. Believing his friends are in mortal danger, Luke rushes off to rescue them – against Yoda’s sage advice. As a consequence he falls into a trap laid for him by Darth Vader and gets his hand chopped off.

Occasionally your inner scholar will suggest a course of action, but you will ignore it, maybe because it seems like too much work. Usually this leads to a month or so of wasted effort and frustration. Inefficiency is built into the research process, so there’s not much you can do about it. But make a note not to fall into the trap next time!

So that’s my idea of the inner scholar… If your inner scholar was a film character, who would it be?

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A Thesis Without Words, or “where is my mug?”

This is the first guest post by my sister, Anitra Nottingham, who is the online director of graphic design at the Art Academy in San Francisco (and a thesis whisperer!).

Looking for advice on doing an art or design thesis by practice can sometimes you make you feel a little bit like the kid called, Jupiter (or Gertrude) looking at racks of mugs with names like Jack (or Madison) printed on them. There’s stuff about doing a thesis, but little already written about you and your sort of thesis.

In effect there’s no mug for you.

If you are doing a “normal” thesis there are certain agreed upon ways of producing it. The building blocks of the finished product are known—words, numbers, data, pictures. Pages in other words. (Probably in Times New Roman, double line spaced, shudder).

But what does “a thesis in art or design” look like when you hold the final thing in your hand? How is it made? Not many people have written about the challenge of defining and making that sort of thesis, at least as far as I can tell. So doing an art or design degree by practice can be a lonely experience — or so my students tell me. So that’s why I’m here.

I’ll start right at the beginning, with what my twin sister, @thesiswhisperer, calls “Identity Work”. This concept applies to you, and your poor, misunderstood thesis.  Both of you lie down on the couch, there, that’s good. Now. Let’s begin…

Yes you can do your thesis in that.

Probably the first thing you encounter from people when you tell them you are doing a thesis in fine art or design by practice, is a snort, and a comment along the lines of “how can you do a thesis in THAT?”.  Sadly this is often from your own kind: art and design colleagues. Here’s the subtext of that statement: “if you’re master at it, why don’t you go do it and get paid for it?”.

If you are a competent professional, this is your first bit of identity work. Doing your art or design thesis by practice doesn’t mean you can’t do what you do - and do it well.  There’s nothing wrong with your thesis either. It is “normal”. But you’ll have to get used to explaining why.

Here’s how you can do that.

First, understand the reaction. People are used to thinking about knowledge in terms of words. Words, and the writing of them have currency in academia. A thesis is meant to be ‘new knowledge’. This produces confusion: if you can’t write it—how is it knowledge and how can it be a thesis?

Sure people have written about art and design for their thesis projects, that’s fine. But when your knowledge is best expressed by practice, by making things, it makes sense that a thesis takes the form of your knowledge – art or design products.

As anyone who does a thesis will tell you, the words are a big deal but it’s the work behind them that counts. If the point of a thesis is to display the the knowledge you possess, the only real way to show mastery is to be really, really good at your practice: art, painting, sculpture, web design or whatever and presenting in such a way that it can be experienced as more than just words. It has to be seen. It has to be made. By you. Experts should be able to see the thing you made (i.e. your thesis) and say, “Wow, you really know your stuff!”

Put it this way, you can look at the Sistine chapel and write about it, but that doesn’t make you the master of painting. The guy who lay on his back and painted the thing for 8 years is the master. That guy is a genius, but would he be handed a graduate degree for that work? Now, happily, yes (or I hope so—that whole misunderstood-artist-while-you-are-alive thing sucks.) If the Sistine Chapel was a thesis by practice or project, people would now call that guy Dr Michaelangelo and turn up to hear his papers. But should he even be writing papers? Wouldn’t it be better to stand and watch him paint and learn from that? See? A thesis by practice just makes sense!

When the examiners “read” your finished thesis they won’t consume words alone, they will essentially “unpack it” (as my sister always says). So your thesis should enable them see your skill—mastery— of your particular flavor of art or design. In a well-written thesis the words become ‘transparent’; the examiner can experience the skill of the writer in the subject, not in the mastery of words. So too with your creative works – they should ‘speak’ of your mastery of your subject.

You can do this because you already are (or are becoming) a master.

My experience from watching graphic design thesis students is that understanding the type of knowledge work you are doing makes doing a thesis easier. So work on understanding why your thesis is made the way it is, and who you must ‘be’ to do it. And when your colleagues scoff tell them you can show your mastery without words. There is, indeed, a mug for you.

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