Writing now and then

This is the second guest post from Prof Peter Downton from the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University, reflecting on the changes that have occurred during his long research career. In this post Peter talks about practices of writing prior to computers and the effects new technology was introduced.

Although intellectually you may be aware of the fact, I can personally attest to the fact that computers are not necessary if you want to write.

I was one of the first kids on the block with a Mac when they were launched in 1984. Prior to the arrival of desktop computers I had managed to hand write several hundred thousand words: some research reports for local and international agencies; a research masters degree (two actually, for, to my supervisor’s horror, I threw the pile of pages of the first one in the bin and started again – by then I had worked with some of the people whose research I covered and my first effort seemed naive); my parts of a couple of co-authored books; some conference papers; a PhD; and a co-authored film script.

Nearly all of this material was typed by someone else for payment. Reflecting on changes in my writing processes, and those I have seen from supervising higher degree candidates since 1974 and conducting a research seminar since 1988, might reveal some things I hope are useful.

My handwriting was done on lined paper. I wrote on every second line to allow inserts and corrections, but if I really screwed up the same fate awaited the paper. It was portable: I wrote in cafes, on couches, and in (parked) cars. My entirely part time PhD was squeezed into the corners of an over-busy life, and frequently done at night or in lunchtimes. Combined with handwriting, this meant that the final draft was composed over twenty-two months. My thinking evolved over this period and the result is patchy. At least I could work in various places.

A similar level of portability was not recovered with computers until battery technology allowed lighter laptops. When reference material was required, the hand writer was more desk-bound than current computer users. Useful material such as outlines, notes to self and diagrammed arguments were kept in arch files along with the emerging text. This was bulky to cart about compared to the one-kilo laptop I currently use.

Writing by hand on paper promotes starting at the beginning. Perhaps this is the beginning of a section or chapter, rather than a whole document, but unless a great deal of cutting, re-ordering and reassembly is undertaken, writing in the same order as it is to be read makes sense. Computers irrevocably altered this for me. Now, I simply start. Often I conclude I commenced in the middle and a beginning is assembled prior to the initial start.

Always the text is provisional at both the level of words and with respect to the structure. Therefore I fiddle. Sometimes improvement results; sometimes it is simply change. The discipline of paper limited the fiddle factor. One person I supervised, only a few years ago, had the entrenched idea that a writer must start at the beginning and work through to the conclusion. He was unable to write at all because he had not decided where to begin. In an act of remarkable desperation he began and produced thirty-five thousand words in eleven weeks as a part time candidate. After mild polishing, this was final draft material.

I have supervised people who bang out drafts at remarkable speed, write a new second take and even a third draft prior to polishing it as a final text. I have had candidates who write in small units, possibly paragraphs, and slowly manipulate them into place in the PhD. Other candidates use whatever new mind mapping, idea assembling, or writing aid they have most recently discovered.

I know those who adore these tools. I see a lot of time go into mastering new ones. I am not necessarily convinced by the outcomes.What matters is the quality of the final product. What works for the individual seems personality-driven, so I am not prepared to support any one approach. Fooling with the writing toy, like tidying up, seems often to be a displacement activity – one more way of avoiding writing.

Post computers I have written books, chapters, and papers. My current mode of working is at odds with the paper-based writing. It is largely toy-free, reliant only on MS Word, although I had some flirtations with voice recognition a decade ago. (The inability to play music or work in cafes I regard as major drawbacks – however I have new voice recognition software on order.) Usually I write a paragraph or two that have popped into the brain. Often I produce an outline.

Nearly all these first thoughts are appallingly naïve and have to be wrestled into something presentable. Everything is in the one document: attempts at structure, outlines of arguments, passages of text, reminders and thoughts in red. Slowly it coalesces. The sensible bits constantly become longer; my first efforts at a whole always need further fleshing out. Re-reading alerts me to what I forgot or failed to convey well. While I feel writing a loose draft and editing it down is a waste of energy, I realise I may well type just as many words working in the opposite direction.

For much of my computer-based writing life I printed what I had produced and scribbled upon that; commenting, re-structuring and editing. This could be done in cafes or on trams. More recently, I take a small laptop to my local café. I also write at a desktop with two 24-inch screens. Pumping up the text size helps proofing. Other documents in electronic form can be piled up for display on the other screen. It parallels having books and papers scattered on my desk.

Many of the guides to writing theses seem to assume that writing is a hated difficulty. This may be true for those who resort to such guides. I have supervised many who enjoy, maybe even love, writing, or who at least (as I do) find the process of word production fairly compelling and hard to avoid.

Editors have long liked me as I have delivered the requisite words, with a low level of error, on or before the agreed date. In my view, this has had nothing at all to do with the mode or means I have employed to write. Mostly it derives from starting early enough. I learned early what a very long process writing can be even for those, like me, who are not alarmed by doing it. I see many people put themselves under pressure by leaving writing until later. I advocate fairly constant writing. A final text can then draw on this material. Be warned, however: it should be commenced much earlier than you intend to.

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PhD reputation

Yesterday I was hacked for the first time. I should preface this story by saying I know how to use protection, but this phishing attempt slipped right through my defenses. I clicked on the link contained in a message in my Twitter inbox because I trusted the person it came from, without reading the text which accompanied it. The link took me to a page that promptly crashed my browser. I couldn’t be bothered rebooting at 4:58pm, so I closed everything up and got on the tram home.

Fifteen minutes later people started messaging me on Twitter to say that I had sent them a message saying saying “ROFL this pic i found of you had me dying lol” and a dodgy link. I kicked myself, because if I had read the text properly I would never have clicked it. I have over 2000 followers now; that’s a lot of people sending me a ‘please explain’, but there was nothing I could do from my phone. I was forced to watch, helpless, as the spam hit person after person.

The feeling of violation was intense.

I am careful about how I conduct myself on Twitter; I aim at all times to be pleasant and helpful, so I was furious that this lowlife hacker was making me look like a jackass. I was so upset I got off a couple of stops early, ran inside and changed my password before I set off to the school to pick up Thesis Whisperer Jnr. Unfortunately I was angry, rushed and not thinking clearly. I made the new password so long and infinitely subtle that, of course, I forgot it immediately. I had to go through the whole password setting process again the next time I tried to log in, which only made me more angry.

Apart from wondering aloud in words not fit for print about why anyone would spend their time doing something so pointless, this whole incident made me think about the importance of trust and reputation, especially in scholarly life. If you think about it, the whole academic enterprise couldn’t exist without these two ingredients. Sure we pay lip service to being critical and replicating each other’s experiments, but we all know that not enough checking goes on. In fact, some have begun to wonder whether replication is really a way to be sure of anything (read this fascinating New Yorker article if you are interested).

When I was a PhD student I was constantly worried about validity and reliability. I was doing qualitative research and took great pains to try and hook people into helping me analyse my data. I convened workshops to show professionals and scholars my data, but the audience just looked puzzled. I made my research participants watch hours of video of themselves and asked them questions until one of them exclaimed: “I don’t know Inger, you are the researcher! You tell me!”. Realising I had tried everyone’s patience long enough, I wrote papers and presented them at prestigious conferences, hoping that someone in the audience would point out my mistakes. No one ever did. I don’t for a minute believe this was because my work was perfect.

I did all these procedures in a fruitless attempt to be sure I had it ‘right’. I’m sure there are similar symptoms of methods anxiety in all disciplines. After a time I started to get the creeping  suspicion that no one other than me really cared whether or not I got it right – even my supervisor. Privately I wondered whether they all believed me and my findings because I am such a self assured public speaker. I discussed my anxieties with my colleague Dr Robyn Barnacle, who pointed out that the whole PhD endeavour is underpinned by the myth of the solo, heroic, individual researcher. In reality, most of us don’t do our best work alone. Robyn’s explanation helped me to understand that, despite the fact I could never really carry the burden of proof alone, I must carry on through my doubts. The rest of my anxiety, no doubt, stemmed from a bad case of ‘impostor syndrome’, which is said to infect PhD students more than any other group.

But now I am a actually I doctor I wonder if we academics really are as critical as we should be. To be more specific – I wonder if that criticality is aimed in the right direction. After a certain level of competence has been demonstrated, I believe that most academics trust their colleagues to be ethical, upright people who are careful with data. Sure, we look for research design flaws and argue about theories, but no almost no one has the time to check your analysis.  It would too much time and effort, which needs to be spent on our own work. We just assume the analysis has been done properly – and go on to argue furiously about how we would have done it differently.

This is why reputation is so crucial within academic communities; doing a PhD is one way to put money in your reputation ‘bank’. I wonder if being embedded in this culture of trust, makes me – and all academics – hypersensitive about threats to my reputation.  In his interesting book, ‘The upside of irrationality’, Dan Ariely notes that revenge and trust are really two sides of the same coin.  Aiely does a series of experiments which demonstrate that humans will trust people they have never met, as my Twitter followers trust me to post interesting links, but that we have a deeply seated drive for vengeance if that trust is violated. If you believe the evolutionary biologists  (I find the literature compelling, despite the tendency for many of the writers to over simplify) we have a finely tuned ability to detect cheating. Society is orderly, so this theory goes, because most of us will seek to punish betrayal, even if we suffer some personal cost and loss to do so.

This probably explains why the very worst crime you can commit in academia is plagiarism. Words are our currency. When you commit plagiarism you are essentially stealing the building blocks of someone else’s reputation. Luckily for me, many of my Twitter followers quickly realised that words used in the dodgy link did not ‘sound’ like me. I hope this meant that most of them didn’t have to go through the infuriating process of changing all their passwords. If you did – my sincerest apologies and if I ever catch that hacker I will make sure vengeance is mine!

What do you do to protect your reputation? Has it ever been threatened?

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I’m a Paying Customer … How Assertive Can I Be With my Supervisor?

I was lucky enough to get a Masters degree and PhD by research on the public purse – the University of Melbourne even paid me a living stipend while I was doing my PhD (ok, technically it was an amount below the poverty line, but better than nothing at all). Australia is relatively generous – at least to local students; in other countries, all students have to pay to do their PhD. When you pay fees are you a student or a customer? How much can you demand of your supervisor? Dr Sarah Louise Quinell from Networked Researcher and Kings College in London ponders these issues in this guest post.

Tuition fees for research degrees are set to increase, in the UK at least. Many people are going to start thinking about whether their research degree represents value for money. I thought I would bring together the two themes of fees and how assertive you can be with your supervisor. I think it’s fair to say that everyone will have a different opinion on this and I expect a lot of comments – so let the discussion commence!

In previous posts I have outlined how I experienced some of the best, and the worst, in research degree supervision. Supervisor number one wasn’t bad, they were just not right for me. I spent ages thinking I had to conform to their way of doing things and it made me very miserable. I didn’t enjoy my work and many times I wanted to walk away. During this experience I learned that I needed to be more assertive; I had to take control of my destiny and get what I wanted from my PhD – but trying to be assertive with my supervisor got me nowhere.

When you pay your fees (or in my case, my Research Council – I was ESRC/NERC funded from year 2) you are paying for the opportunity to gain the degree and for the whole environment which supports this – good administration, desk space, computers – as well as supervision. These other, more tangible, ingredients are certainly things you can directly relate to fees. You pay, so you should have appropriate space to be able to do your work and resources, such as libraries, journal collection access and so on. In my view you must be forceful about getting the infrastructure you need to do your work; relentlessly so in some departments as provisions for PhD students seem to be an afterthought.

But are you really the ‘customer’ of your supervisor? Can you apply the same logic of ‘user pays’ to this relationship? No, I don’t think you can.

I worked in retail for 10 years. People came in choose what they wanted and bought it. If it met with the purpose they kept it; if it not they brought it back. A customer can choose between products, they can do research beforehand try different things to see how they ‘fit’. The same can’t quite be said for education. The student supervisor relationship is a funny thing, as I am sure you will have gathered from my posts. It is one that is built on experience and respect – and that is something that has value, but not in a monetary sense. You can’t always tell in advance if it is going to be the right ‘fit’.

I had one supervisor I didn’t work well with and another I did. What was different were their philosophies over what the PhD was. Number one had a very definite idea of what I should be doing, whereas, number two was happy for me to do what I wanted and would only be critical if they felt I could do it better, or if I was about to make some horrendous mistake.  This worked for me and is why, several months after completion, I still have a good relationship with supervisor number two. She is still supporting me, still has my back and we are looking at ways to work together in the future. Our relationship is very much built on mutual respect.

As a PhD student, you are not buying the finished product; you are, I suppose, trying to develop the finished product. You do this development with the aid and guidance of a supervisor. To a greater or lesser extent, depending on experience, you are reliant on the superior knowledge and judgment of your supervisor to get there. You can expect your supervisor to read, comment and return your work within a suitable time frame. You can expect to be supported, to be guided, for your work to be valued. But what you get out of the relationship with your supervisor depends on how the supervisor values you, and your research. Sometimes you and your supervisor will be incompatible.

You can’t change your supervisor’s style just because you are paying for your education – but you can change supervisors if you think that they are standing  in the way of you successfully completing your degree.

So how does that relate to being assertive and getting what you need? It might work with getting books from the library, but not with people. I tried being assertive with supervisor one and that got me nowhere, so I changed supervisors. I never needed to be assertive with number two. I like to think that if the ‘fit’ is right, there should be no need. So,  if you do feel the need to continuously assert yourself with your supervisor… maybe it’s time you found another one?

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Researching then and now

This guest post is the outcome of an unexpectedly long tram ride with Professor Peter Downton, who works in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University. Peter and I got talking about research education, specifically about doing a thesis before the internet was invented. I was fascinated by his stories and he kindly agreed to write a series of posts for the Whisperer. This first one reflects on the process of doing research then and now. Enjoy.

Once upon a time research, for me, entailed thumbing through variously grubby index cards in long thin drawers pulled forward from chests while standing with others in a library anteroom. One wrote the call number(s) thus found on a small piece of paper and then browsed the stacks for the book, or took the paper to a desk from whence someone pottered off into the far corners of the library to finally return and announce your book. Books were then to be read ensconced in a creaky timber chair with neatly spaced others at long timber tables under the darkened dome of the library. For me, there was (and is) something satisfyingly important about being in the physical presence of an older text, a volume bearing the history of use by other scholars before you in such an environment.

Readers made notes. There were no photocopiers. The Internet was decades away. This was not fast.

Later, I photocopied material from books or journals. Sometimes I was given photocopies of photocopies by fellow researchers. The ease of making photocopies led to a new joy: collecting them. There was a tendency to believe that something worthwhile had thus been achieved and that the content could be absorbed through osmotic proximity to the material.

This gentler pace still gave rise to a sense of being overwhelmed by vast quantities of material that might be important and should be ingested. I think it also gave rise to greater emphasis on digestion. Someone undertaking a doctorate at the same time as me was locally famous for reading only about six books. They were well-selected and extremely well read. In those times it was less evident that there was far, far too much material to be accessed. Fears of drowning in material, or horror of being unaware of important papers, were lively issues then as well as now. Perhaps I realised early the difficulty of getting to all the material within a lifetime. I became calm about this. If, realistically, I could not deal with everything, then it was useless to fret.

There is a considerable risk of reading too much, too thinly. The possibility of down loading vast quantities does not increase either the quality of what is collected or the richness of the reading of it. What is significant is the comprehension of the material and its usefulness for the project at hand. Understanding this is essential. Random quoting is unimpressive in a PhD (or anything else). As an examiner I react badly to texts peppered with quotes from the ‘right’ people for reasons that have not been made clear by the candidate – am I expected to be impressed by the subtle provocations, provide the linking thoughts myself, or be suspicious that the candidate has failed to think thoroughly?

Texts cry out to be read as you meander past them on library shelves. Amazon’s claim that others who bought a particular book also bought the following operates similarly. Serendipity and inefficiency are powerful tools. As I was fortunate to undertake a research masters degree on a scholarship, I had the luxury of spending bulk amounts of time reading inefficiently – in libraries, at home, and in cafes. I was not entirely indiscriminate in what I read, but I was intentionally ill-focussed. Some of the outlying works were found to be wonderfully useful in later years on other projects.

My early experiences covered various varieties of primary research: blowing dust from century-old historic records in a library basement, writing and administering questionnaires, statistical analysis of data on the sole computer in the University of Melbourne, designing new techniques for representing these findings, observing and notating people’s behaviour and surreptitiously photographing and filming them. (Ethics clearance had not been invented at that time.) For some of this research I was directing the Melbourne end of a project being conducted in a number of countries and led from Boston and Paris. It is charming to recall that communication was by air letter. Email, Skype, Twitter and The Cloud had not been born. At least ships and horses were no longer necessary.

There are obviously common themes in what I did then and have done more recently. One link between then and now is the requirement for a system for keeping track of the various bits of stuff you collect or produce. I have never been a notebook keeper – I scribble on available pieces of paper and hopefully disinter them from pockets and assemble them on my desk. Frequently, I find them after I have made use of the ideas. Sometimes I lament not finding them sooner. Some seem stale when found; some would have been exciting to include in prior writing. Over the years I have assembled arch files of material. I have made drawers full of folders in suspension files. I have fooled with various kinds of card systems including those with edge holes linked to key words that then fell from the pack when knitting-needle-like rods representing Boolean searches were inserted. My computers currently are fairly-well ordered. There are databases, bibliographic lists, folders of papers electronically obtained from the library while sitting at my desk or in a café. Every technique works if done properly. I have not seen a panacea that will deliver the goods despite the researcher’s sloppiness.

Whatever the technique, the need is to be orderly from the outset. I have supervised many part time students – in some instances through both a masters degree and a subsequent PhD. The total time between obtaining and using material exceeded 15 years in these instances. The storage and retrieval systems need to be orderly, robust and updated. For much of my supervision, the useful material is more difficult to deal with than words; it is visual, aural and often three-dimensional. Researchers have to develop ways that are suitable to their material if they are to effectively access and manipulate their collection of stuff.

While the toys have rapidly transformed over the decades, the issues for researchers have evolved more slowly. Many ways of working have been enhanced; the need to be thoughtful and thorough has not changed. Modes of distraction have multiplied, but if your concentration is shot you can be distracted by a fly, the need to tidy your workspace, or a mental replay of a less-than-comforting conversation from the previous night.

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5 strategies to help your research student to write

This guest post is written by Dr Geof Hill, the managing editor of “The research supervisor’s friend” blog. In this post Geof tells supervisors some good strategies for helping research students to write. But of course, you don’t need your supervisor to try some of these out! I recommend having a longer look at the Research Supervisors’s Friend if you have a moment – it has a lot of useful advice for all of us.

Learning research skills is usually the easy part of doing a research degree; learning to write about your research is the hard part. Many research supervisors repeat the advice of their own supervisor - ‘just write!’ - and may not be aware of the range of strategies that can be used to help a student do just that… Here are some suggestions:

Answer specific questions then add together the answers to all the questions.

In his chapter “The ‘big picture’ about managing writing” , Robert Brown (1994) details a scaffolded approach for getting students started with their writing. He suggests that you have students write short answers to the following questions:

What did you do?
Why did you do it?
What happened?
What do the results mean in theory?
What do the results mean in practice?
What is the key benefit for the readers?
What remains unsolved?

The first five questions add up to a working abstract. The sixth question is one which evolves with the research document and helps the writer to keep in mind the potential readership. The seventh question is a contrast to the others in that, while the others deal with what is known, it deals with what is unknown – this is the site of the greatest learning in the research project. Brown suggests word limits for the first six questions, but no word limit for the final question.

Understand why academic writing uses some of the devices it does.

Having taught Grade four students how to write a ballad, I am very aware that the research proposal and the dissertation are genres of writing. Both are filled with a range of writing devices that are at the heart of what it is to do research.

For example, the preference of some research writers to use the third person is a device to give the appearance of distance from the subject or objectivity. For some researchers they see this as a crucial element of their research practice and therefore in their writing about their research.

When you explain these devices you are teaching students the philosophies that underpin research practice, and also guiding them about how to argue against these devices – especially if they are trying to write their research differently.

Stop writing and start talking 

Not everyone works well in the written medium. Some people are better at talking than thinking through the writing of their ideas. This can be a strategy for capturing the knowledge that a student already holds in their head and transferring it to the written word. I find this a helpful strategy when I am working with a research student for the first time. I ask them to tell me about what it is that they thought they would investigate and how they thought they might investigate it. Once they have heard themselves speak this, it is often easier to then write down what they have remembered from the conversation, or better still, transcribe the conversation that they have recorded while we have been talking.

This also works well when students are well underway with their research and you ask them how it is going. As they answer this question you can then check whether the dilemmas they tell you about are recorded somewhere in what they have written. Capturing these sorts of dilemmas in your methodology section adds to the authenticity of your account of the research.

Start a Writing Group

Research can be a lonely journey. Alison Lee and David Boud (“Writing groups, change and academic Identity: research development as local practice Studies in Higher Education”, 2003) talk about writing groups, and how these can be beneficial for developing academic writing skills. As the group learns to critique each other’s writing they also develop the skills to improve their own writing. There is a camaraderie of working together which provides a necessary contrast to the oft quoted claim that the research journey is a solo one.

If you have a number of students then you might want to organise a writing group and you all develop the writing and critiquing skills together. Or you can encourage your student to form a writing group with fellow research students.

Get pertinent and specific feedback 

There is no more pertinent way to help a research student develop their writing skills than by providing feedback on their writing. This feedback needs to be specific and, if possible, help the student to understand where you have faced problems in reading their work, rather than simply editing the work and suggesting how it should be rewritten. Editing and rewriting your research student’s writing begins to tamper with the research student’s authorship and may prevent them from developing their own academic voice.

I find the comment function in word documents a useful tool as it allows you to locate the feedback in the writing and is legible (I have atrocious handwriting!). I read a student’s writing ahead of a scheduled meeting with them so that they can have read my comments before we meet. This helps them make choices about what they require in elaboration or discussion. This I find transfers the responsibility for the meeting to the student and makes my role as a supervisor more a help rather than a controller.

What other strategies have people found helpful? We’d love to hear about them.

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The process

This is the second guest post by Maia Sauren, a student at RMIT who has recently  submitted her thesis.  In this post Maia reflects on the PhD process… Is it a ‘journey’ or a series of emotional states through which you need to pass?

The first half

Step 1: Fear
You open Google Scholar and discover  humanity’s research output for the past fifty years has been centred around your topic. There are arguments in the literature about who did what when, and whether it was important. None of them make sense. Your supervisor’s casual conversations in the tea room about an event thirty years ago sends your spine rigid with how much you don’t know.
Solution: muck around on Facebook, develop an addiction to an online game.
Pros: distracting and soothing.
Cons: not a solution.

Step 2: Hate 
It sucks your life. It doesn’t let you out at night. You feel guilty every time you leave your desk. You joke about being in an abusive relationship, and stop laughing halfway through the sentence.
Solution: work like a maniac. Come into the lab at 10pm on a Saturday to follow up on experiments, read every book and journal paper in the research area even if you don’t understand half the words.
Pros: get a lot more done than you think.
Cons: life? What life?

Step 3: Sulking
What the hell does this thing think it is, making you feel so crap about yourself!
Solution: punish it by playing in the sunshine.
Pros: hooray!
Cons: still feeling guilty, aren’t you?

Step 4: Rage and defeat
This is such a waste of my time. I don’t wanna do this any more!
Solution: quit. You take leave of absence, or maybe you just stop showing up. Maybe you get back to your job, or shag strangers in foreign countries – whatever.
Pros: I remember this person! – this used to be me!
Cons: none, actually. Get some perspective and live a bit.

Not everyone comes back after quitting. That’s ok. 

The second half

Step 5: back on the horse
You’re energised, and you’re resigned to another year or three of toil. You open your (messy, pathetic looking) old documents. Who wrote this rubbish?
Solution: read voraciously.
Pros: start noticing  that about half the references in your list are from the same eight research groups, and the rest of the links in any new search point to each other. Your bowels unclench a little. Your experiments clunk along.
Cons: find yourself getting sucked into the old shame-guilt-avoidance cycle.

Step 6: The light is not an oncoming train
You come out of your existential crisis to remember that you have power and choice in all your relationships, including this one. Start feeling the itch of impatience to finish.
Solution: Whiteboard a time map that designates your Ph.D. as a subset of your life, not the other way around.
Pros:  time with friends!
Cons: what do people talk about at parties again?

Step 7: Despair
You whinge about how much work you have to all and sundry. You wake at 3am and wonder whether the shame of quitting outweighs the joy, and whether it’s too late because you’ve passed the halfway mark and it’d be a waste after investing all this time. There’s still a mountain to go.
Solution: start looking for alternative ways to end the misery. Get a study group going, talk to that change management friend about mind sets, research work methods – anything to make this stop.
Pros: feels powerful. Very powerful.
Cons: get used to this impatience. Oh, and have you got anything done on your thesis between reading motivational blogs?

Step 8: Grit your teeth
This. Too. Shall. Pass. You have the odd vivid hallucination about being called ‘doctor’ and almost pass out with elation.
Solution: Just keep writing.
Pros: so close!
Cons: so close!

Step 9: Rip the band-aid off
It’s time to be rid of this. Write until it hurts, then just keep writing. You develop a bizarre clarity about the context of your work, you see the patterns, it all makes sense. Your best friend’s divorce? Who cares! You don’t know how to finish this paragraph, why are these people even talking to you!
Solution: get all the help your life has – friends, family, supervisors – and ask for exactly what you need. Surprisingly, they, too, are falling over themselves to do what it takes to have this over with.
Pros:  I am invincible! Bring me more coffee!
Cons: sleep is for quitters.

The End

Step 10: collapse
You have no idea who you are; you barely know where you live. You eat and drink because first principles of being human say you should, not because you have any kind of drive to.
Solution: get the hell away from your computer.
Pros: there’s sunlight outside, the birds are singing, and everyone says how pleased you must be to have submitted.
Cons: you stare blankly.

In Summary: Sometimes you’ll find yourself going through many of these steps in one day. I ‘quit’ several times before getting to the next stage – that’s normal too, apparently. Meanwhile, relationships and friends come and go, scholarships begin and end, you move house, your friends leave the country. Life goes on.

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Is the University a bad boyfriend?

A couple of weeks ago I visited Sydney University to give a keynote address during research week. During morning tea I got chatting to the director of the Graduate Studies Office, Simon French, who invited me over to his office to continue the conversation before I left for Melbourne. Simon told me to find my way to the Quad on the main campus and then call him, as his office was hard to find.

The University of Sydney Quad is arguably the most magnificent of the ‘Oxbridge’ style pieces of architecture in Australia, as you can see in this photo. Simon is lucky enough to have an office tucked away in the corner of this immense structure. It must be like going to work with Harry Potter (as you have probably guess, I was quite jealous).

It was a pleasure to nerd out with Simon for an hour or so. He is one of the few people I’ve met who is as fascinated by the complexity of the issues in research education as I am. Most of our conversation was about the dissatisfaction research students feel with the research culture at their institutions. It seems research students are happy with the quality of the education they are getting, and most like their supervisors, but many are unhappy about universities as places to be.

On the face of it, RMIT University seems to be in a completely different league to the University of Sydney. Our campus looks more like a collection of funky office blocks than an outpost of Mother England. And – if the buildings are anything to judge by – we have a lot less research money to play with. I thought University of Sydney students would be a pretty happy lot, given their obvious material advantages, but Simon told me otherwise. As it turns out, University of Sydney are just as dissatisfied with the research culture of their university as their RMIT counterparts.

Universities are always working on the ‘research culture’ problem, but all the strategies seem to fail. If students complain about not having space on campus we give them desks, which they rarely use. If students complain about needing more intellectual engagement, we provide them with workshops – which are poorly attended. No matter what we do, we just can’t make them happy.

‘Culture’ is a difficult concept to define of course; it is more than the physical spaces which we inhabit or the people who surround us. I wondered aloud if the problem of research student unhappiness is that university life just fails to live up to our expectations. Simon agreed and then said something both wise and funny:

“I tell people that the University is like a bad boyfriend. Sooner or later it is going to break your heart”

I laughed because it was true – at least of myself. For years I carried around a Brideshead Revisited inspired fantasy where professors sat around drinking port with their students in book lined rooms talking about the meaning of life. My undergraduate experience, although grueling, did nothing to dispel this image. My lecturers  were all so clever and interesting; I wanted to BE them and live the life of the mind. I assumed The University was a charmed place to work; a happy community of scholars living in an intellectual meritocracy.

I was in love with The University, but it broke my heart when I first applied for a lecturer’s job, some four years after I started working as a casual tutor. I was shocked when I was passed over in favour of the research assistant of an influential professor. To my mind I was the better teacher, which made this decision deeply unfair. I said as much to another staff member, who gave me a little talk about the difference between nepotism and patronage and the importance of cultivating Contacts.

It took me awhile to appreciate the value of this cold blooded advice. I went on to be rejected four more times before I had to face up to the sad truth. Just like a bad boyfriend, the university was happy to go on dates with me, but was not willing to commit to a long term relationship. I was just not sexy or interesting enough – I didn’t have a PhD or a list of publications the length of my arm. It’s an unhappy truth that a research heavy CV is the tight leather trousers of the university employment dance. Teaching ability is like a good personality – you are grateful for it after you have known the person for awhile, but it wont make you take them home from the disco.

Simon claimed that some people lead a charmed life and don’t get their heart broken until they fail to get promoted into the professoriate, or get retrenched out of existence because someone decides the university isn’t teaching medieval history anymore. Some unhappy students get their hearts broken in undergraduate courses and never complete; other students are broken by a research supervisor who makes their life a living hell. Simon went on to talk about bouncing back after The University has become your bad boyfriend. It’s true that people do react in different ways to being unlucky in love. Some will swear off having a relationship forever and go out to get paid more in the private sector; some stay, but are permanently bitter.

Others, like myself, realise they were being unrealistic and decide to continue to love The University while being aware of its faults. The happy conclusion to my story is that I decided to put on the tight leather trousers and get  PhD, while continuing to make the most of any opportunity that came my way. Now I have a wonderful job that, amongst other things, pays me to write this blog and think about stuff for a living. The best revenge, as they say, is to have a good life.

As I left Simon’s office that night, and walked with him through the soft purple twilight of the Quad, the bell tower started chiming the hour. It was the perfect moment – a picturesque stroll after a happy hour of talking about meaning of life stuff. For just a moment I thought I had got a glimpse of The University Life I have always longed for. I suspect that, in the contemporary academy, a glimpse now and then is all you are likely to get. For me just a glimpse is enough to keep the love alive – what about you?

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Is losing weight similar to writing a thesis?

This post was written by Dr Emma Kimberley, research forum facilitator and Keeper of the Graduate School Media Zoo in the David Wilson Library at the University of Leicester. In this post Emma tells us some of the lessons she learned from losing weight and how they helped her with her PhD.

In the writing-up phase of my PhD, at the same time as my word count was going steadily upwards I was trying to decrease another important life-statistic. I joined Weightwatchers in my final year, hoping to lose weight gained over 7 years of undergraduate and postgraduate study. As it turned out, I lost 4 stones and learned a lot about writing a thesis in the process. I was aware of the bad habits that contributed to excess weight but firmly in denial about how the same thinking errors might be damaging my ability to write productively.

I was struggling with an idealistic, all-or-nothing mentality in both areas, becoming increasingly demoralised by the gap between my ideals and what I was actually achieving. WW helped me to change my writing habits and bring in my thesis on time! Here is what I learned:

Track what you’re doing. A big part of WW was tracking everything I ate (with no exceptions – chocolate you don’t buy yourself still counts!). This ruthless process left no room for denial, making me face facts about where I was going wrong. Applying the same approach to my thesis was startling but informative: I found out how many words I had left to go, and how long that would take me at my fastest writing-speed of 700 words per day over a 5 day week. The reality was not as bad as I had feared, and ticking off small successes on the calendar was very motivating. Most of all, tracking helped me to gain a sense of control over my writing process.

Find a routine. I started to plan my thesis work for each day in the same way as I planned my meals. A thesis-tracking diary helped identify a routine that worked. Contrary to expectations, I found that I worked best in the mornings – 700 words straight after breakfast left me free to use my afternoons for research that still needed doing, and my evenings for guilt-free relaxation or socialising.

There were quite a few days when I fell behind schedule and failed to stick to my routine. Instead of berating myself for these, WW taught me an important lesson: don’t let small failures hold you back. Feelings of guilt about a failure make it worse, not better!: “This week’s already gone to pot so there’s no point sticking to my plan”. Thinking about setbacks differently gave them a whole new meaning: “I must have needed a day off… now I’ll get back on track”.

In a similar vein, start each day with a clean slate. Instead of compounding a bad day with a miserable week, I was often surprised how little difference it made when I just let my failures go and moved on. A rogue chocolate bar here and there didn’t stop me losing weight, as long as I didn’t turn it into an excuse to throw in the towel. In the same way, 700 words missed every once in a while wasn’t a disaster. And the next day I got back on track.

Watch out for saboteurs, and know how to deal with them. The first time my WW leader came out with this tip, I thought it was slightly paranoid – no-one was force-feeding me cake, after all! – but as I changed my habits it became clear that some people were less supportive than others. Thesis writers are often put under pressure in the same way; regular persistence and sacrifice are needed for both endeavours, and it’s likely that some of those around you – the people who counted on you as a late-night snack buddy or afternoon-of-skiving pub companion – won’t like it. They have reasonable expectations of involving you in some of the activities or commitments you now want to pass up on. If people are supportive, then a few words is usually all it takes to make them understand your goals. If not, there’s some hard thinking to be done about the reasons you spend your time with them.

Move more. This tip might seem more relevant to managing your weight than to managing a thesis, but time out to do exercise increased my focus during time spent at my desk. I took up dancing, and my weekly salsa, jive and ballroom classes turned out to be welcome respite from a day of sitting at my books. I worked harder, motivated by the promise of an evening’s dancing. It also meant that the occasional cake and ale binge with my thesis buddies was no longer a worry.

Think about how you’re going to maintain when you reach your goal. Reaching goal can be hard. You’ve made it to the finish line, but you still don’t feel like a fully-fledged thin person or academic. As someone who completed my PhD in 3 years and 3 months, I never stopped to think about the void waiting on the other side of my focus on the goal. A maintenance plan similar to the one I had for my weight – perhaps a few conferences, or a publication schedule – would have helped me through the post-viva motivational dip.

Weight management clubs won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but the point I’m trying to make is that you can learn a lot about your thesis by doing something else, and especially by doing it with other people. Any shared goal –word count or weight loss – is an opportunity to gain motivation and learn things from the people around you. Where else do you think you can learn lessons about PhD study?

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The perils of PhD parenting

Last week Thesis Whisperer Jnr (aged 9 and three quarters) had to find out seven facts about Ireland for a school project. After the last homework debacle, where we ended up in a screaming match, I have made an effort to adopt more of a Tiger Mother Style, at least with respect to homework. So I set him up with the encyclopedia and told him to get on with it while I did a bit of blog maintenance.

After twenty minutes or so of mucking around he got out his pencil out and started writing a list. I couldn’t help myself and looked over at what he had written:

“Ireland’s flag is orange, white and green”

So far so good I thought and looked at the next item on the list:

“People in Ireland believe in Leprechauns”

The PhD monster inside me was roused at this blatant generalization, the words were out of my mouth before I could even think:

Me: “What evidence do you have for that claim about everyone believing in leprechauns?”
TW Jnr: “What do you mean?”
Me: “It’s a blatant generalisation!”
TW Jnr: “huh?”
Me: “Well…. Do you believe in leprechauns?”
TW Jnr: “no”
Me: “Are boys who live in Ireland somehow different than you?”
TW Jnr: “Um. No. Probably not”
Me: “So do all boys in Ireland believe in leprechauns?”

At this point Thesis Whisperer Jnr burst into tears, threw his pen down on the page and stormed off in a huff. Later,when he had calmed down, we had a little talk. It turned out that he had to illustrate the facts he had found; he included leprechauns as a ‘fact’ because, well - he wanted to draw a leprechaun.

I felt like a complete asshole.

Some time ago I wrote a post called “Parenting through your PhD” about trying to carve out time for study when you have a young child. I was under the naive assumption that finishing my PhD would mean this need to balance my work time with family life would change, but sadly this is not the case. Becoming an academic is like signing up for a whole lifetime of study, so the challenges are still there. I’ve been talking to other PhD parents since this incident and I’ve come up with 5 ways your PhD might affect your school aged child:

You are the parent their teacher dreads talking to

I have a PhD in an education related topic and, like many of you I’m sure, I have done a lot of teaching. Of course, my experience as a teacher does not include primary school aged children, but this doesn’t stop me from being obnoxiously opinionated about it. I am an academic after all.

As a consequence, I am a complete nightmare come parent teacher interview time and will sprout post structuralist theory until the teacher’s eyes glaze over. I don’t want to be like this, but it seems I am compulsive. Luckily Mr Thesis Whisperer will kick me under the table when the 4 syllable words start coming out of my mouth.

Your theories become their theories

When you are doing a PhD what you are reading and thinking about colours your world. I don’t know how it happens, but your kids can can soak up your pet theories along with your taste in music and politics. Sometimes this can lead to conflict with the teacher, as @pinniesp explained to me on Twitter:

“I used to live with a teenager and when his teacher said Australia was discovered, he corrected him: “colonised”. I felt a bit of remorse about the indoctrination – this may have been in year 7 – but oh well”

Precision in all things

My son is going to have to get used to substantiating his knowledge claims with evidence, but that’s not all he has to contend with. I am a grammar nerd too. It’s just no fun to have a parent who insists on the correct use of semi colons in a grade four essay. Other parents on Twitter told me it is even worse if you work with statistics, as @DrBekMarketing remarked:

“… my kids hate it too when I go PhD-parent on them. their response:”n =1 IS a sufficient sample size mum!”

‘Googling’ is not ‘research’

On the tram the other day I heard a 16 year girl complaining to her mother about the bad mark on her essay – apparently she “couldn’t find the information on Google”. I actually turned around in my seat and stared at her, which I know is a stuffy old 40 year old thing to do but I couldn’t help it. All I could think was “no child of mine will think googling is research!”. This is why I set Thesis Whisperer Jnr up with the encyclopedia.

OK,  call me old fashioned, but I think being able to look up an index is a skill that will still be valid through the rest of the century. I am awake to the chance I might be wrong however. My mother wouldn’t let me learn how to type because she was worried I would become a secretary like her. This turned out to be a poor decision as I still can’t touch type and had to write my way through 2 long theses while looking at the keys!

They are the only kid with a bibliography attached to their essay

I laughed when @MisaimedBrain asked me on Twitter: ”How old is Thesis Whisperer jnr? I’m imagining a small child developing impeccable referencing.”

It’s funny, because it’s true. Part of the fight over the last piece of homework was my insistence on correct footnoting and formatting of the bibliography. Poor little bastard. But there may be hope for Thesis Whisperer Jnr and I after all. The next day, on the way home, I asked him how his project on Ireland was going:

“Well, I still got to draw a leprechaun, because I wrote under it: SOME people believe in leprechauns. That’s not a generalisation is it mum?”

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