PhD update - musings on the first major milestone
In my last post I wrote in general terms about my thoughts on the doctoral process, being a part time student and how it was going, but I didn’t really talk in too much detail about where I had gotten to and how I’m finding doing actual research, so here we go!
I completed the first major milestone of my PhD, the upgrade, after approximately 20 months, just before the department wound down for the break that would roll over into my third academic year, otherwise I would have had to wait until the autumn. In the Department of Information Studies at UCL the upgrade has two components, a presentation to the department, and a ‘mini-viva’ on a significant chunk of writing. The submitted writing has to include parts of your introduction, literature review and methodology (as well as evidence of a passed ethics review and data protection registration, as required). In total, these sections of writing need to introduce the research problem and your research questions/hypotheses, justify your investigation using the literature and outline your research plan. The presentation is to introduce your research to colleagues in the department and gives them the opportunity to ask questions, the ‘mini-viva’ meeting is with only a small group and focuses on the viability and achievability of your research plan, is it a unique contribution to research, can it be done, and do you have the ability and knowledge to achieve it.
In all honesty, the hardest part about the whole process of getting to upgrade was getting the writing to the standard it needed to be. Not doing the writing, but after review by my supervisors, doing masses of editorial work and rewriting. There were two problems with this and they were me, and my brain. Firstly my personal reaction to all of the ‘red pen’ (which actually wasn’t all that bad after I was done reacting and actually looked at it) spiralling me off into a dejected pile of uselessness, and also the fact that editing and rewriting documents time and again is really very dull, which makes it an uphill battle to actually get anything done. Yay my brain… but I got there, thanks to lots of support and patience from my supervisors and Mark, always quietly pulling me up when I fall and giving me the power to keep moving forward.
I feel like this picture sometimes. They say a PhD is all about developing and growing, but I constantly feel like I have barely begun…
The presentation goes first and I think it is actually a good preparation stage for the mini-viva at this point in the PhD process. It gets you used to talking about your research to peers, and being challenged on various points and asked to give more detail or respond to questions from individuals with a distinctly different perspective. Given my day job, preparing the presentation and choosing what to focus on wasn’t too much of a challenge, though keeping nearly 18 months of research to the assigned 20 minutes was pretty tricky! This was especially true as the 18 months had been such a deep dive, and yes, I realise that doing my PhD will make me the ranking expert in a very niche thing, but I hadn’t quite thought through how complicated that makes planning a presentation about my research! I chose to focus on my literature review for the presentation and cover the research questions and the plan of attack for the research only in brief. This wasn’t to prevent the audience from asking tricky questions about the research, but more that I wanted to give the diverse audience from the department enough context for the research topic to be interesting to them and that would allow them to discuss the research path with me in a way that would be constructive. I do have a plan to share this with you in another post, so watch this space for details about the research itself!
The viva meeting wasn’t actually that bad, though I remember distinctly not thinking that at the time. I answered the questions but the challenging nature of the discussion overwhelmed my well-prepared self, leaving me standing outside while the group discussed their scores giving myself a stern talking to, telling myself I wasn’t going to allow myself to cry in front of them if I had failed and needed to resubmit. Yes, I know, overreact much, but I was genuinely surprised to pass at the time!
Upon reflection, while the examiner and the ‘mini-viva’ discussion was challenging, asking questions about all of my decisions and plans, timelines, conclusions drawn from my literature review so far, it was in fact all constructive. Looking back, it was clear that she was merely seeking to verify that I had done the work myself by probing my assertions, making sure I had chosen the qualitative path and methodology I did for reasons that were well-grounded in the literature and the needs of the project. She also offered critique and pointed to areas where I could improve my writing, and gave me new avenues to pursue, all of which I now realise was constructive. I managed to take lots of notes, and my supervisor sent me some too, so that was a lot more editing to do, but in general it has just helped me to make everything better going forward.
Once you pass the upgrade, that is the go ahead for data collection to happen, which means that I have been having fun since then, making adjustments to my writing post upgrade, sure, but also starting to reach out and starting my data collection! But that’s another story…