Trees, tables and time
I thought it was about time that I started to blog a bit about my PhD journey. A PhD is a journey, it’s an unravelling of thoughts, ideas, hypotheses and it takes a lot of time. I’m currently seven months in to a part time journey and I’ve hit my first milestone by submitting my PGCert (the first hurdle to ensure I can continue) and also I’ve met some signposts for the first time.
I have to admit, whilst the PGCert does give direction, some of the early months/years of a PhD can feel a little like you don’t really know which way is forward, back, up or down. Unlike a taught Masters or certainly a BA, there are very few pointers. Obviously your supervisors help to guide, but you need to grow that inner ability to step out on your own however shaky you might feel. It’s hard to know if you are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ about things and to speak out loud, for me particularly, has been a big step. There is a large part of me that is wearing an imposter badge, however, I know I am not alone and the more I read, the more I realise that whilst my supervisiors know much more about the academic field than I do, more about their topics than I do, I am the master of my research, I will be the expert in the minutae that is my PhD, not them and they want me to be able to stand up and be accountable for that.
However, I have a LOOOONG road ahead of me before I get there, so today I thought I’d be transparent about the nuts and bolts that keep falling out of my construction and how I am getting my 50 year old brain around them.
I was reading Pat Thomson’s blog again this week (https://patthomson.net/2022/09/12/academic-writing-from-a-bunch-of-stuff-to-text-outline/ ) and she was talking about how to move your findings to text and what she does. Now, I am far away from this, but one of the things that is continual throughout doctoral study is reading. In the early days it seems quite manageable and I began by having my pretty coloured folders with a numerical system for each piece of reading I’d done. I am old fashioned and I apologise to the environmentalists out there, but I cannot work with research papers online, I have to have them in my hands and use a highlighter. This of course means I end up with literally hundreds of reports, editorials, research papers etc. You can imagine that after that first 50 it starts to become somewhat unmanageable, especially when you are mid conversation with your supervisors and are talking about a paper, but you can’t remember exactly the really important finding, or who wrote it, or where it is because you have a menopausal, post-anaethetic (yes I had knee surgery this week too) brain and your papers are currently decorating your study floor, thus your paraphrasing sounds like you actually read a ladybird Peter and Jane book rather than some quality peer reviewed research.
Here’s an example of my early days ‘organisation’ system that consisted of a number (literally to number the paper) and some keywords relevant to my topics and/or research questions.
The next step was to take a leaf from Pat’s blog and create a table. This currently states the citation, the abstract in my own words and sometimes my thoughts, the number I’ve given the paper and then the relevance to my research. What I now need to try to find is some way to be able to eventually sort through 5 years of reading by a keyword that brings up all the relevant literature. I have also linked the DOI via Zotero which is the programme I’m currently using. Zotero will then help me organise my citations and bibliography when I eventually start to write the thesis.
I’d be really keen to hear from anyone who knows of a better system for doing this that maybe can help to organise by theme or if I might be doing this at a later date with post-it notes and mapping on my wall!