What am I doing and how did I decide what to do?

                After reading over my recent posts I noticed that I haven't actually explained what my PhD on, and  considering this is a blog about my PhD this seems like a bit of an oversight.  

                If there is anyone else out there like me (I'm so sorry if you are) your current notes on your PhD will be fractured and organised in such a way that only you, or a crack team of MI5 agents, could ever hope to understand them. This is not through a lack of organisation on my part, but just because I've get to join all of my ideas together into one whole.

                This means that I until recently I could not, no matter how hard I try, give a nice and simple answer to what my PhD is on. It's gotten that bad that a lot of people have just stopped asking. However, recently I had a breakthrough - I am researching community interventions in mental health. It's nice to be able to say it and I feel like I finally have a vague idea about which direction is up.  But, to all of you experts out there your first questions are going to be what  do you mean by community and mental health and intervention. I'm afraid I don't know enough to give you that answer (basically, watch this space).  I'd be really interested to hear from people who are researching in similar areas. 

               If anyone else out there is in the early stages of their research I would like to briefly share some tips and ideas which helped me find an area of study: 

                I think it is safe to say that very few of us will find identifying a suitable area/topic for PhD research easy-  especially for those doing 3 year PhD's who are expected to know within the first few months.  There are of questions which need to be answered in order to decide what counts as a suitable topic, and in all honesty, a lot of these questions cannot be answered within the first few months of research. Many will require many, many hours reading pervious research before we can safely say that  'yes this might work'. 

                Having said that, one of the best pieces of advice I was given by my Supervisor is to give myself the time to 'fish around' for idea and look for something I am really enthusiastic about.  At first I found 'fishing around' for idea's a challenge, especially when I identified a topic and wanted to spend all my time researching it, but once I learned to restrain myself a little I found I was reading about allsorts of different and interesting areas. This advice has stopped me from running with my first idea and has given me the time to find something that I really want to do. In fact my PhD topic is a combination of various different ideas I have gotten from 'fishing around'. 

                I have also found that thinking about what I see as important research and what I want to gain from my PhD helped me decide on what topic to research - after all  it is my PhD and my career which will be determined by it.  For me I've always been interested in mental health and I have always wanted to research into it and my PhD is turning out to be a great opportunity for me to explore under researched areas of mental health which I feel are important (i.e. ways of preventing rather than just 'curing' mental illness). Also, I am now able to design my research so I develop skills I wanted to gain, such as experience working with community stakeholders and partners. 

                Over time what I want to get from by PhD will probably change, but I hope to keep a record of this, so, if possible, I can alter my research to accordingly.  Obviously, what I want to do will not be the only factor which determines what I do in the end but I think it should play a big part in it.

                I hope you all have a good holiday!

Mike.

p.s. if anyone wants to get in touch with me my email address is mjwalton13@live.co.uk.  

They should award credits just for finding the right room...

If my time at university has taught me anything it's that university buildings are designed with one of two purposes in mind. Either to be economical where every room, corridor and stair case are identical. These type of buildings usually leave me with an odd sense of deja vu and desire to see if climbing down outside of the building would be the quickest route out. Or Worse than this are the buildings that are designed to look futuristic and awe-inspiring.  Whilst many are atheistically pleasing the trouble is the interiors make me feel like I'm trapped in an Escher painting.  In short,  both types were not designed with any thought to how people are actually supposed to navigate the building.  

When attending my induction last week I found that there is a new even more complicated type of building- the one building that was once a  series of separate buildings type. I'm almost certain the building started off as one building that can be easily navigated, but over the years someone decided to abandon the laws of physics entirely and absorb the nearby buildings. This meant that although I arrived 45 minutes early for my Induction, it took me 40 minutes to find the room- which happened to be two minutes away from the entrance! If you ask me the real reason we are moving to a new building soon is that too many undergrads have gotten lost and people are starting to ask awkward questions... 

All joking sidesettling into a new department can be a challenging task, so I decided to write this post give some tips which I've found useful when starting a in a new department. 

1.  Firstly, find the toilets. If there is one room you are going to need it will be them.

2. Secondly, find out where the PhD students hang out. If you can find others who are just starting. Not only is it comforting to know you're not the only one who is lost, they may also be able to show you where other essential rooms are i.e. the library.

3.  Explore the library asap. Every library has their little quirks about where certain books should go (i.e. short loan), how to arrange the books on the shelves and how easily it should be for you to take one of their (precious) books. Some, if your especially unlucky, decide that they are too good for traditional sorting systems and invent their own.  My advice is save yourself some stress and find your away round before you desperately need to find something.

4. Find out how your department works i.e. who to talk to you if you need money for a conference or something building for your study. Once you've found out who they are make friends with them.

5. Read a good book on doing a PhD.  The 'Unwritten rules of PhD Research' really developed my understanding of what PhD entails.

6.  Find out what your department expects of you as a PhD student, including when certain pieces of paper work has to be handed in, that way you can make sure you work to these goals.

7. If all else fails... Look lost. I'm serious, you'd be surprised how many people will help! 

If anyone else has any tips it'd be great to hear them, after all I'm still trying to find my way.

Mike

p.s. I feel I should say that the department has loads of great resources and despite the fact that our days in the building are numbered they are doing up the PhD offices for us.

Identity Flux

A PhD feels like invitation to prove that I can join the academic community. To do this I realised I need to change my identity from student to academic.  I know that researchers need to attend conferences, participate in career development, network,  produce publishable research, disseminate their work, and that's without considering all the teaching. Thankfully I'm not expected to achieve all this in my first week! But I realise need to be able to do these things eventually. In this sense, a PhD may be just as much about creating a new and shiny researcher identity as it is about the thesis. After all it is this identity which will help me succeed as a post doc.

The requirements of a PhD Student are very different from those of an undergraduate, where networking consisted of a pub crawl in fresher's week and career planning was only an afterthought on the way home from graduation. A Msc has helped me focus my career and helped me realise that I have  developed many skills which will help me make the identity transition  (i.e. a new awareness of the need to plan for after graduation).  So I feel less worried about the change. If there are others out there who are worried about what skills they need, it might be worth spending some time thinking about the beneficial ones you already have. 

I have also found many useful resources out there on the internet which has helped me consider how I need to change my identity. For example, the internet can be a great tool for networking, keeping up with research and disseminating your own. Here's a couple of links I found useful:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/08/10/im-an-academic-and-desperately-need-an-online-presence-where-do-i-start/#more-7331

Here's a link to a PhD chat on why blogging can be useful: http://phdchat.pbworks.com/w/page/52525100/Blogging%20about%20your%20Research

Also, there are some sites offering advice on how to network successfully, how to ask the right questions at conferences and get work published. The thesis whisper is particularly useful for this. 

Reading these resources has helped sooth my anxiety, but I have to wonder if the identity of a PhD student is always in flux between student and academic? Do we enter a period of metamorphosis rather like a cocoon where some of us emerge bright butterfly's which usher in a new stage of insight to our fields, and others emerge moths determined to eat way at others work by becoming an adversarial reviewer who asks awkward stats questions at conferences?...What do you think?

Me, myself and blog about Dyslexia

Let's start with basic introductions. Very soon I am going to become a part-time PhD student.  There are a lot of PhD Students Blogs out there, each offering their own unique perspectives on what doing a PhD is like (I will put links up to more asap). After pondering what I had to offer I decided to write (partly) on experiences of being a dyslexic  PhD student. My reasoning was thus:

The effects of dyslexia vary widely and, contrary to what some would think, they are not all bad (a discussion of this is worthy of a post on its own).  When thinking about my future as an academic I consider being dyslexic one of the most helpful and yet challenging aspects of my personality.  I can't be the only dyslexic PhD student out there or the only one there will ever be. So  I hope writing about the ups and downs of my PhD my experiences may prove of some use to other dyslexics in similar situations. I'd also like to hear about others experiences.  So maybe this blog can provide a place to share those experiences...

I'd like to start off now by saying that I am new to blogging and my writing skills are very much a work in progress. So please, if you are reading this, bare with me!  Also, I'm not going to just blog about my experiences,  as I hope to get a few blogs out about psychology and research in general.

As I am about to start my PhD in just under a month (scary!) I've found myself thinking more and more about what exactly is a PhD? On a basic level it's a piece of research written up into a thesis.  But from what I have read and heard it's much more than that.  It's an experience which changes you and your life to the point that you are no longer the person who started the PhD.

 

So, this is me when I go in. I wonder who I will come out?