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.
No comments:
Post a Comment