Categories: uncategorized
Date: 20 April 2004 21:07:02
Today I phoned up my employer's head office to enquire about undertaking some research with clients for my dissertation (which starts in a couple of weeks, eek), and to find out about getting ethical approval etc. The guy who deals with it is (of course) in South Africa and not back for two more weeks, so although there are a couple of people I can get some advice from I probably can't do a huge amount about it for a while, which is starting to make me a little anxious.
I had been hoping to go to eastern Europe to do some research with the partners of the charity I volunteer with as a trustee, but things are a bit precarious at the moment and they might cease to exist as a charity at all after June. So I was looking to do some research through work as my backup. Having just parted with shedloads of money to do this dissertation, it would be nice to be a bit less vague about what I'm going to do. I had an email from someone I did one of my previous modules with, a crowd of us are planning a get-together in May sometime but she can't come because she's doing fieldwork in Nigeria for her dissertation. Apart from being really jealous that it looks like my fieldwork is going to end up being in Lewisham, I'm feeling a bit insecure that she seems to be tons more organised about her research than me.
I was thinking today how what I really want to do is study/research and get paid for it. At the moment I have my full-time job which I really like but my heart's not in it as I don't find it particularly stimulating intellectually, and my spare time study which is suffering because I'm so knackered from work. So I end up doing neither as well as I could, and then beat myself up about it. It's a vicious circle.
Ah well. After Tuesday's exam I'll be all positive again (no, really!).