Categories: phd
Tags: supervision, PhD
Date: 17 January 2006 11:59:35
Well, in all the excitement of my heaving social life I forgot to mention yesterday's PhD supervision (the study being, after all, the original reason I started this blog). I'm feeling a lot happier about things generally, and I've now been given my first written assignment to do (we have to submit an end-of-1st-year piece of work of 10,000 words about our research and the work we've done, as well as present a Work-in-Progress seminar based on it, so this is a first step towards that) which I think will be really useful in helping me to focus my research question and my literature search. As I think is very common, with every new article I read I find interesting tangents and paths to wander down, and I'm having to face up to the fact that although any one of them might be interesting to focus on in my own research, I really can't do all 20 million of them. Which I know is obvious, but the reality of letting go is much harder :D (which is why I think I ended up really sympathetic to my student who wrote 8,000 words in his essay - he just didn't want to let go of any of the ideas because he thought they were all so important) (I still penalised him though, because 8,000 words is still ridiculous).
Never fear though, I'm sure this calmness won't last long, and I'll be sure to let you know about the next crisis of confidence :D