Carina Wyborn recently completed her PhD at the ANU and is now based at College of Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana. Carina wrote the story of handing in her PhD for her blog “The pacific exchange” and sent it to me. I loved it and asked if I could cross post here. A cautionary tale indeed! Congratulations on finishing Carina

So… It finally happened, I submitted my PhD last week. Feels surreal, amazing, and totally normal all at the same time. But I thought I’d just share the hilarity of the day for posterities sake. I really wish somebody had been following me around that day with a camera, because it would have made for some awesome time-laps photography.

I was back in Canberra for one week to attend the Society for Human Ecology’s 14th International Conference and to submit my thesis. Unsurprisingly, the thesis was not as ready as I had planned (due to circumstances largely outside of my control…), so I spent the week frantically dealing with the final proofreading, reference list and formatting debacles. With this and the conference it was a week of very little sleep…

I wake on Friday morning at about 5.30am after dreaming about blocked printers and binding failures, stressed about the final formatting. I get to campus and can’t seem to print from my friend’s computer (having left in December I no longer have my own desk at the ANU). After being not so politely told by the IT guy in my department that he doesn’t have time to help me I frantically run to the library to see if I can print there. Things don’t go super smoothly and a few tears and some very friendly library staff later the first copy comes out of the printer… covered in black marks and looking decidedly shabby. I abort the library mission and decide to head to office works.

Sprinting across campus I get half way to my car before realising that I probably left my USB at the library. I pause – conveniently next to a bunch of construction workers who probably enjoyed the site of a frantic looking woman in a short skirt emptying the contents of her bag on to the footpath. The USB isn’t there but in a moment of clarity I see my laptop and realise it doesn’t matter. The sprint continues. I get back to my car to find an $83 parking ticket (which I probably deserve, I’ve been parking there illegally on and off for the last four years…), but today? Of all days!

Onto office works and I tell my sob story to the kind man who says he can print my thesis but to get the colour pages into it he will have to do the whole thing in colour at a cost of $300 per copy (I need four). He takes pity on me and presses print, promising to only charge me for black and white. I sit twiddling my thumbs for 30mins only to discover that he has printed it single sided… The margins are set for double sided so the printing begins again, only this time it ends up black and white. Another 30mins passes.

Half way out the door marvelling at the phone-book sized manuscripts in my arm I notice that the page order of one is all messed up. I go back to the kind man and we figure out and rectify the problem. Another 20mins passes.

I leave office works wondering if it really matters that there are no colour pages. By this stage I’ve lost all capacity to make rational decisions and stupidly think that with 2 hours to go I can get the colour pages in. An unnamed hero prints them at work, I pick them up, take them to office works and get the necessary holes punched in the side. I frantically call a friend to met her in her office to do the page switch.

We now have about 30mins before submission time. I explain what needs to be done and get on to sorting out the pages. At some point I look up, horrified to see my friend in a tangle, undoing the coils of the spiral… “shit! not like that!”. Miscommunication on my part, and turns out that she actually saved the day – we definitely didn’t have enough time to unbind and then rebind four copies of my thesis. We resort to scissors and glue. I’m so exhausted by this stage I figure it doesn’t actually matter.

The examiners wont care. Will they???

Crisis averted 10mins before submission time, we head over to the little office and I sign my life away and collect my congratulatory mug (thanks ANU – is that all my magnum opus is worth?). Over celebratory drinks my supervisor tells me that submission day crises are part of the right of passage. While I agree to a certain extent, I’d say that the major lesson from this day is:

DON’T PRINT, BIND and SUBMIT your PhD on the same day.

Glad to hear it all worked out Carina! Have anyone else had a similar experience? What are your suggestions for getting through the printing / binding / submitting process?

Related posts

Back it up!

The Process

We’ve all been there.

Go on, admit it.

You’re working away solidly on your PhD and then starting to daydream… about being a doctor.

About how life-changing those two little letters preceding your name will be. About how cool it will be to add that prefix to credit cards, business card, airline bookings, email signatures…

And then you get there (yes you can, keep up the good work!). Then what do you actually do? Integrating that title into your life might not be as easy as you think. I realise this post is as weighty an issue as has ever been discussed on Thesis Whisperer (right up there with how put together the sexy librarian number), so I’ve given it a bit of thought.

I figure you can play it three ways:

The whole hog

Change everything. Then spend an inordinate amount of time explaining to all and sundry that you’re not that kind of doctor. Even then your parents and grandparents won’t understand, and they’ll be unwittingly deprived of immeasurable bragging rights.

The strictly business

Sit on the fence and just use it to stick on essential professional materials (and school reunion RSVPs)

The ‘playing it cool’

Get hit with the stark reality that things aren’t really all that different, and that the only people who understand what kind of a doctor you are happen to be doctors themselves.

What did you (or do you intend to) change when you finished your PhD? Did this change over time? If you have graduated, what did you actually do?

Dr (ahem) Danya Hodgetts graduated with her PhD in September 2011. At present she has assumed the much loftier title of Mum.

Related posts

What not to wear: the academic edition

What not to wear the academic edition, part two

“… I have just moved continents and been accepted into a PhD program and have six free months before I start. I was wondering whether you had any advice to give people like me on how best to use the time before starting a PhD in order to be prepared for a PhD!”

A great question topic for a post! Luckily @indecisionpersonified asked this question just as I was preparing a workshop called “Speedy Notetaking for the literature review and beyond”, one of our research masterclass series at the ANU. This workshop explores the connection between reading and making meaningful ‘chunks’ of thesis ready text, so I had some ready answers to hand.

At most universities the PhD  application process asks you to hand in a draft research proposal of around 5000 words. So it’s not the initial thoughts which we should concentrate on here, but how to develop those thoughts through focussed reading and note taking.

The reading problem is one you will deal with all through a PhD and beyond. Reading effectively and efficiently is a learnable skill which is not often explicitly taught – but it should be. You see, it’s a reading marathon you are on my friends. A marathon has it’s own kind of grim fun I’m sure, but it’s mostly exhausting. You need to be well prepared to run a marathon – or you might die.

Here’s three ideas to help you prepare and survive the reading marathon, which I share in in my note-taking workshop. I’m sure you have more, so I encourage you to share your own techniques in the comments.

Remember: it’s a capsule collection, not a jumble sale.

I have a weakness for those TV reality shows like Mary, Queen of Shops and What not to Wear where fashion experts help clueless punters build ‘capsule collections’ by making them sort through mountains of unflattering clothes (with many tears in the process).

Reading for a thesis is a similar problem. Ultimately your thesis should contain a carefully thought out selection of the mass of literature you have read. In the wikipedia article on creating a capsule collection they suggest you “choose one or two base colours that go with everything”. In literature terms, this translates as finding the key authors and/or research groups that produce stuff that is most closely aligned to your work and then reading ‘outwards’, using the bibliographies on these papers as your guide.

Identifying these key players is easier if you perform strategic citation searches; a citation search is a good indication of popularity, but not always quality. However, popular papers are a good place to start seeing what everyone is talking about.

A good tool for analysing citations is ‘Publish or Perish’. Publish or Perish was designed and built by the University of Melbourne Scholar Ann-Wil Harzing and uses Google scholar to perform the analysis (note: if you are on a Mac like me you will need to have some kind of windows emulator). To find out more about how Publish or Perish works, have a look at Harzing’s white paper here or download a PDF sample of the ebook.

If that sounds too complicated, you can perform a citation search in most scholarly databases. Visit your library to find out the tricks; time well spent I assure you.

Ditch the A4 mentality – seriously.

Look, I get that paper is a nice format to read. Portable and easy to mark up. I agree that there is nothing quite as satisfying as scribbling “WHAT??!!” and “WRONG!!” in the margins of a paper you dislike, but people – it’s time to face facts: A4 thinking’, as Chris Bigum puts it, will hold you back as a scholar. Reading electronically allows you to, as I put it earlier, “read like a mongrel”. Mongrel reading means scanning to ascertain if you need to bother reading more deeply.

A word search is the best tool for finding the ‘meaty’ parts of a paper or a book, without getting too invested in it. Try searching for ‘sign post’ language such as: “This paper argues that”, “In this paper we explore” or “the main question is”. Look for certain verbs as well, such as shown, proven, suggest, question, query and challenge. Another trick is to look for words that modify arguments such as: may, might, possibly and so on. Certain words will be important to your work, so keep a ledger of the ones that appear in papers that you find useful.

It’s important to keep search string information stored somewhere, so you can perform the same analysis time and time again – but that’s a big topic for another time.

Time yourself

Editing a book is a nightmare because so few academics will meet the deadline. It’s not because the academics are slackers, far from it. Most academics I know work extremely hard. I wonder though, if all that hard work is as efficient as it could be. I certainly see plenty of inefficient habits get passed on to PhD students.

Maybe it’s my architecture background, but I think a deadline is a deadline. Meeting a deadline means knowing how long it takes you to do something. I emphasised the ‘you’ in that sentence because people work at different speeds depending on experience, time of day and level of stress amongst other things. I’m not putting myself forward as a super efficient academic worker (my colleague Dr Emma-Kate Potter describes my job as “having coffee with people”) but I do measure myself so I can gauge how long it will take me to do something.

It’s important to do this measuring periodically and systemmatically to make sure you are accurate.

For example, I know that a 1000 word blog post takes me, on average, two hours (when I first started they used to take four hours). It will take me up to a day to produce a page of academic text, but it depends on what I am writing. Writing data, where I have largely done the thinking work, takes about the same time as it takes me to write blogs. Writing literature reviews, introductions or conclusions takes much, much longer. And tools matter a great deal to writing speed. My sister, @anitranot measured herself and noticed she was four times faster in Scrivener than in MSWord.

I have just timed my reading and I have improved a lot since I last measured myself, two years ago. It takes me around 20 minutes to read an academic paper in my field, which is about 1 minute and 40 seconds per page (I highlighted some stuff to come back to, but didn’t take notes). It will take me over 2 and half minutes per page with academic text that’s difficult or unfamiliar to me (again with highlighting, not writing notes). I only take notes when I have to write a paper, but I know that note taking will double, at least, the time I spend reading a paper. Once you know your speed you can estimate how many papers you can realistically read in the time you have available.

So @indecisionpersonified – I hope these tips help you make the most out of the next six months. Do you have tricks to share which make your reading more effective and efficient? How did you prepare yourself (or not) for the PhD reading marathon? Love to hear from you in the comments.

Related posts

Reading like a mongrel

Is your computer domesticating you?

The title of Judy Redman’s Thesis Whisperer posts last year, (Human) ethics applications with a minimum of pain 1 & 2 as she says, probably echoes most academics’ feelings about applying for ethical approval. I want to pick up on her observation that, painful though it may be, ethics applications can, if rigorous enough, improve your research design.

My research will take place in the UK National Health Service – I shall be on hospital wards and in GPs’ surgeries observing teaching – so I have to fill in an Integrated Research Application System (IRAS) form. Without going into too much detail you can be assured that the process is complex, and at the moment made more so by the reorganisation of the health service. For what IRAS terms the core study there are 80 main questions (with plenty of sub-sections) although some get filtered out if like me, you are not undertaking a complex clinical trial. The question-specific guidance notes run to more than 50 pages and the guidance on the project filter nearly 40: each peppered with hyperlinks to other documents.

But the questions you have to answer certainly make you think, and they do so by putting you into the shoes of your research subjects and through relentless question clusters. From the get-go the form is pretty unequivocal about jargon; for the overview of the research it stipulates that you should ‘use language comprehensible to lay reviewers and members of the public’ (A6-1 Summary of the Study) and that you should use no more than 300 words. The guidance notes for this one section not only refer to the classic why, what, who, where and how questions, but provide glosses on each. In all the guidance for this one question covers two single-spaced A4 pages of type.

For the rapidly diminishing band of researchers who are still cosily confined to their collegiate ghettoes where they can communicate in restricted codes, this is salutary indeed.

The guidance on the summary of the main issues exhorts you to consider the choices you made when designing your study, its purpose and design, recruitment, inclusion/exclusion, consent, risks burdens and benefits, confidentiality, conflict of interest and finally what will happen at the end of your study. The use of the past tense in ‘the choices you made’ may be somewhat disingenuous since I imagine most researchers are likely to review their choices in response to this close questioning. It goes on to explore, or rather make you explore your research questions, the objectives and the scientific justification for the research before requesting a ‘clear overview of the research protocol or project plan’ under the heading of design and methodology (A13).

It doesn’t let up. The people who designed this form have evidently done a lot of research and maybe supervised a lot of students as well as a lot of sitting on ethics committees. They know the questions to ask and the supplementaries that will skewer the ill-considered response.  Effectively it’s like a very extended supervision or a particularly rigorous examination, and that’s before you submit the form. Of course once you do, you benefit from the scrutiny of a panel of experts.

What it does then is give you access to a broader reservoir of expertise than you are likely to come across in your daily existence as a PhD student within and especially beyond the university.

I am lucky enough to have a thesis advisory panel which consists of 2 staff apart from my supervisor, and particularly fortunate in that one of them has just been through this still rather new IRAS process and she has been an invaluable guide; she agrees that going through it improved her research too. The process also required me to contact people in the university’s innovation centre and wrestle with data protection legislation. All this before I submit the form to be scrutinised by the experts, most of whom will not share my discipline but all of whom will have wide experience in assessing research. The process may seem a bit daunting but it’s likely to pick up problems which might derail my fieldwork or invalidate the results.

Answering these detailed questions in this way also primes you for writing the information sheets for respondents that have to accompany the application form, and it’s all grist to the mill of explaining your research to your friends, your family or anybody else. You might avoid or at least postpone that moment after a new acquaintance has asked you what you do when you notice their eyes glazing over with incomprehension and boredom.

Like Judy Redman I have sat on an ethics committee and can attest that they provide some of the more interesting committee-based discussions you are likely to encounter in a university. This committee which I chaired for a while, dealt with a wide range of applications, from students wanting to use research monkey for an online survey to full-blown clinical trials for drugs and treatments. In most cases I was impressed both with the amount of work and careful thinking that had gone into many of the applications and with the level of discussion from committee members.

That committee was particularly  fortunate in its recruitment of a lay member whose point of view was invaluable because she asked questions that the academics from a range of different disciplines had not considered. It would not be an exaggeration to say that after some 40 years of sitting on university committees, this one restored my faith in the potential of committees to do interesting and useful work.

So, although it has become something of a management cliché I would encourage you to embrace your application for ethical approval and think of it as an opportunity to widen the audience for your work, receive constructive criticism and think of it as a useful contribution to your development as a researcher.

Related posts

Human research ethics with the minimum of pain (part one)

Human research ethics with the minimum of pain (part two)

In the first few weeks of my thesis, I remember being directed to a blog post by “Sciencewoman” which gave some sage advice to students on how to complete your PhD in a reasonable amount of time. I recently re-read it only to find I had failed two of her major points. Namely, ‘Don’t pick a topic that requires multiple years of data collection,’ and ‘pick a field site within a few hours of your university/house’  - and definitely nowhere prone to natural disasters.

I ended up doing my thesis, in multiple stages, in a town 14 hours and 3 flights from my house, that experiences major flooding every wet season. However, somehow I managed to submit it in a reasonable amount of time (around 3.5 years).

I’m definitely not going to recommend that anyone else should attempt this; working in an overseas field site proved to be extremely stressful and disorienting at times. However, if you are misguided enough to pursue something similar, here are some of the things I found most important for keeping everything together (in all senses of the phrase!).

 “A person’s riches lie in the fewness of their needs”, Anonymous

Anyone who knows me would attest to the fact that I am by nature a piler not a filer. I always worked between my office and home computer and leaving a disorganized mix of documents on the desktops of both. However, I quickly learned that such disorganization only comes with the luxury of having a space of your own to pile in, where no-one else will ever disturb you. At one point my literature review was ‘organised’ in heaps of paper that overtook my desk and spilled onto the floor. I barely noticed until I realized my office mates were stepping over them all the time.

Twice throughout my PhD I had to literally pick up everything and take it with me, with around a month’s notice. I once used my whole baggage allowance taking textbooks and aforementioned piles of articles on a field trip, and quickly realized the cost in physical (and emotional) baggage wasn’t worth it.

Whilst this may sound like contrived zen wisdom, you are actually better off without any of those piles of stuff. I strived to go paperless and now own an e-reader and small laptop. I found this is all I needed to finish my thesis. I believe it saved me immeasurable hassle.

However, if you do have a portable PhD, and are working in a country prone to spontaneous torrential downpours and unearthed electrical storms, you also need to take precautions. I always took an over-supply of surge protectors and had a laptop bag with a heavy rain cover. It goes without saying that you need to make multiple backups, kept in different locations, in case your whole bag gets lost or your office is flooded (which has happened to colleagues of mine).

The only ‘piles’ I couldn’t avoid were the paper-based surveys which comprised my main study, however they were easily stored in bundles of plastic sleeves and couriered back to Australia. I also found out the hard way that laptops with complete drafts of your thesis inside are more vulnerable to breaking on long jarring bus rides than you might expect. Luckily the back up in another bag was intact!

“Plans are nothing, planning is everything”, Eisenhower.

During my final seminar I was told the best chapter of my thesis was my methodology. I was surprised as I thought it was one of the drier chapters to write and most interminable to read. However, I think it was successful because I had to co-ordinate and explain exactly what I was doing to colleagues and supervisors across languages (with a translator) and time zones.

Don’t get me wrong, I know all PhD students put much thought into their methods. However if you are working mainly by yourself, you have the ability to deviate from the plan if new ideas come up. In  my project this would have just caused confusion for all involved. The actual time frames for completing my activities changed frequently and suddenly, based on a everything from the wet season cutting off one field site to my research assistant giving birth. However, the fact I had an overall plan that I was forced to communicate simply and clearly meant we could pull the whole thing off in the end.

“You are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room”, Dr Seuss

I spent a hell of a lot of my spare time in the field by myself, generally in very basic hotel rooms. Whilst other international students could immerse themselves in volunteer work and other fun pursuits, guilt, and the need for some introversion, prevented me from doing this. Since none of the distractions that push their way into life at home are there, I found I had written large chunks of my thesis before I returned from each trip.

The down side of this is of course loneliness, although as other writers on this blog have noted, feeling lonely and marginalized is a common part of the PhD journey. In the end I think the loneliness at home was no worse than the loneliness when I was away. I came to value the solitude and chance to work uninterrupted while away. I also often had limited access to the internet, which I found made me more, rather than less productive.

I hope these tips may be useful to anyone else setting out on a similar adventure. It’s true that by choosing a field site more than 5km from my house I caused myself complications and headaches. However I don’t regret it, throughout the journey I made many valuable connections and strong friendships. I had the time to investigate a topic I love in more than one interesting place. There were times when it looked like everything was about to fall apart. In the end it came together, with a lot of patience and resourcefulness.

Do you have any tips for extreme fieldwork? Or extreme laboratory work perhaps? Did you any thinking ahead that saved your PhD from falling apart?

Related posts

The post fieldwork blues

A Phd is like a pilgrimage

Flick (whom I never once called by her actual name, Felicity Jones) was 12 years older than me and, although I never thought about it this way when she was alive, she was like the big sister I never had. I wanted to share some of the things I learned from my friend Flick because I miss her already.

Accept your failings, tell a story and laugh at them.

Flick would have been the first one to say she was terrible with money and didn’t really like cleaning the house. When she died she left behind a truly amazing number of unpaid parking fines. Her paperwork was a mess. Although she had drafted a will, she never got around to signing it. We all managed to have a laugh about this in the terrible week after she died because it was just so typical.

None of these omissions happened because she was stupid. Far from it – she’d gone back to school in the 1990s and earned a masters by research along with a couple of other degrees. Flick just had trouble paying attention to details. Terrible trouble. She tried all kinds of things to fix her attention problems, most of which didn’t work. When she was diagnosed with ADHD at age 50 she was relieved to finally have an explanation, but the treatment didn’t seem to make much difference.

While most of us hide our failings from the world, Flick would tell funny stories about her stuff ups, with great relish and a hearty belly laugh that invited you to laugh with her. Flick’s acceptance of her own failures went along with acceptance of other people’s failings. Everyone knew you could trust Flick not to judge and to keep secrets. I think this is the reason why so many people confided in her.

So much time in academia dedicated to the pursuit of perfection it can be easy to forget that stories of failure are often more interesting – and human. I’m pleased that stories of my own failure, such as “Academic Arrogance”, “Why you might be stuck” and “the stegosaurus strategy” have resonated so much with others. While working to accept your failings you may find solutions – or not – but laughter helps regardless.

There’s only actions and consequences

Flick was a great parent because she approached it with intelligence, care and diligence. Her adult daughters genuinely enjoyed spending time with her, which I think is a testament to her success. I used to ask Flick for parenting advice because I aspire to be a parent/friend when Thesis Whisperer Jnr grows up.

Flick often talked about how important it was to equip your kids for the world, but to never  fall into the trap of feeling sorry for them. The key, she claimed, was to not try to fix all their problems. If you swoop in to save your kids all the time, she said, it sends the message that you don’t have confidence in their ability to fix things for themselves. The job of a parent is to help build confidence, not undermine it.

In my view many research supervisors could take a leaf from Flick’s book of parenting.

I often encounter supervisors who think their primary job is to edit their student’s writing, but correcting is not helpful past a certain point because it disempowers people. It is far better to spend time teaching students how to avoid the mistakes in the first place, and then get out of their way. Standing back is not the same as being neglectful. Research students are highly capable adults. We need to respect their abilities and let them fix their own mistakes.

Be who you are

It was always easy tobuy presents for Flick; you knew what she liked. Her taste was eclectic and she was enthusiastic about all kinds of stuff. Someone  in the 18th century would have said Flick had ‘strong affections’.

She liked steampunk, celtic tattoos, spikey high heeled boots, Led Zepplin, Georgette Heyer novels, the history Wales, Nat King Cole, quilting, cable knitting, corsets, second life, Cafe del Mar, Jamie Oliver, purple hand luggage, Vince Jones, little big planet and cupcakes – just to name a few.

The thing I will remember most about Flick and her interests will be her enjoyment of them. No matter what anyone else thought, she was confident about what she liked was interesting and worthwhile. This was an attractive quality that drew people to her.

For instance, I’ll admit that I never understood her fascination with the online community Second Life. I’ll admit I was judgmental and thought Second Life was a waste of time, but I kept my thoughts to myself because Flick threw herself with enthusiasm into it and built relationships with many people there. After she died it was some measure of comfort for me to read about the SL community’s grief for her. SL was a creative outlet for Flick; a lot of the stuff she made in there was beautiful. I’ve included one of her SL avatar pics here because I think, in some ways, the self she made in SL was the most pure expression of her aesthetic interests.

What I take from this, for research practice, is the importance of curiosity – and following your interests with enthusiasm. I like to write academic papers about odd things: whingeing, food, hobbies. Sometimes I have a hard time getting these papers into the peer review process, perhaps because these topics don’t seem important to journal editors.

I write papers on more banal topics just to ‘get runs on the board’. While these kinds of papers are much easier to publish, my heart is not in them and they take an agonisingly long time to complete. I guess Flick would say sometimes we have to stick with the things that interest us in the face of indifference of others, gate keepers or not. Eventually, if you persist, such writings will find an audience who will appreciate them.

Thank you, dear reader, for staying with me this far and indulging my need to pay homage to my friend Flick. I found writing this helped me process the loss just a little bit. Now I’m wondering – have you had a friend pass who was precious to you? Did they teach you anything about life and work that you want to share?

Related Posts

Vale Professor Alison Lee

In memory of Maria Cugnetto

I’m running two student workshops while I’m here, at the University of Edinburgh and at Herriot Watt University. Hope to see some of you there. Otherwise – catch you all next week!

Jenny is about six months into her degree and just beginning to discover the true extent of the literature which might be relevant to her topic, by which I mean she’s completely freaking out.

Jenny ‘s had a good start to her literature review. She initially read things her supervisor suggested and then went off exploring, using the references in those papers as a stating point. She met with her subject librarian who taught her about databases and how to use Google Scholar properly (not everything is in there, just so you know). The librarian taught her how keywords work and how to do citation searches. With these new mad skills of library Jenny discovered a vast amount of stuff, which, although it was interesting, seemed only peripherally related to her topic.

She discussed ideas she had read about with her supervisors and some of her peers. She wrote a bit, then read some more. Under the influence of the literature, her ideas about her thesis changed. She started to recognise the same names started appearing in the bibliographies and understand how the scholars were linked together in skeins of thought. Being a social type of person she did a bit of academic networking and started to know, socially, some of the people who wrote those papers. This made her feel more confident. Comfortable even. Part of a community.

Until she downloaded THAT paper.

She didn’t realise how important the paper was at first. She merely downloaded it as part of a conference proceeding, read it and then tucked it away in her database under the mental tag: ‘interesting, but not relevant’. There it might have stayed, unloved, if she had not had her paper proposal accepted at the next iteration of that conference. Being the diligent type of student, Jenny dug out the proceedings again to get a feel for the length and tone of the papers.

So it wasn’t until the second read through that she realised that it was THAT paper.

You see – suddenly that paper spoke to her. That paper, on the second read, seemed to touch on every idea that she had thought about so far, but – you know – in a better way. It took her half formed ideas and wrapped beautiful words around them. Although it didn’t precisely scoop her thesis topic, that paper showed her that she had only been reading in the shallow end of the pool.

The paper had a bibliography; full of papers that she had not read. This surprised Jenny. She had thought she was on top of the main players in her field. So she read some of the referenced papers and, as it turns out, all of them were interesting, relevant – even important. She started to see THAT paper as a godsend. It was, if you like, a set of goggles she could use to swim in the deep end of the pool.

Then an uncomfortable thought intruded.

What might have happened if she had not bothered to read that paper twice?

What if she had carried on, without knowing that all this other literature existed? What might her examiners – who surely would have read all those papers – have thought of her? They would think she was a bad scholar! They would have failed her!

Hence the phonecall to me (I’m a useful friend to have when you are doing a PhD as you can imagine). I tried to tell Jenny that she was borrowing trouble. She had now read the paper. All those terrible things wouldn’t happen. But she was far from reassured. Why did she not see the importance the first time she read it? How had she missed all this literature it pointed to? It was clear to me that her faith in her new mad skills of library was deeply shaken.

So I promised this post.

You see, the feelings Jenny was experiencing are completely normal. In fact, realising you have just missed a piece of important literature is number four in the Thesis Whisperer’s top five #phdemotions. In case you were wondering, here is the list:

1. Elation when you realise you know more than your supervisor about your topic and you feel brave enough to argue about it.
2. Fear of being ‘found out’ as fraud, not really knowing enough/being smart enough to be Phd student.
3. Unexpected admiration of your own writing.
4. The “I’m a genius! Why hasn’t anybody thought to do that before?” moment before people point out the obscure paper you’ve not read.
5. Misplaced smugness after photocopying/downloading loads of stuff but not actually reading it.

So why didn’t Jenny see how important this paper was the first time she read it?

Answer: sometimes you can’t see the gorillas.

There’s a difference, some artists contend, between looking and seeing. Looking involves taking in a scene with your eyes, seeing involves making meaning from it with your brain. The key to making meaning is relevance. It’s surprisingly easy to miss the relevance of other people’s work, partly, perhaps, because of how we are wired to look at stuff in the first place.

There’s a famous experiment with a Gorilla and basketball players which is a good demonstration of how our processes of looking. When participants were asked to watch a video and count the number of passes basketball players were making, most failed to notice a guy wearing a gorilla suit wandering through the scene, even when he stopped to beat his chest. When you watch the video knowing the gorilla is there it is almost impossible to believe that people could miss him. But those people were looking at the ball being passed between players and paying attention to the number of times this happened, they were not looking for gorillas. They were not primed to look for a gorilla, so they literally did not see it.

I suspect this is what happened to Jenny on the first reading. She hadn’t yet read enough to know what she should be looking for. She wasn’t yet primed and so couldn’t see what she needed to see. Just as you can’t understand a whole conversation from two lines of dialogue, academic papers rarely make sense in isolation. Re-reading is an important part of the process. If you don’t see the point the first, second or even third read, you have not made a mistake – you just haven’t seen gorillas yet. Or there may be no gorillas to be seen. Getting to know literature is like watching a picture come into focus. Be patient, just keep reading.

What would have happened if Jenny had not re-found this paper ‘by accident’

Answer: there are no accidents.

The first thing to realise is that she didn’t re-discover this paper by ‘accident’ at all. I contend that if Jenny hadn’t gone looking for that conference proceedings for another reason, she still would have re-discovered the paper anyway, probably via a citation. I routinely download articles without realising I already have them until my database tells me. I’m experienced enough to realise this is not because I have made an error; this is just what happens sometimes. I can’t keep everything I have ever read in my head. I may not have recognised the importance the first time around and therefore forgotten about it. Procedures are important for this reason. So long as Jenny kept on doing exactly what she was doing – reading, writing, thinking, talking – she would eventually have found, if not everything, enough of it to convince the examiners that she is a competent scholar.

How had Jenny ‘missed’ all that other literature?

Answer: that paper was a piece of wormhole literature.

One of my favourite TV shows is Stargate SG1, mostly because of the way Col Samantha Carter kicks ass the wormhole itself. It’s a fantastic magic device that catapults our heroes to another world, in seconds. THAT paper was a research wormhole; it catapulted Jenny into a whole new area of potentially relevant literature. Again I say, if she kept doing what she was doing, she would have found all those papers – eventually. But sometimes, even travelling at light speed, it can take a long time to get somewhere. That paper helped Jenny, briefly, bend the laws of research physics for a moment – and that’s got to be a good thing.

Have you had an experience similar to Jenny’s? Do you have any suggestions for making sure that you are getting everything you need out of the literature?

Relevant Posts

5 ways to tame the literature dragon

The Top five #phdemotions

The idea for this post emerged when we were having lunch one day and I complained that some of my academic colleagues didn’t like blogs or blogging – and viewed me with some suspicion because I enjoy it so much. Evelyn wondered if some academics are “too posh to promote” and told me about the classes on online marketing she is doing with creative writers. I thought it was so interesting I asked her to blog it for me.

Thanks Evelyn!

Unlike some creative writers, I have a hard-nosed commercial bent to the way I promote my work that comes from a decade at the coal face of tabloid newspapers. Every journalist knows that you have to sell your story idea to the Chief of Staff or section editor before it will have the chance of getting in the paper, and you do this day in and day out, deadline after deadline.

Heard the one about the journalist too posh to promote? No, neither have I. But when it comes to creative writing many emerging fiction writers are nervous about how to sell themselves without selling out. What if they have yet to score that book deal? It’s a case of what comes first – the chicken or the egg? The book deal or the self promotion?

Then there are published authors who would prefer not to get their hands dirty with what they regard as a publicist’s job – or are simply unsure of how to best go about harnessing digital media to promote themselves.

This doesn’t just apply to writers. Academics can be very ivory tower about going digital with their ideas, preferring to keep to the prestige journals and monograph book publishing contracts at a university press. The fact that these rarefied routes may reach only hundreds of readers if they are lucky doesn’t deter them. Indeed, the savvy academics who garner thousands of readers via blogs and online opinion sites are often seen as “sell-outs”.

I am not sure why having a large audience is a bad thing. Don’t we want people to interact with our work? Don’t we want our ideas to spread and flourish?

I work in a public art gallery promoting artists, and I can understand why they, just like writers, are reluctant to self promote. Unlike actors, their work isn’t about being on stage and in front of everyone. Indeed, actor/writers like Stephen Fry, Richard E. Grant and Steve Martin have very good digital footprints and are incredible self promoters and I believe this is because they have learned to accept rejection at the audition stage. They are also skillful in presenting a “public persona” that is both the “real” them but one step (or more) removed, so it is not like being naked on stage when they are promoting their movie on a TV talk show.

Writers, artists – and many creative academics – are different. Unlike actors who can “disappear” into a role, for these people work is the heart and soul, blood and guts of what they do, and rejection is heartbreakingly personal. Creative people feel things sharply, which is how they can create entire fictional worlds and artworks out of thin air. Like the canary down the mine shaft, their antennae is calibrated to the zeitgeist. It’s like they tap into the raw nerve of humanity and bleed for all of us.

So it is brutally difficult for them to put on the sandwich board and call out – “roll up, roll up, see what I have got!”

Alas, that’s the cold reality of 21^st century life. As the digital revolution gives opportunities, it also takes away whole professions and people who used to be able to help creative types; such as publicists on tap at publishing houses.

This is why we all need to be able to get out there and push and promote.

I teach a tertiary course that helps creative practitioners do just that. Using a mixture of entrepreneurship, business, public relations and journalism skills, this course assists students to be their own best publicist.

I know an academic who dismisses the skills of communications practitioners with the line “any sentient being can teach themselves to write a media release” – which is certainly true if a business kindly hands you information about a product they would like you to promote. But what if you are that product? How do you objectively write about yourself?

Learning how to put on a public persona online is the key to promoting your work. It is also easier if you stand back and see yourself as a brand, rather simply a single product like a thesis, exhibition or book. To do this, I ask students not to focus on the one thing they are working on, but all they have to offer and what makes them unique. I get them to do a SWOT analysis, which might seem odd to creative people.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats – and you really need to assess these honestly to see where you fit in your chosen marketplace. This is your brand, and it is more than the one thing you are working on, even if that is an all consuming thesis. Besides, PhD’s are now so varied an artist may be working on an exhibition for their doctorate, just as I am working on a novel for my doctorate in creative writing.

How can you use your research skills to become a public intellectual, rather than a one-monograph wonder? By doing your SWOT, and knowing your brand. Postgraduate students have to narrow their focus for their doctorates. I encourage them to think widely about how to apply their broad areas of expertise to the marketplace. And figure out how to leverage what they know into what is topical, newsworthy and current.

My students have often found this confronting at first, but as we mind map and brainstorm, it gets easier and more exciting for them to expand the many areas of knowledge they have into a whole range of business ideas, pitches for news related stories, books, websites and a whole range of products.

I set them an exercise is to look at how their favorite authors promote themselves on the web. Who has a website, who has a blog, who tweets and who has a business Facebook page? The answer is that while the web is filled with savvy Australian writers who have realized they need to be their own publicist, there are also others who are either too posh to promote, or too scared, or just haven’t understood that it is necessary.

The title of my paper at the recent Independent Publishers Conference at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre for Books and Writing, held by the Small Press Network, was “Google Me: writers taking control of their brand in an era of digital publishing”. I asked – what does your digital footprint say about you? I revealed some tips on how to build value around your core brand.

Futurist Gerd Leonhard says that “trust is the new currency” and I maintain that you nurture that trust with your audience by giving away some of your work and ideas for free – knowing that it will build your brand and expand your fan base. After all, who is going to buy your books, come to your exhibition, fill the seats at your conference presentations and ultimately, follow you to the university that will gladly have you teach for them if you can show that you do indeed have a fan base?

It’s your fans. The people you have nurtured through social media.

It is very 20^th century to rely on getting a book contract and think that’s all there is to having a writing career. Or landing a lecturing or research position and believing you can avoid having to dirty your hands by constantly selling your ideas to the world. This is the 21 st century, and you need to play by the new rules. The academic adage is not longer just publish or perish. It is promote or perish.

Gerd Leonhard says that social networkers are the new broadcasters. What happened to the old broadcasters? Declining newspaper sales, television announcers being boned, programs being axed, mighty media empires crumbling. So, don’t be old school – know your brand, and promote it. Learn from the savvy creatives who do just that – Google them! For more tips, check out my website (www.evelyntsitas.com) and buy my book on entrepreneurship for creative practitioners when I launch it next year!

Other posts by Evelyn

I’ll have what she’s having: hottie research envy

Doctoral Devotion: to complete or not to complete?

This is a story about a doctoral student named Laura (a real person, but not her real name) and how she came to pull her hair out (well a few hairs anyway).

Laura began her PhD this year and really hit the ground running – within a few weeks, she was giving her supervisors many many pages about the literature on her topic. Laura’s supervisors are conscientious, organised and well-intentioned. They gave her masses of feedback on her drafts, with many helpful comments about content, style and structure, including comments such as: ‘good observation – now relate this to an over-all argument’ and ‘engage critically with these definitions’.

This is where things went wrong and Laura pulled some hairs out. She came to talk to me about writing, and it was clear that despite how productive she had been, and how helpful her supervisors had been, she was feeling overwhelmed and her supervisors were feeling puzzled about their meetings and her progress.

It took me a while to understand what was happening and it was actually very simple. Laura is a ‘drafter’ – one of the fabulous kinds of writers who use the writing process for thinking and organising, right from the beginning. I myself prefer being more of a ‘planner’ – the kind who likes to hover around the ideas with maps and doodles and tables and post-it notes and imaginary landscapes – before being ready to settle down to write.

Laura’s supervisors are closer to the ‘planner’ end of the spectrum too. They like to discuss ideas, make rough outlines and bullet point lists. They think that if something is written down, with paragraphs, it must already have a plan, an argument, or an analysis behind it – so it must be ready for polishing and tweaking.

IN FACT Laura’s many pages with paragraphs were really more like notes, capturing her initial ideas and understanding about what she was reading. It was way too early for her to start engaging critically with some of the ideas, or developing an argument – these ideas weren’t even forming analytical categories or themes yet.

All the conscientious feedback from her supervisors was missing the mark, because they had different assumptions from Laura about the thinking and writing process, and had not had a way of talking about it explicitly.

So the moral of the story is:

We need a meta-language – or whatever you want to call it – we need some models for talking about our writing and our writing process with supervisors, so that we are on the same page.

One kind of model, with some meta-language which was useful for Laura and her supervisors, is the Onion. It is a way of showing how more complex types of academic writing, including critique, argument and analysis, are built up from simpler types of academic writing, like description. (See the diagram below.)

Laura’s supervisors thought that a written draft would already include critical thinking about the literature, an argument and analysis. (Because planners have often done this work before they write a draft.) So they gave Laura advice about how to polish and improve these things.

However Laura was already writing drafts when she was still right at the beginning of her thinking about the literature. (Because ‘drafters’ use the act of writing as part of the process of thinking through the ideas.) So Laura was writing descriptive drafts, but her supervisors were giving her feedback suitable for polishing persuasive and critical writing. Which made Laura panic, and feel like she was not doing good work, which got in the way of her natural drafting process – which made her supervisors wonder why Laura seemed to be stuck, and was not acting on all their helpful advice.

You can see where I’m going with this: If there was an explicit way of discussing the writing process from the beginning, this misunderstanding could have been avoided. Laura and her supervisors could have begun their relationship with a discussion about their different ways of working, about what kinds of feedback from her supervisors would be helpful for each stage of her thinking and writing.

‘Planners‘ versus ‘drafters‘ and the Onion are a couple of models for writing which people have found useful – and there are plenty of others. Personally I don’t think the technical terms are that important – the point is having some kind of shared, explicit language for talking about our writing processes, to help us work in all our diverse and wonderful ways, but still get on the same page.

Have you talked to your supervisor about what kind of writing style you prefer? Or have you just had similar conflict to what is described here and ended up feeling hurt and misunderstood? How do you respond to well meant, but useless feedback?

Related Posts

How to use deliberate practice to improve your writing

3 reasons I hate writing sometimes (but do it anyway)