PhD diary

Progress has been slow over the past two weeks, and I need to get motivated to write better discussions for Chapter 6. Why am I so slow in writing? I am envious of people who can write/speak while thinking quickly. It was a great relief to meet my supervisor last week. My revisions of Chapter read more

Finally, after ten months’ struggle, I have completed writing the findings chapter. For the last month, I have been amending the chapter by revising narrative descriptions and some linguistic errors, and adding the findings of a thematic analysis of interview data. The findings chapter has 35,000 words. My supervisor said she initially thought the volume was read more

I felt able to step back from my data a little and looked at the whole picture from above, reading through my supervisors’ feedback comments on my draft chapters. The end of my third year is approaching, and strangely, my enthusiasm for researching the field has now fully returned. In my spare time, I tried read more

When sending draft chapters to my supervisors, I always have mixed feelings with a sense of achievement “I’ve accomplished my goals for this month”, a touch of guilt “I could’ve done better research”, and a strange calm “I do not want to think about anything now”. My writing habits have become much more consistent in read more

I have completed Chapter 5, and have been working on Chapter 6. It’s a bit strange feeling to see there the four summary tables that I initially made for my convenience, with no intention of including them in my thesis. But my supervisors approved the idea of including them. When writing Chapter 5, I first read more

The draft chapter of findings will soon be complete. I’ve been revising the presentation and narrative explanations of my findings, and over the next few days, I will add some translations. The target next week is to finalise the chapter. There seems to be a great deal of disciplinary variation in presenting results from qualitative read more

During my PhD programme, I’ve become less sociable – and it’s getting worse towards the final year. I know a couple of PhDs who worked in a lab for fixed hours, were very punctual, stopped work at 5:00 pm and went out to socialise. I work from home, shut myself in a room when I’m read more