Author: Paul

Defining bleurgh probably isn’t necessary as I reckon almost everyone in academia understands the feeling experienced when the stress of writing the paper is finished and the anxiety of waiting for the feedback has yet to kick in. That feeling of limbo/impending doom alternates with the exhilaration of having actually written something that someone else…

Ok.  There it is then.  Two weeks later than I had hoped/anticipated/prayed for:  the first draft is away and I can move onto other things until my supervisor tells me otherwise. Having written many assignments before, for some reason I still hadn’t worked out that the final read-through and amendments take up so much time. …

A good start back after the kids half-term.  I have managed to get some reading in: Kolb and Honey & Mumford in particular are important background stuff, although they (almost inevitably) lead to Piaget  and on… I am sure there are many people who can just pick up on Piaget’s ideas, but apperently I am…

I have lost about four days this year due to the snow.  As I work from home, my job is affected inversely – the more snow there is, the more work I have to do and the less research gets done.  This means that I have made no progress at all today other than to…

To date I have: Made a start (several thousand words) on the introduction. It will do for now, but certainly needs attention in the near future as it doesn’t quite say what I want to say. Just matters of inflection rather than substance I suspect, but hey. Completed the systematic searches for the literature review…

I am on the way. I have a couple of thousand words written for the intro, which although slow, are reasonable given the time I have had. Time is the key here, I suspect. Being interrupted right at that crucial time where your thoughts come together, is something I need to manage better. It isn’t…

Well. There it is… my first journal submission. Coo. It is exciting and vaguely sickening at the same time… any piece of work involves your time and skill, and to ask for solid criticism is really quite nerve-wracking. So, I guess it is just a case of waiting for a few months and then waiting…

I have now finished the systematic searches, which means I have searched ten or eleven databases and now have an initial reading list of about 100 papers. This has resulted from searches using standardised and predetermined search-terms which are, I suspect, open to argument regarding their appropriateness. This, I believe is one of the greatest…

This is getting to be a pain in the backside… because of the snow I am unable to take any days off, therefore my ability to study/research drops dramatically: I would normally be able to take about 16 hrs of research time during a Thursday/Friday period, of which I have achieved less than four. This…

It is the sound of my brain being used again for the first time in ages! Coo, continuing my database searches with Ingenta Connect (bloody useless!) and JSTOR, it goes from the sublime to the ridiculous… IC refuses to search for terms with more than one wildcard and JSTOR only allows three! Honestly, call themselves…