Month: March 2016

How important are regular supervisor meetings?

You are bound to have a PhD supervisor as a scholar. Sometimes you may even have two supervisors who are in charge of monitoring our progress and extending you support throughout your PhD journey. A supervisor is assigned with the duty to keep a track of the progress that you make and have your schedule … Continue reading “How important are regular supervisor meetings?”

You are bound to have a PhD supervisor as a scholar. Sometimes you may even have two supervisors who are in charge of monitoring our progress and extending you support throughout your PhD journey. A supervisor is assigned with the duty to keep a track of the progress that you make and have your schedule reports ready with him. This responsibility to monitor your progress is important for your benefit as well as it ensures that you do not lag behind in your research process and you are able to complete your PhD in a timely fashion with the regular guidance and support that has been extended by your supervisor. Supervisors have the calibre and discretion to extend this support to the supervisor in long distance also but however, some amount of meeting regularly is important to cope up with the intellectual and emotional demands that a PhD raises. The question that should be discussed here is, how often should the supervisor and scholar be meeting?

The first thing that is important here is that the frequency of the meeting between both the scholar as well as the researcher should be mutually agreed upon by negotiation.  No one party should be dictating terms to the other party in terms of relationships. Too many meetings some time feel like an apt solution to pace up the work but that may not be necessarily true as if the meetings are too frequent , it can get counterproductive and become more like a burden or a chore rather than a practical and useful chance which could be used productively to guide or to learn.

There isn’t a thumb rule that says, it is the right frequency to meet.  How often you meet your supervisor should be determined by the kind of support you think you need for your work. You subject knowledge, prior research experience and exposure to statistical techniques will determine how much of learning and support would be required by you. Usually scholars find it important to meet often in the initial stages of their PhD till they get on track and know exactly what is to be done, same thing in the end of your programme when you need to finalise your thesis. During the interim period, often people tend to meet less as most of the time scholars are busy with the allotted writing or research work quite independently.

How often you meet may not be as important as how much of time when you meet is used up productively. Try to maximise the productivity of how much ever opportunity that you get to meet your supervisor.

 

Creating the foundation for your Literature Review: continued

Having discussed the foundation of the literature review in the formative blogs, we can further discuss the important components of a good literature review. Create sub heads of the collected content for the LR:  you must know the main themes that you will be breaking down your literature review into.  Whatever material that you have … Continue reading “Creating the foundation for your Literature Review: continued”

Having discussed the foundation of the literature review in the formative blogs, we can further discuss the important components of a good literature review.

Create sub heads of the collected content for the LR:  you must know the main themes that you will be breaking down your literature review into.  Whatever material that you have collected, you must stack it up under the correct subhead. There may be some content that you wouldn’t know where to place that is ok. Keep them aside and leave them for the ends rather than discarding them. At the end of this task you may be able to place them better. When you finish segregating all the content into its relevant stack you will get the idea of how much weight you have allocated to each sub theme and whether it is worth it or no.

Design your conceptual schema: all the sub heads that you have created in the previous stage must be organised in a sequential manner, they must go well with each other for which you need to put up ideas that go together under one head and ideas that contradict each other at a more appropriate place.  Sequencing out the sub heads is going to help you to create the chapterization pattern to add a sense of connectivity between the ideas and as the reader goes through the chapter from the beginning to the end, he is able to graduate in his understanding and learning of the concepts in a smooth manner.

Start paraphrasing:  when you have put up each thing to where it belongs, you need to now give it your writing so you got to actually start beginning to write your literature review. You can start from any of the subheads, it won’t matter. In fact it is always better to start from a section you are most comfortable with or the one that excites you the most. At this stage, you must not forget to put the citations while you are paraphrasing the content. If you procrastinate the citation work for the end you aren’t doing anything but inviting trouble for yourself.  After you have completed the paraphrasing task of all the sections, you have accomplished a big stage in your literature review

 

By the end of this stage you would have completed the first draft stage of your literature review. Congratulations it isn’t any less than a milestone.

 

 

 

Creating the foundation for your Literature Review

Her we will discuss with you some step process that will help you to create the foundation for your literature review in a jiffy. Finalise your area of research: Before you actually start looking out for articles and books, you must narrow down on your area of research before actually starting with any further on … Continue reading “Creating the foundation for your Literature Review”

Her we will discuss with you some step process that will help you to create the foundation for your literature review in a jiffy.

  • Finalise your area of research: Before you actually start looking out for articles and books, you must narrow down on your area of research before actually starting with any further on work in that area. Once you do that, you would know exactly which books and articles to pick up and not get attracted towards other material, even though it may appear fascinating to you. Concentrate only on what you have decided upon.
  • Explore appropriate Literature: do a comprehensive hunt for books and articles that you can find in your area of research. By reading the abstract itself you would come to know whether it pertains to your area of study or no and once if   you know that the research paper belongs to your area of study, down load and  if required print those articles to have them ready to be used for drafting the Literature review. All this work may not show much productivity coming into hand, but this is important work and the foundation for creating a sound literature and also simplifying the writing task. Do not take a very long time to do that and set aside a specific time frame in which you want to do it so that within the given time, you have created the base for your entire section/chapter.
  • Search for relevant content in the chosen material: you would have to next do the task of skimming the content of each of the research paper or article that you have chosen linked to your topic of the study. While you do the skimming part, you will have to extract out the relevant part that you will be using in your research. That is:
  • Definition of the terms that are used in the research paper
  • Findings, claims and constructs about the research that is getting investigated by you
  • Identified gaps in the study
  • Follow up studies that are called
  • Your opinion about agreement or disagreement with the constructs that you have chosen in the study

When you find these important things from each of the paper, bring them directly onto MS words. Type the key content and while you are doing that keep putting down the name of the author and other referential details alongside itself.  Word gives a very simplified option to create an automatic bibliography for you, work on that.

When you are done till here, it becomes easier to move to further completing the Literature Review which we will discuss in the subsequent blogs.

Some Characteristics of A Poor Quality Thesis

Whatever you have learnt throughout your education, you use it or produce it in your thesis in some or the other way. However, the sad part is that a lot of dissertations show the author in not a very good light. You can get here a reasons that can make your dissertation fall short of … Continue reading “Some Characteristics of A Poor Quality Thesis”

Whatever you have learnt throughout your education, you use it or produce it in your thesis in some or the other way. However, the sad part is that a lot of dissertations show the author in not a very good light. You can get here a reasons that can make your dissertation fall short of good quality

Bad writing:  Not all of us are great writers. More so when prior to writing your dissertation you have not had much experience of writing. You may find yourself struggling a lot in that case. Remember that whatever field your dissertation belongs to writing is an integral part of it and if you feel that writing isn’t one of your strengths, you have no choice but to do something about it.  Better than sitting over your problem, it is better to do something about it. There are a lot of places you could go for help. A lot of universities have writing centres or you may find a helpful colleague who would help you to improvise on your mistakes.

Weak foundation of thesis:  remember that if the foundation of your thesis is not good the entire thesis is going to turn out bad. You need to have a strong foundation over which you can rest your paper. If you actually feel that   you are struggling with the concept of your thesis and it lacks strength and originality, it is better to drop it rather than trying to build an entire thesis over a weak foundation. A smart move is to examine the quality of your thesis right in the beginning itself.  The best way to know it is that while maintaining your originality, read through other theses in detail and identify the concept that has not really been thought before.

Defending a claim that is unsubstantiated: Never write on a topic that does not have significant research to support it. Often writers get pepped with the idea of writing about something exciting that is completely out of box and has never been discussed before.  However, that logic appears more applicable when you are writing a brief concept paper and not an entire thesis. If you are so intrigued by a new concept that you cannot stop yourself from writing about it, you can mention it briefly in a section specified as “Areas of further Research”