Teaching and Teacher Learning

I am a planner, an organizer, a nit-picker. I love to plan. I love to plan dinner, I love to plan vacations, I love to plan my work. OK, so I might be a bit of a controlfreak. But planning is one of the most essential things to do while conducting your PhD, so we were told last week by The Dutch PhD Coach Arjenne Louter. While I might be over-organizing things myself sometimes (illustrated by the pictures below: (1) my “Wall of Thought”, (2) my neighbour’s wall), still I found some tips to be very helpful. Especially when you are just starting out as a PhD, just like me, planning four years into the future might make you somehow scared, stressed, or leave you completely blank. What on earth will you be doing in your 4th year when you have not even been around for 6 months yet?! Do not panic, for here are some tips for planning your PhD when you have only just started.

Plan your PhD: Tips for starting PhD’s

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It has been one and a half year ago since I have started my PhD research project and although most of the time I’m in a flow, fully enjoying the work, some challenges I face along the way will prevent me from keeping the fire burning. As Anna van der Want has shown in her blogpost humor can be helpful in dealing with struggles that come along in a research project. In this blogpost I present four ideas that can brighten up your days as a PhD-student, which I’ve found during a symposium of the PhD-network from the Netherlands Educational Research Association (VPO) last week.

On a rainy Wednesday afternoon a group of Dutch PhD’s gathered in Den Bosch to hear not just any story about being successful in PhD-life from experienced professionals in PhD supervision and planning. Especially Joseph Kessels’ story will help me when I’m in need of a research related energy boost, since he shed light on two sides of becoming a researcher. He came up with some realizations that can help PhD-students to be proud of your work even when you lost the spark for a while.

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Like I promised in my last post, this time I’ll tell you a little about how I spend my days. Since it’s Monday today, I’ll talk about what I did last week. I even kept some notes on a little post-it!

Monday

I actually started my Monday by doing some very useful tasks. I cleaned my desk and my outlook inbox. Even though I try to stay organised, my desk usually gets pretty messy. The picture below is a photo of my desk today, so my cleaning effort was futile. I’ll try again soon.

Monday is also teaching day at our institute. I wasn’t teaching last week, but because I supervise the research projects of student-teachers, there were plenty of research plans for me to provide feedback on.

The third big thing I did on Monday was think about an elevator pitch about my research subject and why it is interesting. My supervisor asked a few of us to prepare a pitch for a presentation on Friday. We also spent some time discussing what the presentation would look like.   Read more

Whenever I tell people about my job as a PhD student they tell me that they could “never work on the same thing for four years!”.

Like doing your PhD is mindlessly slaving on one specific task, non-stop, for four years. I guess it’s one of the most common misconceptions about doing your PhD. While it is true that I am spending four years working towards one thing: my dissertation and defence, I am not working on one thing at all.

In fact, being a PhD student is a very diverse job with a lot of possibilities and quite some freedom to choose. After four (or three, or five) years, your dissertation needs to be finished, but it’s not like you can decide to start writing it on your first day.

Things that need to be done before you can finish your dissertation:

1. You need to read about your subject
2. Your research needs to be planned
3. Data needs to be collected
   1. Instruments should be developed (or found somewhere)
   2. You will spend time finding participants
4. Data needs to be analysed (maybe you even need to spare some time for data cleaning)
5. Results need to be interpreted
6. And of course those results should be written down
   1. You will have to spend some time researching journals that you want to publish in
   2. You will spend endless hours polishing your text until it is perfect (although it never will be)
7. You’ll have numerous meetings with your supervisor(s) to discuss all these different steps

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I’m standing in the supermarket. It is a rather large supermarket, but luckily I only have to be in one department. So, here I am, standing in front of a pile of boxes of chocolate sprinkles (“hagelslag”, in its Dutch term). The place has huge departments and lots of choice. I recently got hired to do research on boxes of hagelslag. Which makes me very excited, because I love hagelslag! I look at the shelves, no, I gaze in awe at the shelves, where piles and piles of hagelslag are exposed, hundreds and thousands of different kinds. Since I know nothing about hagelslag yet, I have to get a grip on the field I’m studying. I have to choose the right boxes of hagelslag to start with, otherwise it will take me ages to find some information. After all, I’m getting paid now to choose the appropriate boxes of hagelslag for my research. Where to start?? Read more