What Have I Been Doing?
So, as I come up on three months of being in Australia and a little over two months of active study, many people are probably wondering, what exactly do you do at the start of a thesis writing process?
Answer: Spend a lot of time being overwhelmed.
Having never done any major research project (I didn’t do a Honours Thesis), this whole process is new to me. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I’m doing what I’m doing while also figuring out what I’m actually doing.
When I applied to Deakin University, I submitted a research proposal titled “Executive Directors: What does it take to become one?”. So far, my work has consisted of reading anything that might relate to this topic. Prior research in hiring processes, definitions of the roles of the CEO, trends in sport, sport governance, impact of CEOs, board performance, board-CEO relations, opinions on the importance of education, experience, qualifications and anything else you might think of. For every article I read, I wrote something about it. Sometimes it was two or three sentences (even a “This is irrelevant” sentence or two). Sometimes it was a couple of pages of writing. Often times, the best and most important part of an article was the reference list. Finding a good article would often lead to several great articles and provide a more thorough understanding of a topic from several areas.
The more that I read, the more I understood what the purpose was. By no means am I now an expert in the literature search, but I have a basic understanding of the importance. You need to read anything and everything in order to figure out a way to put two topics together for comparison. Plus, you learn more about what interests you and what piques your interest.
From a more practical standpoint, scholarly journal databases and I have become quite close. Ebsco, Emerald, ProQuest, I have spent a lot of time in each, although I have typically search for articles through the Deakin library search. (Sidenote: Some articles still are not online. Honestly, I have had to go to the library and actually find the journal. They have apps that can read an MRI on your iPhone, but not all articles are electronic, that’s mindblowing.) Also, another program I have found is EndNote and I think it’s awesome so far. Basically, it’s a super easy way to keep track of all your references. Most databases let you export the bibliographic information directly into EndNote so you don’t have to do any typing or anything. Then, EndNote can link with Word and insert the reference in where you need it and add the full citation to a list at the bottom. You can choose whatever format you want as well. Within the program, you can organise the references into different groups. I’ve been using two groups, “Unread” and “Read”. Can you guess how I sort them? It makes it easy to go and search and highlight a whole bunch of useful programs in a database, export them to EndNote and then track which ones you have read. All in all, a very cool program.
So what has this all led to? Well, last Thursday I went and met with my supervisor to discuss where I am at and what the next steps are. In preparation for this meeting I had to condense my 10,000+ words of notes into a relevant one page summary along with a list of the most important information. Going back and looking at everything I’ve read, I started to realise how much of it is no longer relevant with the direction of my topic. I also found that trying to link all the aspects of the research into one page was very complicated. It took lots of scribbling, flow charts, web drawings, random lists of ideas and several attempts to try and write something that made sense to me and summed up the basic research topic. So, after a very productive conversation with my supervisor I now have a title for my research………which I will reveal in the next blog. (Yes! TV style “To Be Continued”!!!)
Keep smiling people!
