Eureka

Last Friday, I had a meeting with my supervisor to discuss some of the literature I'd been reading. I think it's fair to say I was struggling a little. My project is novel - which is great! - but I was finding it increasingly difficult to ground it in the literature - not so great. It is the type of project that draws on many different areas, but doesn't really belong to any. So, having stressed out for a week, I plucked up the courage to say "Help!!". Let me tell you, I came out of the meeting saying "Best. Day. Ever!" like Rapunzel in Tangled.

Have you ever had the experience of finishing a conversation with a great idea, but being unsure where that idea came from, what exactly triggered it or who's idea it was? All you know is that it is just brilliant. That is what my meeting was like.

Through our conversation, my supervisor and I identified not so much an error in our thinking, but the point at which we had stumbled. The great thing as well is that it hasn't rendered what I've already done useless. In fact, I don't think we could have drawn these conclusions without the work I've done already. Now, we have the opportunity to build and move on from that, let the idea grow and blossom and suddenly, we had three new experiments planned with a multitude of ways to look at the data and most importantly, a renewed enthusiasm and excitement about the project.

Truly one of the best feelings in the world, and I can understand why people strive to feel it again and again. I might not quite have run naked through the streets, but I certainly announced my joy to Facebook and anyone who would listen (and some who wouldn't). Awesome.

From under the marking pile

I've been somewhat absent for the last 10 days or so, being under my first pile of marking. Relatively small to some, seemingly huge to me. Marking second year undergraduate work has surprised me with how little I remember of what it is like to be one of them. Before dissertation and final year exams, before working all hours to get PhD applications just so - it's all a blur.

I am having a short break before beginning on my next pile of marking. (And I mean around half an hour, not a couple of days... unfortunately). I think it's necessary to get out of that zone where the world gets tuned out and my brain is reduced to scoring, key phrases and frustration with students' inability to reference.

I'm also writing today though, because the monotony of marking is blanketing out a small but rising panic. I believe I am encountering the first stages of PhD Panic (with touches of imposter syndrome) where the voice in the back of my head vacilates between feelings of inadequacy, inability and sheer stupidity to being overwhelmed with the enormity of a thesis and a PhD project as a whole.

This is something I am aware everyone goes through. My calm, grown-up internal voice is telling me to just be patient and sit with these concerns, that they are a part of the process and trying to block them out will just make them worse anyway. It's early days and I am perhaps being too hard on myself.

So really, this post is about riding the wave. By next time, perhaps I'll be a little less panicky and a bit more under control. I think coloured pens and pencils are required.

Growing arms and legs

Once you're settled in and are used to the rhythm of the academic life in your university, it can be a little bit difficult - I reflect after only being here three weeks, I know - to figure out how exactly you want to map out your own progress. As I mentioned in my last post, I'm currently waiting for my supervisor to review my ethics so that I can submit the application to the ethics board and hopefully begin my pilot.

What I'm discovering though, is that even something as simple as a pilot with only two participants can grow arms and legs. My study uses a portable eye tracker mounted on glasses frames. It has two cameras: one that points at the eye and one that views the scene. Once you compile the two, you get a pretty idea of where a person is fixating within the scene their head is pointed at (to put it very uneloquently). In theory, this is great! No more bite bars or chin rests, much more resemblance to real-world vision, what could go wrong? Well, those things are true, but there's some underlying complexities in there too.

Adjusting cameras (whilst being terrified I might break it), getting the balance of the calibration right, allocating the right amount of time etc. are all procedural things that I'm sure I'll get used to. After having a bit of a practise using the eye tracking and collecting some arbitrary footage, I'm getting a better picture of the sheer extent of data two participants will produce.

It has at least given me several new questions to answer: How much do I really need to know about where a participant looks? What's important to where they look? Do I really need a frame by frame breakdown?

At the moment, I am sitting on my hands - at least in regards to this - until ethics are approved, but these questions are churning over and I hope that that's something I can figure out soon, so I can best figure out how to run my pilot. The point of this post, I suppose, is to remind myself to think small. It's something I really need to learn, because look how something as small as two participants can grow into something big!

Let's hope the data grows into something big too :)

Earning your keep

I'm aware I keep saying this, but I still find it really hard to believe that already we're nearly done with September. Now it's really time to start putting my skills to use.

One way I'll be doing that very soon is to start earning my keep. The deal with a studentship (at least within my own School) is that PhD students funded by the School earn a certain amount as a stipend no questions asked with no work involved, other than your PhD of course. In addition to this, you can earn extra income through marking undergraduate essays/reports or teaching undergraduate research classes. This year I’m doing marking and I’ve been lucky or unlucky depending on how you look at it in that all my marking falls within a four week period this semester, then another four week period next semester. Good because it gets it over and done with, bad because that’s a really big chunk of time where I’m going to have no time for anything else. I’m sure you will soon find out just how well I’m managing that particular dilemma.

The other way in which I’m starting to use my accrued skills is to run my first experiment. This is exciting and terrifying in a way I can’t seem to convey in words. I think most likely actually “doing something” is exciting because it feels like progress, but terrifying too because I’ve not really run my own experiments since my undergraduate dissertation. Let’s just say, they don’t exactly feel comparable.

My pilot is nice and simple with just two participants. I have a magic trick selected and I’m intending simply to find out what happens when they try to learn it. Well, I might add that it sounds simple, but the amount of data that’s going to come out the other end is ridiculous. It’s certainly giving me an appreciation for why natural-environment eye tracking studies have fewer participants. You’ve screeds and screeds of eye movement data to get through and doing that for 100 participants would be a close approximation of a “kill me now” situation.

I’m not sure how soon I can get it up and running as I’ve yet to find out the ethics situation, but it’s more than likely going to be after my marking marathon. I’m getting prepared though, and with perhaps one more meeting with my supervisor, I might even start booking some time slots in the lab. Exciting times!

Early days

It's now week two of the academic year and I am slowly settling into postgraduate life.

I have an office (how exciting!) which will hopefully soon have my name on the door. And yes, you will be subjected to photographic proof. I've met people and shook hands and attended talks including one by Keith Rayner (psycholinguistics celeb) who also came to our Lab pub lunch on Friday. I've been to classes, I've learned how to use a mobile eye tracker and I've slowly started adding to my stationery and book collections in my office.

Up until now, it's been a bit of a whirlwind, but there are some very vivid moments of panic interspersed amongst them. If I'm honest, those mostly consist of thoughts like "They all know loads! You have to understand things to ask questions... I'm so far behind!" and "I really hope they don't find out how little I know about [insert whatever the current subject is] or they won't want me as a PhD student anymore!" and, of course, "Where the hell do I start?!" I've been assured by my supervisor and many others that these are feelings that everyone experiences at some time or other. Know it, but doesn't stop it.

The question of where I start is the most pertinent to me just now. I've begun by familiarising myself with a bit about eye tracking in real world scenarios as this was something I didn't know much about and made sense to have that background to help me shape my reading. Now, I'm trying to put together some rough ideas for a first experiment, which is a lot harder than I could have imagined. I take each day at a time, and am slowly building up a picture of where I need to start investigating and what I need to start reading about. It has given me a real appreciation of what previous PhD students I've known meant when they told me I'd need to be very blinkered. As soon as you start looking at what X, Y and Z are doing, you're making unfair comparisons because we've all come to this with different knowledge, experience and research topics.

So, blinkers on, I wonder what I'll get up to this week. Pub night tonight, for a start. I have my priorities straight. :)

Welcome to the Active Vision Lab

What do you know, I'm an official student after all!

This week is my first "on the job", but there's still a lot of settling in to be done. As ever, the matriculation process is a little hectic and leaves you with the feeling that surely there is a simpler way to do things. Nevertheless, I have secured a student card (with a truly awful picture - I'll need to see what can be done about that), my university email and my new start has been advertised on my Lab's website. It's called the Active Vision Lab (or AVL) and you can read all about it here. We're actually very lucky in that all the projects running from the lab are really interesting and it's a great set of people to be working with!

So what have I done so far as an official PhD student? Well, there was a lot of checking online modules and a great deal of excitement at being able to select "Doctorate of Philosophy" as my course title. I also had the opportunity to meet two other girls starting their PhD's this year who I hadn't met before. Both are lovely, and have really exciting projects too! Altogether, there are five or six new PhD students starting across this month and next, and I think it really makes a difference having so many people starting all together. It certainly makes it a little less formidable and makes you feel more like part of the group. Two of the other students I know already from my undergrad years, which is nice too.

I've been in and around the building, which I love because it feels like coming home and also because the building is rather attractive (even if I am a little biased). I've done some work too and I definitely find it easier to be productive in uni as opposed to at home. I'm still waiting to find out where my office is going to be, but since so many people need to be accommodated it's understandable it's taking a while. Once I do have some space, I've got all my stuff ready to move in - books, stationery, plant and all!

We have a Welcome to the School party on Wednesday and a Welcome to the Lab lunch on Friday (I will be eating well this week haha) and after that, classes start. It's exciting times! For now, I'm plodding away with some reading and trying to think about what my first experiment might be. Whatever I'm doing though, it's nice to know I'm officially part of the School again.

Big girl school

Starting life as a postgraduate student is very different from when you enroll as an undergraduate. I've not quite made it to matriculation yet (that's on the 9th) but I'm getting there with paperwork and figuring out what exactly is going to be going on. So, why is it different?

As an undergraduate, you don't exactly get your hand held through the process, but it's not far short. If you head to university straight from school, your guidance teachers or career advisors help you through the application process via UCAS and you go on school visits to universities and so on. When you get accepted to your chosen university, you get heaps of paper. Letters about the uni, what there is to do in the city where it's located, what's going to happen when you get there, about your halls of residence (if you're staying in them), the Union, societies... It's never ending! It's reassuring too though because when the average age of freshman students is 18, knowing what you're going into makes leaving home for the first time seem more like an adventure.

Being a postgraduate doesn't work quite like that. I've already detailed the application process I went through, which you can read here. Since the School or university doesn't have a guaranteed number of postgraduate places per year, admissions doesn't quite work the same. In short, you're a lot more responsible for making sure that you have everything you need!

I wouldn't want you to think this is a criticism. It is, in fact, a good way of doing things. If you're planning on going into a life of academia, you need to get used to how admin works from the word go. When you've got the responsibility for your own learning, you should have the responsibility of making sure you know how things work. You get the chance to practice, with a trained eye supervising you, instead of a safety net.

So, I guess I'm all grown up now. I'm quickly learning who, where, what and when things go on and while it can be a little bit scary or stressful, it's pretty cool to feel like you're finally in control of exactly where you're going. Thumbs up from me!

Review: Sleights of Mind

Sleights of Mind by Stephen Macknick and Susana Martinez-Conde is, to quote Mac King "A real close-up look at the true secrets of magic". (And Mac King, if you didn't know, is a very famous magician who headlines in Las Vegas). In a nutshell, it's an excellent way to begin learning about magic from a psychological perspective. In fact, Macknick and Martinez-Conde are the world's first neuromagicians, and are members of the Magic Cirle, Magic Castle and others, making them perfectly qualified to author such a text.

The aim of Sleights of Mind is to give the reader an overview of neuroscience experiments that study magic and what they can tell us about the brain. What I particularly love about it, is that it's written like a novel but a novel that delivers a whole lot of interesting information about the brain, details some excellents studies and some fantastic illusions. Macknick and Martinez-Conde also tell the reader about their own adventures in magic, beginning as novices and developing their skills and routine, giving an insiders view to a magician's experiences.

Let me give you an example. I'm paraphrasing a little, but here's a description of the Chameleon Dress Illusion, as performed by the Great Tomsoni (also know as Johnny). Johnny and his assistant - who is wearing a very small white dress - are on the stage with spotlights on them while all house lights are dimmed. He tells the audience he will turn his assistant's dress from white to red. They dutifully stare at the assistant and the light shining on her dims briefly before brightening in a dazzling shade of red. Of course, the audience are a little confused here - is the Great Tomsoni really telling them that's magic? Changing the colour of the spotlight? But Johnny laughs, telling the audience they had to admit her dress had gone red, then switches the lights back and asks you to watch again. Once again the lights dim before stage lights up in a blaze of white light. And this time, inexplicably, the assistant's dress really is red - crimson red! How on earth did he do that?!

I'm afraid that I won't tell you, but Slights of Mind is full of detailed descriptions of a number of illusions like this and how they are done. It's magic like this, and what it does to your brain, that gets me really excited about this subject. I can't give this book higher praise than to tell you that when I finished, I was even more excited and intrigued and passionate about my own research. If you're even remotely interested in magic, psychology, neuroscience or illusions, this book is a must. You can get it here and read more on the website here.

In anticipation

I've been told by lots of people to prepare the best I could for three years of craziness, starting pretty much from the moment I matriculate again. Go on holiday, they suggested, exercise, do something you enjoy, see friends, see family. So I did. It's been a busy two weeks away - which is why I haven't managed to write here. It's a really strange situation to be in because I'm really eager to get started, but I also want to make sure I'm well rested before that time comes. Now I'm back from holiday I'm spending a bit of time reading, revising and making notes. I've also had great fun buying up almost all of WHSmiths. Stationery, if you didn't know, is a dear love of mine :)

I am looking forward to beginning student life as a postgraduate for many reasons (research first and foremost of course), especially meeting lots of new people. As a teaching postgraduate, I'm a student but also a member of staff, which creates a nice balance. Letting me see both sides of the curtain, I suppose you could say. I'm really pleased as well that there will be new PhD students starting at the same time as me; one I know, several I don't. It's great to be part of a lab too. Having so many new and interesting people around me make for great conversations, new insights, support when we all need it and of course new friends.

That's why it's a little strange to dip into this world when I'm just beginning to start reading papers and revising some of the basics, then go back off to work at my part-time supermarket job at the weekends. However, it's not forever (not really for much longer at all!) and I'm sure the time will pass before I even really have time to register it. Let's hope so anyway!

The application

There are lots of different ways to find funding for a PhD programme. In this post, I'm hoping to illuminate a few of those options for you as well as tell you how I got funding for my PhD. There's probably many more options out there than what I'll cover, but if you're at the point of considering a PhD, perhaps this might be helpful to you.

A lot of your funding options will depend on what you want to do as your project. You might not have a specific idea in mind, instead you could have an area of interest. If you're still an undergraduate, I'd always recommend speaking to lecturers you know who teach in that area - not only is it a great way to bounce around ideas, but they might know of people in the field who you may be able to apply to work with. Failing that, you could try browsing projects already available at Find A PhD; there's forums there too where you can discuss various aspects of a PhD.

There are several scholarships you can apply for - in the process of my attempts to get funding I applied to three. Those were EPSRC, ESRC and Carnegie Scholarship. You can find out more about those on their respective websites (easily found through Google). Again, it's up to you and how you want to conduct your research that will indicate which might be better for you. ESRC offers what's called 1+3 funding, where they fund you to do a one year Masters before your three year PhD. EPSRC and Carnegie only offer 3 year funding (PhD only). I also learned that due to the economic climate, ESRC have changed how they fund PhDs. Now only certain universities can apply for funding from them, so if you are applying through a specific university, you may want to check with your supervisor/the website to see whether ESRC still offers funding to your institution.

Sometimes, if you're lucky, the university you want to apply to will have in-house funding. These may be called studentships, or demonstratorships, and often involve a teaching componant in exchange for a fee waiver and stipend. Obviously, everyone is trying to make cuts at the moment, which is why you're particularly lucky if your university has some. I was one of those lucky people, thankfully!

The actual application process for all these methods are different. For Carnegie, EPSRC and ESRC, you fill in a form with your personal details, some information about your experiences, your proposal (normally no more than 500 words) and two references. Once you've submitted the form, it's all out of your control and you simply have to wait for an answer. University studentships are usually more rigorous, as teaching is involved and the staff must ensure you are capable of upholding the duties required of you. For my studentship position, I was required to submit an application and then go through an interview panel.

The interview itself wasn't nearly as terrifying as I'd imagined it would be. I think, in all honesty, I was going in there feeling as though I was facing a viva, whereas it was much more of a friendly chat. Naturally, you have to display your skills, enthusiasm and knowledge, but in a much friendlier way than a viva (from what I've heard about vivas that is...) I had to give a 10 minute presentation about my proposed project, which I did via PowerPoint. The panel asked me some questions afterwards, about my proposal, my interests, why I wanted to do a PhD and how I felt I'd cope with the demands of the PhD programme. My supervisor was great in helping me prepare for my interview, and making feel less panicked about the whole thing.
Essentially, across all the different applications, I was working towards being accepted for around nine months. That's a lot shorter than some people and a lot longer than others. The key thing I'd recommend? Be passionate and enthusiastic. When you feel those things about your project, the rest comes a lot easier.

To PhD or not to PhD, that is the question

At 22, I'm quite young to be starting a PhD. I'm also quite young to be certain that this is, without a shadow of a doubt, what I want to do. How have I come to this decision, or this certainty, you might ask. Let's just say, I went from A to B with a detour around a whole lot of other letters.

When I left school at 17, my motivation for going to university was "Let's move out!" rather than "Let's get educated". I had decided to apply for Law, because I figured you earned a lot of money doing that, I could argue for a living and you had to memorise lots of things, which I happen to have a fortunate ability for. Like I said, clearly my motivations were pure and honest. However, meeting my boyfriend in January 2006 prior to my Higher exams that May, meant suddenly I had something much more exciting than revision to take up my time. (Or, someone, rather).

In the end, I got five highers, but of AABCC quality - not quite the AABB calibre required for a life as a Law student. Quickly getting over my heartbreak, I scoured the UCAS Clearing website for courses that still had places left. (I'm not sure if this is a uniquely Scottish facility, but it's basically like an "everything must go" sale, where you can reapply if you didn't get your first choice of course). I was happy to find that the University of Dundee still had places on several of their courses, so I picked Psychology. It was something I'd always had an interest in - you might be surprised at the number of Psychology textbooks I'd procured before even thinking about studying it at university - so I figured it was an ideal second choice.

I will happily tell anyone who asks, or who I can con into listening, that this is the best mistake I ever made. I immediately discovered Psychology to be a subject that I could find interesting, no matter the variation. Social, neuro, linguistics, developmental, comparative, clinical - all variations on a single theme; the human mind. It was intensely pleasing to read a journal paper and formulate an argument from it, simply to understand the content to the degree required to be able to do so.

As the years progressed, I began to wonder what I might do when my student life ended. There were two main contenders - a PhD, or a career in Clinical Psychology. Due to various reasons I won't go into, I couldn't apply for a PhD during my fourth and final year of undergraduate, which meant I still had another 6-12 months after graduation to decide which path was for me.

A few weeks after my graduation in June 2010, I took up a post as an Assistant Psychologist, which is a graduate level job required to gain experience before you can apply for a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology. (This is a vastly complicated process, and for more information you should see the BPS website). It took little time for me to see that while I found the theory very interesting, the practicalities of life as a Clinical Psychologist were not for me.

I was very fortunate in having the chance to "try it out", as it were. If I hadn't done so, I couldn't possibly have embarked on my journey towards "Doctor Katy", as I am fond of saying, without doubting whether it were the right choice for me. Instead, I am one of the lucky few who has answered that "If only..."

In the end, my journey to decided to do a PhD was rather round the houses. Actually getting onto a PhD programme was another matter altogether, however, and that mini-adventure is something I'll write about soon. For now, adieu!