Don't Panic

So, having been off uni Thursday and Friday and - despite trying - not getting anything useful done, I am starting to feel the edge of panic. A couple of days doesn't make a disaster of course, but I think I am now experiencing what some of my fellow students have for a while; the "OH MY GOD I'VE GOT TO DO ALL THIS STUFF!!" feeling.

It feels very like snakes and ladders. I'm forward because I've conducted my pilot and just about ready to submit ethics for the next experiment, backward because I've still not finished my coding, and my reading pile is... well, more like a mountain than a pile.

This week is not the best week to be thinking these things because I am taking Thursday and Friday as a holiday (birthday!) but I really need to start prioritising better once I'm back. I've spent a lot of time reading about writing and time management, so I really should start practicing it. In the mean time, I'm going to try and finish my ethics this week and do some more coding. Although you can't see it - I'm giving myself the stern face!

I know the important thing here is not to panic, so I'm reigning it in and trying to be practical about it. To be honest, it might even be a bit beneficial if it actually gets me being more productive. Either way though, it's uncomfortable.

Edit: Also - as Thursday is my birthday, the next post will be next Monday, when I'll write about my first TMC :)

Managing Sickness

Being human, it was inevitable that I would get ill. (Also, given fate, somewhat inevitable that it would happen at the most inconvenient time).

Melodrama out the way - I have a horrible cold. For the first few days I was able to make it into uni, but I am pretty icky now and I really don't want to infect any of my fellow students!

It made me think about the whole thing of how we manage our workload when we get sick. Sometimes, you just can't get into uni to do the things you were meant to do. My task this week was coding, and unfortunately the video files are too big to be put on my removeable hard drive to bring home. Usually, this would have made me panic, but this time I've adopted an "all's not lost" attitude.

So I might not have been able to get all the coding done, but I brought a pile of reading home with me to do. It's a long overdue - my to-read pile is absolutely huge! Getting some of it done might not be too bad after all. I'm hoping I will be able to go back into uni tomorrow, but if I can't, there's plenty of reading to keep me going until I look (and feel) a bit more human.

In the mean time, it's lots of fluids for me, medicine and an endless amount of tissues! How do you manage your PhD when you're sick?

Thinking Days

For me, sun breaking through clouds is a pretty apt metaphor for thought; especially about a PhD.

I know a lot of people feel anxious at the thought of having a day in the office - or wherever you work - not doing researchy/PhD stuff. Or at least not anything that's directly related. It must be said of course that there are some (though relatively few) who go in the opposite direction and have too many of these abstract-type days.

Personally, I like to label these my 'thinking days'. The type of day where you don't always code or analyse or do stats or write. You prepare a lot of things. For example, today I have printed at least 20 papers in an effort to create a To-Read pile. (I have discovered having a physical pile is the only thing that will inspire me to read, and to do it properly. Sorry trees). I've done the little niggly things on my to-do list that don't take a huge amount of time but I routinely never get around to. So, I've sorted out my log in for the university's experiment sign up website, emailed a Magic Society to both advertise my research and ask for participants and I've brought together a few academic targets for the next twelve weeks.

Amongst all these everyday tasks, I feel I've had a few insights about my research. Allowing my brain free reign whilst doing things that don't require any cognitive power has resulted in a good couple of Ah hah! moments. This has had the added benefit of remotivating me and getting me eager to push on through the endless coding to get reading so I can write up and go for the next one.

So, however you feel about thinking days, I'm pretty positive about them. Not to be confused with just "days where you do nothing" of course, but a productive thinking day can leave you feeling pretty "Woot!" :)

Your Academic Parents

Thanks to PhD Comics for the image.


As PhD students, we all undergo some form of supervision. Depending on what year you're in, how well your studies are going, what day of the week it is and innumerable other factors, supervision can be a good or a bad thing.

At the moment, for me, it's a good thing. I'm not hiding in any bushes anyway. I think a lot depends though on the structure of your supervision. At Dundee we have two (or sometimes more) supervisors. You have your primary supervisor concerned with all things research related and a second supervisor who takes more of a pastoral role. They are, as my second supervisor likes to say, your 'Academic Parents'.

There's strategic reasons on the University's before for structuring supervision in this way. If a student is having problems at home, at work, at uni or with their primary supervisor, there is another door for them to knock on. For me, it works out because my second supervisor is someone I've known throughout my undergraduate degree and who I get on well with. He is the type of person I'd go see for a chat anyway, so he seemed the perfect choice.

Supervision is essentially a constantly evolving relationship. My needs and theirs change on a weekly (if not daily) basis and it's nice to have people you can touch base with. I'm sure there will probably be times when going to my supervisor is going to be the last thing I'll want to do, but having the supervision in place at least means if I start to run off the tracks, there's a big support net there to make sure I get back on them. More than that, they have encouraged me to come along to conferences, have different ideas of things that might be useful to me and have different interests, which enriches my PhD beyond just the research. I suppose some might call in networking, but my supervisors are people I do hope to count as friends by the time I leave.

It's a tricky thing, supervision, and I imagine you might be reading this thinking I am either naive or demented - which is possible! - but for now, it's working in my favour.

Making Progress

I'm at that exciting point in my research where I have finished one experiment - now in the coding stages - and am ready to start preparations for the next one. I love this time in research and always have. I find it rejuvenates my enthusiasm and makes the monotony of coding much easier to bear.

The next experiment I'm going to run is big. Potentially the biggest one of my thesis. That's exciting and daunting, but it's important to do it now and not just because it gets it out the way. This experiment will be like the tree trunk from which all my other experiments branch off. It's an integral part of the whole question of my research and may change the direction I take once it's finished and analysed.

So, if you live in the Dundee area and want to learn/see a magic trick, get in touch. I'll be needing you as a participant in 3-4 weeks! (And no, you won't have to wear the headgear in the picture).

It's quite exciting as well because it makes me feel I'm making progress. With this experiment, I feel like a "proper" Psychologist. That comes along with being more familiar with the experimental process as a whole, the literature and my own approach to the topic so I can blag my way much better! It's exciting though, and it's one of the reasons I signed up for a PhD - I love feeling like I'm on the verge of something big!

Why are you doing this?

When I started my PhD in September, I was doing a PhD because I wanted to do research. I wanted to be an academic. I wanted to not be working in Asda for the rest of my life. I'd been focused on getting to that point for almost a year (and on-and-off for maybe longer). At that point, the PhD was really the end-goal, rather than the beginning to something new.

My research, broadly, looks at social attention. Specifically, it looks at how magicians learn to manipulate social attention. My research is not going to cure cancer, win a Nobel Prize or help us figure out how to make Star Trek a reality. My research will, hopefully, tell us something interesting about how we deliberately use gaze and other things to manipulate someone else's attention. It could have interesting ramifications if we find something, it might not.

Now that I'm not a "new" PhD student anymore, I've been reconsidering why I'm doing this and where I want it to lead. I still want to be an academic. I still want to do research in the Psychology of Magic. I'm beginning to realise though, that there's other things I want to do too.

I want to teach. I want to make an impact on students' lives by showing them a field of Psychology they'd probably never considered and sparking interest in them. I want to mentor them through their own research beginnings, be that in fourth year dissertations or PhD students themselves. I want to be an advocate for students, because somewhere out there, there is someone who is going to find the cure for cancer, who will win a Nobel Prize and who will make Star Trek a reality.

Ok, they probably won't be studying Psychology. But when I was an undergraduate and feeling a little lost, it was the lecturers who were passionate, who had time for students' questions, who made you interested, that inspired me. That made me want to do what I'm doing today. I have a lot of ambitions for my research, but these are ambitions I hadn't considered before. I want to help a future generation of academics find what they truly love and give them the confidence to follow that dream, as was given to me by my own lecturers and supervisors.

And while that might be a long way off yet, I feel it's a pretty good reason for why I'm doing this.

The Prodigal Student Returns

Thanks to www.phdcomics.com for the image.

First, I should really wish you a happy New Year! I hope 2012 has been going well for you so far. To be honest, I barely feel like I've been away, but that's a story for another blog. I think it's fair to say though, that even having been away from my office for three weeks, my head has very rarely left the topic of my PhD.

Now that I'm back, my main task of the next few weeks is coding the video data from my pilot. For those of you not familiar with real-world eye tracking, we use a mobile eye tracker which the participant wears like a pair of glasses. The eye tracking software makes a composite of the scene camera footage (i.e. what the participant's head is pointing at) and eye camera, where it identifies the location of the centre of the pupil. Put the two together and you have a video that shows where a person was looking in the scene over time. Very clever.

The downside is that coding is normally a manual frame-by-frame process. There are 30 frames a second, and I have four hours of data to code. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this! To help prevent the slide to insanity I've decorated a bit with some relaxing pictures and nice smelling candles (that won't get lit, just smell nice, Mr. Health-and-Safety) and am arranging several evening meet-ups with friends so that I don't glue myself to this chair until it's all finished.

I hope you're keeping your fingers crossed for me that I find something. I have another experiment to arrange too, but I'll probably worry about that later. So all in all, it's a crazy-busy return to the office, but despite all that, I'm glad to be back. :)