Fulfilling the Potential of Your Doctoral Experience. Pam Denicolo
and will, likely, recognise the challenges you will be experiencing and can provide pertinent advice from their own experience, something your supervisors may not have had.
The whole point of the first 100 days is about building relationships and laying the foundations for your future networks. Use this time to find out about who you are working with and for, and enable those people to find out about you.
The environment
Your immediate ‘place of work’ will need the first attention so that you can settle in quickly and have a base from which to become more adventurous. Departmental secretaries/administrators are likely to be your best resource in this respect because they can guide you in a variety of areas; for instance, they will know where doctoral researchers usually work, if there is allocated desk space and how the allocation system works. They will also be familiar with other aspects of the system, such as what resources are available, who holds them and how to gain access to them. They will also, along with any research administrators, be able to give you insights into departmental customs and practices such as regular meetings or seminars, who usually attends them, who contributes to them, whether attendance is obligatory, superficially voluntary but expected, and so on. Such people will be pleased if you check with them about such social niceties as whether there is a shared obligation to contribute to funding coffee/tea/biscuits, a rota for bringing in milk or tidying the fridge; it will demonstrate your willingness to become part of the community.
Once you have found out about your immediate environment and colleagues, you can then begin to look to the broader environment and context in which you are working. This entails finding out what you need to know so that you can do the job brilliantly. Initially, you will need to find out what resources and information are there to help you and then begin to refine this to the needs of your specific project. You will need to build a picture of what this thing called ‘doctoral research’ is about in your specific context. Initially, your supervisors will be a great resource but do not underestimate the knowledge of librarians, researcher developers, careers advisors, postgraduate administrators and fellow researchers who will value being asked for information and advice. Indeed, the wise researcher learns very quickly to draw in the resources they need from a variety of sources. Do not expect your supervisor to know everything – part of being a professional researcher is being able to track down the expertise needed if it is not readily to hand. We cannot provide details of such things as availability of computer terminals, inter-library loan schemes, cost of or how much photocopying is free, and so on because these not only differ between institutions but between departments too, since they are budgetary items. Thus, do not assume that because a colleague in another department has certain privileges then you will too. However, it is essential that you get yourself set up with referencing software as soon as possible and you should aim, by the end of the 100 days, to know how to use it properly. Your institution may provide some software, but there is free software available. Using the search terms ‘Comparison of reference management software’ within Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org) provides a summary of the different formats and what operating systems they require. It would be wise to check with peers and your supervisor which ones are regularly preferred in your discipline/geographical location. The advantage of cloud-based systems is that you can use them anywhere and anytime, after you have successfully completed your doctorate and perhaps gone to another institution or organisation.
Another area of difference is that some institutions may have formal contracts or agreements that researchers and their supervisors need to adhere to. These may specify contact hours, how supervisions are recorded, and what is available to the researcher and what is expected of them, such as lab duties or teaching/tutoring, as well. There is a UK national code of practice that includes a section on researchers, the Quality Code – Chapter B11, that researchers are advised to read to find out about the expectations surrounding research degrees. There is also a national statement, the Researcher Development Statement, that identifies areas of learning that all researchers in the UK are expected to cover (especially if they are funded by the research councils) and a fuller framework, the Vitae Researcher Development Framework, that all researchers should find useful as an overview of the researcher role and as an aid to professional development (see our companion book for more detail: Success in Research: Developing Transferable Skills, Denicolo and Reeves, 2014).
In Chapter 5, we consider other resources and opportunities that you should avail yourself of, either in your department, school or in a facility especially focused on the needs of postgraduates or doctoral researchers, such as Graduate Schools and Doctoral Colleges. Such entities are likely, as are departments/schools, to have some form of induction event at the beginning of the academic year or each term/semester during which facilities, activities and resources will be summarised and key people introduced.
Even if you have completed your undergraduate and/or master’s studies at the same institution as the one in which you are undertaking your doctorate, do not underestimate how different the doctoral process is and what is available only to doctoral students and research staff. Our advice is, do not skip any induction events on offer or tours of library resources. You may think you know how to use the library already, but that may turn out to be a self-limiting assumption and cost you time later. There may be disciplinary resources you have access to as a postgraduate researcher (PGR) that are not generally shared with other students. Similarly, learning to use social media for research or identifying useful software available to researchers will set you up for the project ahead.
Special note for part-time and/or distance learners or those who start their registration on a non-traditional date: Planning ahead of your first registration date should, if possible, include taking an opportunity to attend the inductions available in your institution, even if they do not coincide with your actual start date, since they will be the source of much useful practical information and provide opportunities to meet significant people (supervisors, administrators, peer researchers). If this is impossible, then seek out all the documents that were provided at the last induction and a contact email for a peer attendee who might be willing to talk through with you (even via Skype) what s/he found out.
The role
Transitioning into the research process is a progression that should not be underestimated or ignored! One of the biggest problems facing new researchers is failing to reflect on their expectations – so we have provided Activity 2.1. Until you have completed the whole process, it is difficult to appreciate just how different undertaking doctoral research is from all other roles in higher education, whilst it is widely acknowledged that it entails one of the more challenging of pedagogies, a point we discuss further in Chapter 10. Two questions (and our suggested answers) may help you to reflect on the difference:
1 Dealing with uncertainty: How will you manage the unknown? This is likely to be the first time that you are seeking not simply a new answer to a project question but, in the initial stages at least, a new question within the discipline. Answer: You must adopt a flexible attitude so that you can manage the changing environment, your changing expectations, the excitements, occasional disappointments and even fluctuating levels of motivation. It is inevitable that things go wrong or you encounter unexpected barriers to progress, but this can open new avenues for research and often leads to better ideas, so should not always be viewed negatively. (Experienced researchers do often forget to warn new recruits of the truth of the adage ‘if anything can go wrong, it will’ because they have become acclimatised to it.)
2 Dealing with immensity: How do you eat an elephant (or a comparably large vegetable)? Answer: One bite at a time! This is an old joke – but a truism when faced with a very large project that stretches over years. So, to avoid choking or being overwhelmed by the size of the thing, you need to methodically munch your way through it one mouthful at a time. This is where your ability to plan is vital; dividing up the tasks not simply to undertake them in a logical order but also to check that they all can be completed in time (Chapter