PhD basics: academic journals and presenting your thesis

In the lead up to my research trip I've been attending a couple of seminars for post-grad students at my uni. Here is a brief overview I've some of the tips I've picked up.

Submitting to academic journals

Last Friday's seminar was titled Where to publish and what to consider, which focused on the whys and wherefores of getting published in academic journals. As a creative-practice led student who is not considering a career in academia, I'm more interested in having books published and proudly on display in bookshops (both bricks and mortar and virtual). However, I have had one journal article published and would like to have another under my belt before my PhD is done.

For those, like me, who don't have an academic career at the top of their list, the best piece of advice I took from that seminar was to spend plenty of time reading the journal you're considering submitting to. This sounds obvious, but it's something I didn't do when writing an article (which was rejected) that I based on a conference presentation I gave. I thought if the conference paper was accepted then my paper based on the conference paper would also be accepted. Wrong! In hindsight, if I'd taken more time to read the journal, and read articles by the journal's editor, I would have seen that we were never going to see eye to eye on the ideas I was putting forward. Still, it was a learning experience, albeit a frustrating one at times.

The PhD examination process

This morning's seminar was on the PhD exam process, which took students step-by-step through all the processes our university requires to get to that fabulous wearing-a-floppy-hat-on-stage moment. Most universities will follow slightly different processes. However, I think the following points can be useful for all higher degree students.

1. Your abstract is crucial.
Some examiners, when reading through a PhD submission, may start by reading the abstract, the introduction and the conclusion to get an idea of the flow of your argument. If your abstract clearly and succinctly outlines the flow of your argument, you're going to give your examiner a good first impression.

2. Your final seminar presentation must show breadth and depth.
At my university PhD students have 45 minutes to present the key points from their thesis. That's not a lot of time to highlight 80-100,000 words of hard work created over 3 or more years. But the key is not to just summarise the main points, which will show breadth, but also to choose some highlights where you can also demonstrate depth.

3. Know the opening lines of your presentation off by heart.
You'll probably be the most nervous at the start of your presentation. Knowing the opening lines of your presentation off by heart will help you ease into the process, and overcome that initial attack of 'big moment' nerves.

After your presentation

There is one BIG question that has been haunting me almost from the start of my PhD: what happens if an examiner or audience member asks you a question about your thesis that you don't understand?

This morning's presenter, a veteran who has delivered hundreds if not thousands of presentations throughout her academic career, gave the following advice:

1. What is your research 'boundary'? Is the question about something you probably should know, or is about something that is really outside your thesis/area of expertise. If it is outside your area of research, say so.

2. If the question is about something you think you should know, ask the questioner to repeat the question. This will give you a little time to play around with it in your mind, and consider a response.

3. Your supervisor isn't allowed to answer the question for you but if you're really struggling they may be able to prompt you along the lines of "remember when you did such and such...", which may be enough to get you started on an answer.

4. If you probably should know the answer to it but you don't, be honest. Tell the panel that it is something you haven't thought about. They may grumble a little, but then the moment will be over and you can move on.

If you try to answer it without know what you're talking about you might just dig yourself into a deeper hole, making it much harder to move on.

Attend seminars and build confidence

Seminars are filled with valuable advice from people who have been there and done it before you. I find that with each seminar I attend, I am building up my knowledge and confidence in how the PhD process works, and how I can maximise my success. So my final piece of advice is, if seminars are on offer at your university, make sure you take the time to attend. It should be well worth it.

Osmosis and the hokey pokey: that's what creative-practice led research is all about

The past week I've focused on reading N. Katherine Hayles' How we became posthuman. It's a fascinating book that has sparked off lots of questions for me around what my creative piece is really about. It's also got me thinking about the relationship between my creative writing practice and my research; that is, how I use my research to inform my thinking about my creative practice.

Creative-practice led research is a tricky beast. It is often difficult to define the exact nature of the research/creative practice relationship, well for me anyway, but I'm going to put some thoughts down about how I see it working.

Almost three years ago, back when Dirt Circus League was a bunch of random ideas in a long-winded narrative that had no beginning, middle or end,  I stuck a sign on my mirror that encapsulated what I might want a reviewer to say about my book, once it was published. The sign says:

A Vonnegut for contemporary young adult readers... Wacky, fast-paced, original, off-beat, funny and wildly imaginative, always with an eye on the obscure and the absurd. A mash-up of neuroscience, action, dark humour and adventure with absolutely no lesson to teach.

It will be up to readers to tell me how much of that 'review' is true for the final product when Dirt Circus League is eventually published. But in terms of my PhD, and how my creative writing practice informs and is informed by my research, there are some interesting things to note about the 'review'.

From the start, it was always going to be speculative fiction. It was not going to be didactic. Like my writing hero Kurt Vonnegut, I wanted to make my readers both laugh and think and get some insight into the beauty, cruelty and absurdity of our planet earth. I referred back to the sign often but didn't try to specifically add in to the story elements from the sign, which would come across as false and implanted rather than naturally occurring. In other worlds, I wanted those elements to seep in by osmosis. And I want my research reading to do the same thing.

Research informing writing informing research

The timeline of story writing/ reading research breaks down roughly like this: 

• July 2010- March 2011: initial reading/first draft of manuscript simultaneously
• March 2011 - November 2011: lots of research into neuroscience and related fields (including reading my favourite Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology)
• November 2011-May 2012: further drafts and changes to manuscript along with reading into neuroscience and related fields such as critical neuroscience and reading another important text for me, Brain Culture)
• June 2012-October 2012: research reading, focusing on Bahktin's Rabelais and His World (my first real departure from neuroscience related reading)
• October 2012-December 2012: another significant rewrite of the manuscript
• December 2012 - now: reading literary criticism, some related to eco-criticism but mostly around speculative and science fiction; reading focused on posthumanism

The pattern shows intense periods focused on either researching or writing, with fewer periods where the two overlap. However, the basic plot and narrative of the story essentially hasn't changed. What the research does change in the manuscript is the deeper layers, the foundations of the manuscript and the ideas that form it. It's not so much that new ideas come into the manuscript, but that my research illuminates on what those ideas are really about. In turn, I make changes (sometimes quite subtle) that add layers of meaning to the surface story.

Coming back to Hayles' book, for example, I read a paragraph where she writes about Norbert Weiner's book The Human Use of Human Beings. Hayles posits:

'If memory in humans is the transfer of informational patterns from the environment to the brain, machines can be built to effect the same kind of transfer. Even emotions may be achievable for machines if feelings are considered not as "merely a useless epiphenomenon of nervous actions" (HU, p. 72) but as control mechanisms governing learning.'

When I read that I think about my protagonist Quarter, and how he is deliberately doing something to his body and brain that interferes both with memory and with how/what type of informational patterns will transfer from his environment to his brain because some of these patterns will now be bird patterns. I may use that thought to go back to my manuscript at some point and add in a detail, or perhaps even alter the ending slightly, to reflect that notion of the human and animal patterns within him. I'm not going to alter his character to add machine parts, or to incorporate a cyborg into the plot. Nevertheless the point Hayles raises inspires a series of questions for me about who or what Quarter really is, and what he may become.

In this way, my research dips and wiggles its fingers and toes in and out of my creative practice. It's kind of like the hokey-pokey but probably more like osmosis. Just as that sign on my mirror has influenced the type of book that Dirt Circus League is now and will become, so the research seeps its way into my creative writing, sometimes in ways I don't consciously recognise until my supervisor asks me a question about my work, and I realise that I can answer it.

Young adult fiction and the cult of the brain

I have set a deadline for myself to have my PhD confirmation seminar done and dusted by the end of March 2012. Easy peasy! Well, not really, but to get myself started my supervisor asked me to work out a draft outline for my thesis, and then draft up a rough introduction. I gave her my draft outline a few weeks ago (it was then I discovered that I was a post-structuralist of sorts, whatever that means) and today I have finally got around to drafting an intro.

Doing these two exercises has made one thing pretty clear: my PhD 'problem' has changed from what I wrote it would be in my formal proposal last year. This is, I think, a good thing. For starters, I actually think I have a real problem to solve, one that won't solve world poverty but is definitely worthwhile looking at. In a nutshell, it's this:

How should young adult fiction filter and represent the rise of neuroscience into all aspects of life – the cult of the brain - within its narratives?

Let's face it, barely a day goes by without the media using a headline with the word "neuro" in it. We have neuro-ethics, neuro-marketing, neuro-revolution, neuro-economics, just to name a few. A new book by Davi Johnson Thornton, Brain Culture: neuroscience and popular media, "looks at how the cerebral cortex has become a 21st century version of Warhol's soup cans or Marilyn Monroes". (It's on my to-read list, along with The neuro revolution: how brain science is changing our world, and a dozen or so other brain-related popular titles.) Brain-related this or that is everywhere. And yet, it has very thin representation in young adult fiction.

This intrigues me. After all, it's today's adolescents that are growing up into this brain-obsessed world. And many of the decisions being made for children and young adults are impacted by this neuro-obsession, including decisions about education and the law. It is a big thing, to big to ignore in writing for young adults.

I'm interested to know what novels for young adults are out there at the moment that people consider tackle the implications of the 21st century's 'cult of the brain' in some way. In what ways (if at all) is this topic being addressed in young adult fiction? What are some of the ways people think it should be, or would like to see it be, addressed?

Let me know, please - I need all the help with my thesis I can get!

The road to PhD confirmation

My PhD confirmation is not due for another 12 months (because I'm part time). But for a range of reasons I want to get it done a few months earlier than that. So I let my supervisor know my plan at our last meeting.

She tells me, if I'm to present for confirmation in March, she wants to see an outline of my thesis for our next meeting in 3 weeks. That's right, an outline of my entire thesis.

Bloody hell, I thought, the woman is serious. So, being someone who doesn't like to let her supervisor down (she is a great supervisor, after all) I thought I'd better start at least collecting my ideas about what my thesis outline might look like.

In some ways I'm lucky. I'm doing a creative practice PhD so 60,000 words of my thesis is taken up by my young adult fiction manuscript (and I've already finished the first draft of that). So that's no drama, but it's the other bit - the literature review, the case studies, the literature review, the reflection... did I mention the literature review?

I came across this fabulous presentation on the PhD presentation by the fantastic 'thesis whisperer' Inger Mewburn, titled (appropriately) Help I am experiencing fear - Confirmation! This has a lot of helpful information and if you're ever going to come up against the dreaded confirmation make sure you have a look at it.

But back to my immediate problem - an outline for my thesis. I've got a few ideas from some great articles I've stumbled upon recently. First up is a great paper, which comes from a great website called Critical Neuroscience. There's a great paper by Jan Slaby on the site that gives an introduction to what critical neuroscience is all about, and it makes a great overarching framework for my thesis.

Related to critical neuroscience, in terms of the work I'm doing, is the reading I've been doing on cultural neuroscience. I'm still trying to get my head around it properly, but from what I've read, it's about how cultural practices impact on brain development. In this way it dovetails in quite neatly with neuroconstructivism in that it looks as culture as experiences and also, partially, a product of environment.

So, these elements are starting to shape the beginnings of my outline:

• critical neuroscience as an overarching framework, leading into
• cultural neuroscience, which with its focus on how cultural experiences impact on brain development, leading into
• neuroconstructivism, with its focus on context dependence (nothing develops in isolation)

And somehow, I have to tie all this in with my work on young adult fiction.

But at least it's a start.

Top five reasons why I am doing my PhD

There are five main reasons for why I decided to do a PhD.  I’ll rank them here from bottom to top.

Number 5
So that, in my old age, when my best friend (who’s also doing her PhD) and I are living together and raising hell in some retirement village somewhere, when the phone rings I can answer: “Dr Ryan’s and Dr Kimberley’s residence. To which doctor do you wish to speak?”
Of course, her PhD is in psychology so if people need a ‘real’ doctor, she may be able to help them. I, on the other hand, will only be able to provide advice on cutting out dead words and sentences. Although, of course, I may manage to pick up a bit of neuroscience during my research and so may also be able to assist with a dodgy diagnosis of a neuropsychological problem (callers are warned to hang up straight away if I mention scalpels or lobotomies).

Number 4
So that my older brothers and sisters (I’m the youngest of five) will have to show me some respect and call me Doctor Kimberley. This is to compensate for years of having to relive the trauma of having the childhood nickname of ‘reek-a-russy-bubby-girl’.
Clearly, I want people to call me ‘Doctor Kimberley’. Of course, I could just pretend I was a doctor of some kind and lie to strangers, but I’m a very bad liar. Some of my siblings claim that they will refuse to call me Dr Kimberley whether I complete my PhD or not. I will have my ways of making them conform. They will pay for that ridiculous nickname and the fact that none of them ever even had a nickname at all. Ever.

Number 3
I’m a library nerd and I love books, and the best way to get the cheapest (as in free) and best access to books is to be a post-grad student. I just can’t get over the fact that I can ask for a book from any library in almost any place in the world and it will get sent to me. For nix. It’s like having a magical power.  Of course, it’s not a magical power like flying, but it’s close.

Number 2
Not only am I a library nerd, I am a nerd nerd. It’s taken some years for me to come to this realisation. I was never a nerd in school – I was the rebel. I demonstrated all the classic (and not so classic) rebellious behaviours, including (but not limited to)
-smoking in the toilets at school (and scoring a suspension)
-turning up to school stoned
-having a hallucinatory flashback at school and hiding behind a friend and pointing at the principal screaming “keep her away from me”
-starting my own communist party
-walking out of religious classes
-constantly challenging and arguing (always logically, of course) with teachers
-flashing my arse from the windows of the Year 12 corridor
-getting everyone in my extended friendship group to wear their pyjamas on free dress day (still not exactly sure why that one caused such outrage, but Catholic girls schools can be strange places)
But rebellion is for the young. So now it’s my time to be a nerd.

Number 1
All these are excellent and valid reasons. But the number one gong I’m doing a PhD is because it will make me a better writer. Doing a PhD involves research, lots and lots of research. And if I learnt anything from doing my Masters, it’s that research makes me a better writer. It gives me new ideas. It makes me think about those ideas in different ways. It opens up whole new worlds I never knew existed. It adds layers and depth to my writing. It makes me really think about the world I’m creating and the internal logic that holds it all together. The creative writing and the research weave in and out of each other, not seamlessly, exactly, but each feeding into and off the other. But research alone is not enough. The PhD also provides rigour and discipline. It doesn’t let me get away with anything. And that’s just what a rebel needs. No matter what you call her.

Thoughts from a conference

Went to the QUT post-grad student conference, Ignite, held at the Kelvin Grove campus in Brisbane last Friday. It was a two-day conference but working full-time at the moment I could only fit in the one day.

I had a 10-minute paper to deliver first up in the morning, along with 4 other first year PhD students, which was interesting. I've spoken at conferences before for work-related stuff, but this was my first academic style conference. The audience was small and consisted of everyone's supervisors, family and friends but at least that meant it was a supportive group. Pretty much everyone used bigger words than me, though maybe my few mentions of neuroconstructivism put me up there. And the short reading I did from my creative work resulted in stunned silence (still not sure if this meant they were spellbound or shocked).

Over the rest of the day I attended a couple of sessions of PhD and Masters students delivering 20 minute papers. A couple of things I learnt from attending those:

• you can talk the academic talk and be entertaining
• interesting discussions can come out of the question and answer sessions
• keep on track with your topic
• be prepared and be professional
• somewhere along the way doing your PhD, the chances are high you will lost the plot

One of the most interesting papers was by a candidate who had just submitted her thesis for examination. About two thirds of the way through her PhD, she realised that all the assumptions she'd made about her topic were wrong. All the data she had collected was telling her something that she didn't want to see. So she had to take a step back, pull all the data apart and look at it again from a fresh perspective. After having a minor (or possibly close to major) meltdown, she got through it all and came out the other side with a thesis that was much more original than her initial work. She had some great advice to give to new PhD students, including:

• don't make assumptions about what you think your data is telling you
• don't give up - take a step back and work through the issues
• don't be afraid of letting your research taking you in unexpected directions

One of the worst papers was from a candidate who was clearly unprepared. She may have been a last minute replacement, which would explain why she was all over the place, but she made some major mistakes that could have been overcome with even a few hours preparation:

• she sat on a table swinging her legs, instead of standing
• she didn't use any visuals to help maintain audience interest and focus
• she rambled, lost her place, and jumped from idea to idea with no coherent thread
• despite getting several time warnings from the facilitator, she kept rambling on

I thought the facilitator was going to have to stand up and put her hand over her mouth to shut her up!

The final session of the day was a 'debate' about the relationship between student and supervisor during the PhD process. It was more entertaining than informative and ended up, as many discussions in Australia seem to do, deciding that what was needed was more alcohol. Sigh.

But all in all it was a good day. Met some interesting people, learnt some useful stuff and had a few laughs. It was a nice, laid-back intro to the academic conference.