5. Footnote

A slightly different, more community-minded fortnight for my PhD.

Last Thursday I went to watch Sue present on her thesis study of how people find and share information during natural disasters. Her thesis is conceptually similar to mine – a study of how information about natural phenomena is shared – though her methods were more qualitative, being based on interviews, where I’m finding myself leaning increasingly toward a computational approach. It’s a really interesting topic and it caused me no small amount of anxiety about whether or not I have it in me to reach her level of insight.

On Thursday afternoon I had my first meeting with my mentor, Marion McCutcheon. I’ll keep the details of that discussion private except to say that she is lovely and she strongly recommended that I read Chris Hammer – The River. The book is a series of journalistic vignettes from across the Murray-Darling Basin set against a broader investigation of the river’s present and future health. It was a great recommendation, I’m loving it.

Friday I attended an AANZCA / N&MRC writing and networking day. We spent most of the day in a light writing bootcamp, then had some discussion opportunities and a few drinks / food paid for us at the university bar.

I got some writing done – really just synthesis notes from my annotations to this point. Not much, but another step forward.

The real highlight was the socialising though. This was my first chance to meet a lot of the others in the cohort, being part-time and remote until recently. It was really nice – both because I’m a little starved for socialising since moving to Canberra (it’s hard to make friends as an adult moving to a new city – who knew!) and because it was just nice to share the anxiety of being a dummy in a PhD program and having that feeling shared.

The second week was I was very distracted by other work, and particularly the News Bargaining Incentive. My boss came to Canberra, we spent Tuesday at Parliament and the legislation dropped on Thursday. This isn’t the place to talk through my feelings on that measure; I just mention it because it consumed my time and brain.

I did have a very interesting meeting with my secondary supervisor Kieran McGuinness though. It was our first session and, again, the details aren’t for the public blog, but it was particularly useful to chat to them about how to approach theory as somebody with no real background in it or aptitude for it. They had some suggestions of particular areas that might be useful for me to look into but the real message was to read read read until I can’t read no more.

All of this – the cohort, the discussion, the sharp reminders that I need to think and read and write a lot more than I am – has reinforced that I need to go full time with the study. Two days a week, half of which is immediately eaten up by meetings and admin, is just not enough. I moved to Canberra because I wanted to immerse myself in the doctorate, and now I spend only a quarter of my week actually doing it.

It’s not really practical to do this immediately, but I’ll work out a way to get there.