It has certainly been a very busy time over the last month… Came back to a really useful supervisor meeting in early January, a great start and sparked off lots of ideas and new things for me to be getting on with, so the past month has mostly involved cracking on with all that in advance of the next meeting in mid-February.

Barring a nasty bout of tonsillitis, progress has been steady (if somewhat slow at times). I’m working on really refining the theoretical framework I am going to use and also revisiting the original research questions from my proposal in order to develop them into actual, real, workable ones. Real mixture of days, some just feel like the most extravagant exercise in procrastination, where so little seems to get done in 7 or 8 hours that I find it rather incredible and genuinely wonder what I could possibly have been doing with my time (curse you, Facebook!). Other times, the odd hour or two will see me coming along leaps and bound; I had a recent Eureka moment at 1am on a Monday morning. So I’m starting to learn to go with the weird ebbs and flows of desperation/inspiration….

I’ve really found that scribbling things down helps too. We live in such a technological age that even for a Luddite such as myself, the default ‘work’ action is ‘switch on laptop and open Microsoft Word’. However, just sitting with a pen and paper certainly has merits and makes it much easy to map things out visually, so I’ve amassed a nice little collection of haphazard and rather scruffy-looking diagrams over the last week or so.

I’ve also been working on my Ethics application over the last few weeks, which can be tricky when you are still only in the early stages of research, but can also help you to really consider what your research is actually about and how you can communicate that to other people, particularly participants. It’s a long old process and it has been good to get the ball rolling with it… so hopefully next Supervisor meeting the ethics application will be coming along nicely and I’ll have made some real progress with the research questions and theory more generally… not too much to ask is it?!