Merry Christmas to all!

So I thought I better reflect on the term (and the year) which has passed.

I have done my Christmas shopping and have this afternoon sent my project approval form to my supervisor, so as of tomorrow (as I still have a few loose ends to tie up tonight) I will put my feet up for Christmas. Chill out and get started on that garage full of beer!!!

It’s been a great term and I feel I have come a long way already since starting the PhD. The end seems like quite a long way off but hopefully in two years time I will be writing up my thesis over the Christmas holiday. Oh my God that does seem very distant! But I think things are starting to come together and I got some positive feedback from my supervisors when we all met last week. I have done a literature review on Europeanisation which has helped me organise my thoughts and get to grips with some of the reading. I feel I’m a lot more critical about things now (which is a good thing, although I do see myself launching into major rants about minor things which annoy me!).

So after Christmas… I need to get started on my theoretical framework and start planning my methodology. In addition I will have to start to contact people in Portugal and start to get my fieldwork planned. Jens, my supervisor in modern languages, has invited me to give a talk at the Instituto Camões seminars in May. This will be my first major presentation and it will give me the chance to try out what I will have prepared for the Faculty presentation later in that month. A bit scary to think I’ll be presenting my work! I won’t have any hard evidence to present but I hope I’ll be in situation where I can give some insight into what I hope to find out and problematise the concepts I am dealing with and present them in a way that people will be able to understand.

Now all that sounds a long way away, but it seems like only yesterday I started my PhD and I’m already 3 months in!

So Merry Christmas and I’ll look forward to blogging through 2009 and having lots more new PhD experiences.

Hello everyone, it’s December and there’s snow on the ground and more to follow tonight! It’s been a while since my last post but there are lots of things to report on…

Today I returned to PhD work (gradually) after a little break to celebrate the weekend leading up to my MA graduation which was yesterday. In stark contrast to the hot July day I graduated from Newcastle as a Bachelor in 2006, the day I became a Master was cold and with some snow! But it was a very enjoyable day and marks the end of the my time as an MA student. It was good to see some people again I’d not seen since the Summer. Also it gave my supervisors the chance to talk to my parents and girlfriend and give them a little taste of what they might expect Steven to be like in the coming years as his patience wears increasingly thin.

Incidentally, it is more of a cold than a hangover I am nursing today but this has been partially remedied by access to free Portuguese wine this afternoon. The Postgraduate Director asked me and my fellow “ambassadors” to give a talk to the current undergraduates about the joys of postgraduate study. Free wine and mince pies is always an effective lure! This I was happy to do and was as enjoyable as last week where we were available to answer any questions at the postgraduate open day. As Jo has eluded to in her blog, it was a very reassuring experience for us and the prospective new postgrads. It certainly made me think about how far I’ve come (and now I have formally graduated too!!!) and that I don’t regret postgraduate study.

So I’m sipping on the wine slowly as I write this. It’s not mulled wine unfortunately that would be lovely. So I may go back via the Christmas market and have a shot of that! Yeah, Christmas in Newcastle is looking good this year. Fenwick’s window is all Oliver themed and my parents were very impressed. The Christmas lights look nice and the market is full of nice things too. But I won’t be doing my Christmas shopping just yet! Alas I’m far too busy!!!

Other things of note that I have done. Well on my project side I need to do my project approval form and complete my PhD proposal by Monday. This is mostly done already but will keep me occupied for the next couple of days. And I shall meet with my supervisors next week and discuss what I have done on my Europeanisation literature review. Oh, I better do some work on that before the weekend!

I also have some good news in that the Portuguese Embassy in London has written back to me and are willing to co-operate in getting me access to places in Lisbon to do my fieldwork. Hopefully a clear plan will emerge after Christmas on quite what I want my project to be and where I will go and who I will talk to. For now, let’s just accept that we have had positive communications.

One thing last week was particularly interesting. I saw the other side of the fence! Meaning that my supervisor got me to help her mark her second year undergraduate presentations. So I was in charge of setting up the tape recorder and had to make notes and mark the presentations. Some were better than others. While I was impressed by the way some students communicated, some of the others left me rather puzzled. Looking back on my old undergrad days (I did that module but we didn’t have to make a presentation in my day!), I remember that ok some of us were half decent, but other students weren’t so good and/or were rather lazy when it came to group work. On the whole I was impressed with what I saw and the next lot will be tomorrow. I guess the best part was trying to give them a mark. This I thought would be quite difficult. However, me and my supervisor met up at the end of the day and discussed each presentation in turn and agreed a mark (in a quiet pub over a pint). I was impressed in that the marks we gave them were quite similar and maybe my marking was little on the harsh side, but we came to an agreement. Alas I can say no more for fear that said undergrads may be reading this blog!

For sure there will be another post before I finish in Newcastle for Christmas. Maybe the end of next week.