After submitting my article in September, I recently received my reviewer’s verdict. I had some revisions to do and two weeks to do them in, but now V2 of the article has been completed and re-submitted.
Luckily, most of the sections were satisfactory. My abstract needed some extra information, to which I initially thought “that’s impossible, I’ve only got 150 words!” However, I was wrong — my new abstract fits way more information into the limited space.
Continue readingYesterday, I finally pushed the big green “Submit” button on the research article that I’ve been working on sporadically for nearly two years. Pressing that button provided a relief, though an anticlimatic one; seeing years of my life summed up in a file just 46kb small felt more painful than joyous.
But for now I’ve done what I can, and I need to wait for the journal staff to give their verdict. However, that could be a slow process. When I and two other students helped with another study during our undergraduate degree, it wasn’t fully published until three years later. Hopefully my paper won’t need too many revisions, but I’m not naive enough to think it will be waved through unchanged.
I’m glad to have completed a version of the paper, and I’m fairly happy with my work. So far, I’m annoyed about only one aspect. As part of studying science communication, and from my own interests, I’ve read quite a bit about the failure points of academic writing — how it can be jargon-laden, hard to read, and artificially exclusive. I’ve read about how to make academic writing more lively and well-crafted, and how to make it better do its job of communicating. After diving into this new topic, I wanted to try out those new techniques and approaches. But in the end I stuck with the conventional approach, the passive, impersonal “view from nowhere”.
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As of yesterday, I have graduated from my MSc. So now I’m a … post-post-graduate? a double-graduate? Someone with more degrees than sense? (maybe!).
I found graduation day a little odd, thanks to being in the mildly-uncommon situation of graduating from the same university twice. I experienced a few déjà vu moments as a result. Yet some parts of the day were very different. The biggest difference was size: in 2014 I graduated in a class of 200, in a ceremony dedicated to psychology qualifications. Yesterday I was one of a class of 9 (7 of us were at the ceremony). We shared a ceremony with one standard-sized group – biological sciences – and other tiny, specialist, or interdisciplinary subjects.
Observing this reminded me of one reason why I enjoy sci-comm. As much as I respect psychology and maintain my interest in it, sci-comm feels like “my” subject in a way that psychology never quite did. I think this is because sci-comm is interlinked with so many subjects by necessity. There’s always a new way to understand and investigate issues, or new ideas which can be brought in and combined with existing common knowledge. I enjoy this multidisciplinary approach, as it lets me keep a lot of doors open when it comes to learning new things and future decisions.
Continue readingOn November 15th I handed in my dissertation, and officially completed my MSc.
Having finished is a strange concept; I haven’t got used to not spending most of the day writing yet. Not spending all my time thinking about my dissertation and the ideas surrounding it also means I’m catching up with a lot of ideas I had been ignoring (and plenty of tasks I had been ignoring too).
It also means I’ve had some time to think about the dissertation module as a whole and about elements I wish I’d done differently. Beyond the obvious wish that I’d procrastinated less, one part that I know I would change is supervision.
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I’ve now received the marks back for my presentation from Tuesday, so that’s two out of three dissertation elements complete.
While my actual score (62, one mark higher than my proposal score) was unexpectedly high, the feedback I received was what I had already assumed: the weakest point by far was in not explaining my sample and method clearly enough, while the strongest point was in how I explained my results. Also, the feedback said I made sense of why the research is taking place within UWE and right now- that I got its relevance across and connected it to the study aims. I’m glad I got that feedback, as I struggled with explaining the research relevance in my proposal, so to know I successfully communicated it this time is reassuring.
I’m now in the final month of dissertation writing, and thanks to completing my presentation defence today, I’m 20% closer to finishing the overall project too.
Overall, I think the defence went quite well- given how long I took to get it finished, things could easily have gone very wrong. I only finished the script on the morning- repeatedly changing my mind about how much context and history I needed to include, combined with doubting my ability to explain the idea well, meant I’d repeatedly put it off until I felt more confident about what I was doing. In hindsight, that was a really bad idea, and I got lucky.
So far I’m disappointed- I may have got 33 responses after two days, but two weeks later I’m only at 40. There’s been so little progress, and literally zero response from the UWE Facebook group.
This month I’ve finally been able to release my questionnaire, which is a relief.
After my and my supervisor’s attempts at piloting gained a grand total of 7 participants, I wasn’t feeling optimistic. But checking over the results from the 7 pilots showed that my questions were well-designed, and worked better than expected.
I’d expected that I would have to revise the survey inbetween piloting and releasing, but my alpha scores were high enough (a fixable 0.655 for the lowest section, up to a surprising 0.926 for one section) that we could release it straight away.
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The majority of my MSc time is now officially over, as a few days ago we received our finalised marks for our completed modules. I got a Merit, with an overall average of 64% (and my 90-second-late essay was reprieved, which was nice). Due to how our marking system works, the maximum I can now get is a Merit even if I somehow aced the dissertation. I’m finding that knowledge helpful- it means I can’t be worrying about trying to reach a grade that’s actually impossible to reach.
May was a big month in uni terms, as we had three difficult assignments, forming an entire module. We also had our last taught lecture block, so technically we finished uni on May 7th.
Our final day of uni started with the group presentations we had been preparing since the start of April. While presentations are my least-favourite type of assignment, I wasn’t excessively scared about this one, as we’d been able to go through our scripts multiple times and work on each others answers.
We ended up with a Distinction for our presentation, which I’m very happy about; normally hearing the word “presentation” sends all expectations about doing well straight out of the window, so to do well on one was surprising.
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