Since kicking off my PhD training here at the Institute for Transport Studies in Leeds (ITS) at the start of October, I've attended many training & induction sessions and can even remember what happened in some of them! Topics covered included:
Starting Your Research Degree - Faculty of Environment / Ethics / Overview of Mapping & graphics software / NVivo Part 1 (the basics of working with text for qualitative research) / How to Write a Great Research Paper, and Get it Accepted by a Good Journal (by Elsevier) / Advanced Literature Searching
In addition to this we've had to mix in a number of institutional 'Welcome' events, such as the WR-DTC Welcome day in the wedding cake interior of Leeds Town Hall, as well as the ITS Induction afternoon and the Faculty of Earth and Environment Welcome and associated barbecue. Oh it is a hard life!
My supervisor has met up with me several times since the first day and I'm starting to learn to interpret the guidance I'm being offered! It is a strange experience not to be the tutor (my old role at Coventry Uni) and I'm also adapting to on-the-fly deconstruction and analysis of complex ideas within sentences... I do feel well supported, although the oft mentioned 'Transfer' looms some way over the horizon of the New Year and with it the vague possibility that my potential ability to make my project as complex as this sentence could put my smooth progression to the full-Monty PhD stage at risk!
In short, progress seems slow - I've read a handful of papers in which the authors review other literature on commuting by bicycle, or the integration of cycling with public transport (PT), as well as others which cover research methods related to cycling in addition to methods as applied to more general (mainly transport) research areas. Time to get more strategic about this, anyway, some of the following posts will give a sense of what's involved in being a PhD full-timer and others will be of interest to those of you also researching cycling and/or integration with public transport.
Please acknowledge my blog, website and any ideas, links, or other content I choose to display here appropriately!
Starting Your Research Degree - Faculty of Environment / Ethics / Overview of Mapping & graphics software / NVivo Part 1 (the basics of working with text for qualitative research) / How to Write a Great Research Paper, and Get it Accepted by a Good Journal (by Elsevier) / Advanced Literature Searching
In addition to this we've had to mix in a number of institutional 'Welcome' events, such as the WR-DTC Welcome day in the wedding cake interior of Leeds Town Hall, as well as the ITS Induction afternoon and the Faculty of Earth and Environment Welcome and associated barbecue. Oh it is a hard life!
My supervisor has met up with me several times since the first day and I'm starting to learn to interpret the guidance I'm being offered! It is a strange experience not to be the tutor (my old role at Coventry Uni) and I'm also adapting to on-the-fly deconstruction and analysis of complex ideas within sentences... I do feel well supported, although the oft mentioned 'Transfer' looms some way over the horizon of the New Year and with it the vague possibility that my potential ability to make my project as complex as this sentence could put my smooth progression to the full-Monty PhD stage at risk!
In short, progress seems slow - I've read a handful of papers in which the authors review other literature on commuting by bicycle, or the integration of cycling with public transport (PT), as well as others which cover research methods related to cycling in addition to methods as applied to more general (mainly transport) research areas. Time to get more strategic about this, anyway, some of the following posts will give a sense of what's involved in being a PhD full-timer and others will be of interest to those of you also researching cycling and/or integration with public transport.
Please acknowledge my blog, website and any ideas, links, or other content I choose to display here appropriately!