Читать книгу Fulfilling the Potential of Your Doctoral Experience - Pam Denicolo - Страница 31

To reiterate, the first 100 days should involve getting established in your new researcher role. Even if you have been at the institution for some time, you should still approach this as a new job in a new department and enthusiastically look at everything you may already be familiar with from a fresh perspective. You should think of yourself as a professional researcher and not a passive student.

By the end of 100 days (or three months), you should know who your supervisors are and how you will work with them; you should know the people who can help you with your work; have become familiar with the people in your department and be thinking about who you might like or need to know outside of your department or institution, too. You should be conversant with the university environment and what resources are available to you within it, and you should be beginning to take advantage of available opportunities, that is, accessing the training and development that you may need to help you conduct your research. None of the three key aspects (people, environment, role) are discrete or provide you with finite tasks: you will always be adding to your people contacts, which will eventually become your ‘professional network’; you will always be expanding your resources and refining your plans and understanding of what being a researcher is about. However, by the end of the first three months, you should have the basic foundations in place. Although the checklist in Activity 2.2 might seem to indicate that you could work on these three areas sequentially, that is one per month, instead you will need to work on all three concurrently.

Finally, you need to come up with an overall plan of what you intend to do. Essentially you are on a ‘fixed term contract’ and have a limited amount of time to work on a project with a specific deliverable (a thesis) at the end. So, it is best to plan this out and draw up phases, stages or work packages that ensure you can deliver the thesis on time. By your second or third supervision, you should be discussing your overall plan with your supervisors. This plan will evolve over time – but the important thing is that you have a sense of direction that you can build on, manage and control. With this, you will have made an excellent start.