My Higher Education - help

[MooMa1d]

Hi all

Might not quite be the right place to post this but just feeling a bit deflated right now.

I have a full-time job but 4 years ago took the decision to study part time firstly for an fDa and then secondly for an Hons degree. This is my final year (dissertation) and I've just come to an absolute stop. I'm struggling - I know what I want to write about but the dissertation just seems.......massive!

Partly I'm frustrated because I've managed to pass everything so far despite having depression, now I feel I am over the worst of that, and looking forward, me and OH TTC and this dissertation (due May) is just blerugh. If I managed to do work during work and depression, how come I'm struggling now?? I'm so tired and take this weekend, sat down to do it and just seem to have accomplished bugger all.

I've emailed my supervisor today so hopefully she'll come back to me next week but never been to uni before so all new to me, just wondered if anyone had an advice on actually writing dissertations or getting motivation? Or how have you helped your children when they've come to an impasse with the whole thing.

Or just some general encouragement would be good - I kind of wish I hadn't started but I'm literally only a few months to the end.....

Is it the length of the dissertation that is getting to you? Can you break it down into chunks?
So, (and I'm writting this from a science perspective, it may be different in your area)
research
practical
results section
Conclusions
intro

Get one section done, and the rest seems to be less of a mountain to climb?

Part time degrees are tough. Go get that Hons degree!

I can fully empathise with having no motivation to get going on big pieces of work. I've left it all to the last minute on multiple occasions and caused myself so no end of stress and anxiety in the process.

One thing to avoid if at all possible is just doing absolutely nothing at all and repressing the rising sense of panic because that makes it infinitely harder in the long run. Another thing to avoid is beating yourself up internally over what you haven't done/your lack of motivation/etc etc because it just ends up with an awful spiral of self-hatred! drama face

It sounds from your post like you know why you're less than enthusiastic (looking forward to the next stage in life) but is there anything else worrying you about it - i.e. do you have a firm grip on the topic, know how to go about approaching your research, have a good idea of your writing approach (i.e. do you like to do multiple careful drafts, write it all quickly then edit at the end, etc.)? Is it the topic itself that's not interesting/inspiring you?

If you have firm answers to all of that then I think with 5 months to play with slow and steady is the way - break it down into weekly word count aims that take into account how you fit reading/research round that as well. Get a concrete idea of how much you can do in one hour (i.e. read and annotate two articles, write 500 words, whatever) and plan your week round that.

Your supervisor can and should help with the planning stage and will let you know when they'd like to see drafts etc - if they seem vague on that or inclined to just let you get on with it, explain that you think targets/regular email contact will be useful.

Your university should also have study skills sessions/advice - have a look on the website - they might be hard to get to if you're working but see what you can find online in terms of dissertation support - there'll be lots of information out there.

Studying while working full-time is INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT, especially if you have a job that is less than totally fun and fulfilling, so congratulate yourself for getting this far, especially with depression on top - and try visualising your graduation day celebrations or updating your CV as a motivator.

Best of luck.

Thanks guys,

I can just feel the stress bubbling up from my toes to my top, stressing about getting it done.

The thing is they're helpful but because its all distance, they're not overly helpful. I mean, I guess there is only so much help they can give but it's never seemed enough. It is a bit like out on your own.

You are right, I need to stop beating myself up but I just can't!

I know what I'm writing about, I just keep thinking perhaps I'm not as good as I think I am, or I don't quite have a grasp on it. TBH I'm just wittering on now.

Everything you say makes sense - I just need to do it!

Without knowing your area it is difficult to give much advice, but the main thing is not to think about the final length at this stage, just the tasks to be done.

I supervise social science dissertations, and the place to start there is with a literature review. I tell my students to think of this as an essay and aim for 2-3000 words to get them off the ground.

I bet if you sat down for the rest of the evening now - say, 2.5 hours' work with tea and biscuits breaks - you'd feel so much better about it in the morning.

Focus on small things - making a plan, getting a nice folder for storing papers/drafts, looking at notes and just trying to write 300 words - whatever it is.

Don't let the size of it intimidate you - think of it in multiples of whatever the longest piece of work you've ever done before is and it'll become more manageable. My undergrad dissertation was 8000 - 10000 words, which seemed wholly insurmountable at the time - now I can write that in a week comfortably! If I'd thought of it as 4 x normal essay length I think it would have been much easier.

Think to yourself that the longer you don't do it for, the worse you will feel, but then use that thought to make you do something asap. Even half an hour per evening will put a dent in it, which will add up. You've got loads of time yet - you'll get there!

My area is criminology and I'm looking at profiling cybercriminals.

But I think you're right, break it down into chunks.

It's just knowing whether or not I'm writing the right thing

MoooMaid, have a look at this thread.

Dissertation Question

I'm cutting & pasting & adapting part of my post from there:

The problem at the moment is that you're in "all or nothing" thinking. To be really tough, this is an easy get out, frankly. I see it a lot: "Oh I'm stupid. I can't do this." -- it's a quick way out of dealing with a difficult situation, and a typically socialised female way of dealing with it.

But while it's understandable - we all do it to a certain extent, I'm sure! - then you take a deep breath and you start to take the small steps that are necessary to complete a large-scale piece of work, starting from scratch.

Doing it all in one go might work for an essay, where the essay question is written for you, and the content is described by the course/module, and there's a reading list & so on.

A dissertation is different. It's often longer than the essay length students are used to (but not always). However, the main challenge of a dissertation is that it's the student herself who develops the question or topic, defines the field, pulls together a schedule of reading & research.

So you need to start with small steps: doing some reading around your broad topic. Then you need to think about a coupe of questions which interest you. Without going "Oh, I'm too stupid, I can't do this" -- you just needs a couple of ideas. Think about why you're doing the course in the first place. Or what's a question about the field you're studying that has niggled you for the last 2 years? Something. Anything.

Then you need to get to the library and browse the bookshelves in that area, and start reading. Schedule to spend a morning or an afternoon just browsing & skim reading in the library. Pull likely looking books off shelves and so on.

Then you need to brainstorm a couple of pages. I set a creative writing exercise called "free writing" -- students write (I get them to do it in class because I am evil ) for 5 minutes without stopping. Without editing, without judging themselves. I get them started on a sentence such as "In my thesis I will argue that ..."

Here's a Wikipedia link, but don't tell my students I've linked to wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_writing

You really need to break the task down, bit by bit. And take small steps, step by step, and tell yourself that each time you write, "It's just a draft" you can rewrite. You can edit bad writing, you can't edit a blank page. You just need to do anything, something, that will get you one tiny step closer to the final goal.

And you need to "man up" about it -- but maybe just for an hour a day. The other 23 hours you can believe this "all or nothing" wrong thinking. But for one hour each day, you're going to help herself achieve what you really want to achieve: at the end of a week, that's 7 hours of work towards your dissertation, and that's almost a whole working day.

On this principle you could also do a plan for yourself, working backwards from the hand in date, and how many words. So a dissertation due, say 1 May, of 10,000 words, there are now 4 months to go. That's:
2,500 words a month;
625 words a week;
125 words a day.

But you do all this with a tutor or a supervisor.

This is tough love & why my students pass!

Thank you so much - I will have a proper read of that tomorrow but your responses have made me smile. I guess I didn't know what to expect support wise so I'm feeling a bit lost! We don't have that much interaction with our supervisor - I don't know what they can or can't do for me.

I do know I drive all of this but I guess I wanted some hand holding - which I know defeats the purpose of the learning process but it's security!

I am in the writing stage, so my topic, plan and prelim stage has all been done, title sorted and I do have 2500 words so far but it seems to have stalled, it's just seemed all "a bit too much" but when you look at it as 625 words a week that doesn't seem so bad and I do know what I'm talking about, I just have to try and articulate it!

Some truly excellent advice there ladies, guess I just needed some confidence and support

p.s. I shan't tell anyone you linked to the worlds largest editable encyclopedia Wikipedia

I bet you are doing fine. The others on the thread know loads more than me but your last post made me think.

But you ought to know how much your supervisor can do - have you had a look at the section on dissertations in your course handbook? Or if you can't find it/it doesn't help, can you email the supervisor and ask them to clarify? They can't know unless you tell them, and if you just say something like 'I am unsure how many meetings I should be having with you' or 'is there a limit to the number of office hours I can attend', then you'll know where you are.

Nothing wrong with wiki IMO. I love it. Just don't cite it because it changes all the time!

Wikipedia is a useful source of references, if you go to the sources it cites, rather than using the wiki entry itself.

chemeneger weeeeell , I actually think that's debatable. But I tend to "ban" wikipedia because it's unscholarly, and not authoritative. It's also a lazy first port of call, and limiting.
I teach in the humanities -- it might be different for the sciences, but I hope not. My undergrads have access online to many many scholarly & authoritative research sites. Wikipedia is not needed.

I love wiki.

I don't get them to look at it because they'll C&P the sources without actually reading them. But it is brilliant and I'm glad it exists.

I'm in engineering. Nowadays the vast majority of technical Wiki entries are absolutely fine and factually correct. For research projects it gives an alternative set of starting materials to a database search for papers. Obviously the students can't construct a 30 page report from a Wikipedia page but they can use it to start to find the sources they need. It's not that different from putting search terms in a database or using a review paper that someone else has produced to find references. Ultimately we could ban students from using it but we can't stop them. I do appreciate that other areas are different, and a few years ago when it was less reliable we did advise against using it.

If I'm looking to refresh my memory on theory its often the first place I go for a quick fix. All my colleagues do this too, so it is probably does depend on what subject you are in. We do operate in an area where most of the theory used at UG level is very well established, so once the Wiki entry is there (and it looks like most of them are transcriptions of lecture notes or extracts from textbooks, so they are well edited) they are not really evolving in the way that others do. Its also really useful for finding out about industrial processes, an area notoriously badly covered by scholarly literature.

LDR, yes, not reading the papers is a problem, but that has always been the case - read one paper, copy their references, hope nobody knows better.

Oh, sure.

I think it's dodgier for wiki than a peer-reviewed paper because you hope the references in the peer review are at least accurate and relevant, though obviously that's not perfect either.

I wonder if wiki is worse for arts subjects? I find it can be great, but some of the historical ones have clangers. I read one the other day that claimed someone was a servant to Elizabeth I - they meant Elizabeth Woodville, so they were about a century out of date.

But I agree with you, I use it, I know students use it, and I'm not going to be snobby about it - I just don't recommend it to them.

Anyway, don't want to get too off-topic - but I hope maybe this is reassuring that supervisors aren't necessarily scary people who never had to do a quick google.

If I have to do a quick Google, I use GoogleScholar, while logged into my University's website. Far far better -- it brings up peer-reviewed stuff.

That's the main problem: wikipedia is not peer-reviewed.

Google scholar sounds good.

I don't know if you use TSR at all, but there is a dissertation thread over there which exists basically purely for the process of hand-holding. You aren't alone in wanting this!

In your current situation, I would email your supervisor and ask for a meeting. Generally, if you don't ask for help, they won't offer it, but if you ask (and maybe go in with a list of questions you've thought of) then they will usually offer some advice! You could also ask if he is willing to look at some of what you have already done in order to see if you are working along the right lines.

625 words a week is easy, but it may help you to plan and structure this before writing- e.g. I need 500 words on x subject, today I need to find 3-5 sources on x and discuss them. Set yourself easily achievable goals in terms of what you need to write, and how long you are going to work for each day/week.

Also, allow yourself permitted study breaks- ideally one day a week when you do no uni work at all, and do something fun for yourself, so you don't have time to feel guilty. For me, at least, this helps keep stress at manageable levels. If I know I have time off to look forward too, it helps keep up my motivation to work.

Hi all

Don't worry about going off topic all adds to the discussion.

In terms of meeting up its not possible - I'm a distance learner and in a completely different area of the country to my uni. That's been part of the problem I think. I hear full timers say they meet on a very regular basis - we can't do that but I don't think as much support seems to be there. In fairness its perhaps just my perception though but it adds to the problem.

Is TSR the student room?

And yes, I too use Google Scholar

That is one of the things you have to factor in as a distance learner, and presumably something you've known all along.

Consult your Department handbook for what is available for distance learners. You must have had tutorial support via telephone or email before this, so use it.

Students really can't be passive about this. If you need support, you need to ask for it. Unless you came on here simply for a moan.

No no not just for a moan

I admit I was feeling rather down and deflated yesterday but not so bad today. Only got in an hour or so ago so no work tonight but tomorrow night I'm looking at it again.

As I say, I have started writing I just got a bit 'stalled'. I think I feel a bit bad bothering them but at the end of the day, that's what they're there for and I need to take advantage of this.

This is the second long distance degree I've done (2 diff unis) and they're quite different in terms of support - I knew what it'd be like before I started, yes but I didn't realise how different, however I admit I was a tad naive about the whole dissertation process but am feeling better about it today.

Tomorrow I plan to split my work up so far into their own separate files (each chapter) and work on them as separate pieces rather than one big piece which will also make it easier to send smaller chunks to my supervisor for some assistance.

Yes, I knew what I was getting myself into but nothing quite prepares you for reality, that's all

Can they not skype you?

(Or I should say, can you not offer to skype them?)