The Year of Isms, Ologys, and Everything in Between: The Honours Program, Part II

I took one last look at my emails in a mixture of frustration and disbelief. Leaning back in my chair, I took a huge breath and covered my face, blocking out the view of my cobweb filled ceiling. Was I really going to need to stand outside a school tomorrow and hand out flyers, begging families to be participants in my research. What had I gotten myself into?

To start, a quick word on accommodation as promised from part 1. As soon as semester one wrapped up, I moved off of campus to live in a share house in West End. I finally felt like I was actually living in Australia instead of a strange bubble atop a hill. Having friends who have absolutely nothing to do with university and mingling with locals is refreshing and I feel it's important when putting things in perspective. It was a definite improvement, the major one was probably not being constantly surrounded by 18 and 19 year olds anymore. I hold absolutely nothing against them, when I was that age, I was probably the same - being unnecessarily loud, brash, irresponsible, and always looking for a party. Anything else was 'lame'. I'm not sure I would have survived semester two had I continued to live on campus.

Semester Two.

I made a big mistake at the end of semester one. If you read part 1 of this series, I finished semester one with a perfect GPA and it seemed things were going to plan. I did two things which would come back to bite me in the ass later. Firstly, I took my foot off the gas. Secondly, I planned a trip back home to Malaysia. Now... The second part wouldn't necessarily be so bad had I not 'relaxed' my focus. I needed to go back to see mum anyway and catch up with the family.

When the semester ended, because I really needed the scholarship, my focus altered slightly from my dissertation, to pushing articles that I could submit to journals and show that my work was 'publishable'. I set my dissertation aside completely, thought to myself 'she'll be alright', I'll restart work on that when I go home to Malaysia, use my family and friends as pilot studies. I didn't touch any of the ethics stuff that in hindsight, I should have just completed to get it out of the way.

On the article side, I think we did pretty well. I got roped in to co-write a review paper with my supervisor and submitted it before the year closed out. So I felt good, gave myself a pat on the back, and again, thought things were going to plan. Surprise surprise, it all fell apart as soon as I flew home. As is common, and I should have known this, whenever I visit home, my itinerary quickly fills up. Whenever I thought, I should probably start working on my dissertation and try writing another journal article, I'd get a call or invitation from family or friends to hang out. My justification was always, meh... I'm only home for a month, might as well catch up with as many people as I can. Long story short, I got about as much work done as the Malaysian Anti Corruption Commission. None.

So I get back to Australia late January, with my brother due to join me in the first week of February to watch Opeth and Underoath. Before I knew it, I had the first half of my dissertation, my second review paper, my ethics, and data collection plan all due by the first week of March. We managed to hammer out the ethics application and it was approved within a week, thank jeebus. In my first meeting with my supervisor for the semester though, we counted out the weeks to submission and what I had to get done by the end of April, so I could write and edit in May for submission on June 2nd. Turned out I had about 5 weeks to interview all my participants. Quick tip: start early!

My researched focused on Virtual Reality usage for families. Guess what? As a single, young(ish) immigrant, I knew maybe 3 families personally. Where were the other 10 or so going to come from? I made flyers, I sent out emails, got on the university mailing list, I posted on Facebook, I texted anyone and everyone who would give me the time of day. You know when your friends join a MLM scheme and suddenly they're pressuring you to come for meetings and shit? Yeah, that's what I kind of became. Except I was a dodgy-looking Asian fella in Australia who hardly knew anyone.

Accurate representation of data collection.

But things weren't moving quickly enough. It's understandably difficult to get families to allow a stranger into their homes and take 2 hours of their time, with the children present. Too early and parents are still at work, too late and you're eating into family/bed time. Through the kind souls at university, I quickly racked up 3 interviews. The first 3 weeks or so went alright, I got up to 7 interviews. But then it suddenly dried up. April was ending and I needed at least 5 more families to interview. That's when the situation in the introduction happened. My supervisor suggested I was moving way too slowly and I needed to try something different. She suggested standing outside a school and handing out flyers. I'm not sure if the universe sensed my dread and panic. But somehow, some way, I found 5 more families. People who were brushing me off and seemed like dead ends decided they could pull the family together for 2 hours and I got it done.

You can plan all you like for these long-form, group interviews. Let me assure you, none of them will go to plan. Kids get restless and antsy as soon as the VR demonstration is done. People clam up as soon as you turn on the audio recorder. You forget to ask important questions. Kids get distracted and start asking me about myself (even with my tattoos covered up for interviews, I understand that I'm a peculiar looking person). I remember one interview in particular, where their daughter, who was about 5, was happily chatting with me but as soon as I started asking the real interview questions, we couldn't get another word out of her. All of this as my urgency level is already turned up to 11. But anyway, the point is I got it done. Through repeated shared mental breakdowns and reassurances from my peers. But that was just the beginning, what was next was hell week.

Ah.... transcription. Literally the devil incarnate. Remember when I said I was doing long-form style group interviews? Every 10 minutes of audio is roughly an hour of transcribing. I now had 12 interviews, averaging about 40 minutes each. 480 minutes of audio. Yes, 48 hours worth of transcribing. I hated every second of it. I don't mind hard work, but when it's as mind numbing as re-listening to the interviews and typing it out, it's like riding a tricycle into an oncoming truck with shards of glass glued on the front. But again, I got it done. Thanks to a nifty transcription tool recommended to me by my partner-in-crime and saviour, it took out half the frustration.

Hell week continues when it comes to analysis. This is where you code your interviews and make sense of the data. I think we spent a week cooped up in a house together, brains melting, our conversations getting more aloof as the hours slipped by. Only too aware that time was running out. The thing with analysis is, at the end of the day, it's up to you to decide what patterns appear and what patterns you think is relevant to your research. This leaves a lot of space for second-guessing. My initial coding and the final outcome were almost nothing alike. Through many conversations with myself, sometimes in public, I tore down all my reasonings and built them back up until I could no longer challenge myself. Oh, and bear in mind, I was still working on a review paper on the side all through-out this.

Accurate representation of Hell Week.

In part one, I touched on how it was important to have moments where you could completely forget your research and reset your brain. A key change happened in semester two which allowed this. Our department had a change of head. Prior to the start of semester 2, I had been allocated classes to tutor. When the changes were applied, I found that I had lost my classes because 'undergrads should not be tutoring undergrads'. I'll get more into this at the end of this post. But that freed up some of my time. I signed up to be a mentor to new international students, meaning I would spend at least an hour a week helping a new student adjust to life in Australia over coffee. This was great. Just having inane conversations about life in Australia, and exchanging knowledge about each others' cultures (my mentee was from Germany). I also picked up boxing, started playing more music, rock climbing, and running to get my frustrations out. So again, despite the avalanche of work, you have to make time to disconnect from it all. It's necessary to remain sane through-out.

So when the analysis is done, next comes putting everything together in a legible manner. Writing the actual dissertation. We left this quite last minute to be honest, which I suppose is to be expected. You want to push it right to the edge to ensure the quality of work. I think I completed my first draft about 2 weeks before submission. This was a 'soft deadline' we had set for ourselves. Initially we had plans to have the finished work proof read. Nope, that went out the window. Editing, reviewing, editing, and more reviewing, and editing. It's all a part of writing. I had to switch around sections, graphs, titles, tables, etc until both my supervisor and myself were satisfied. It was a mad scramble, but I submitted my full 118-page dissertation on deadline day. 2nd of June, 2017. To get the scholarship, I could not score anything less than first class honours, and I could also not miss the deadline because of the time they needed to mark in time for the scholarship decision. This sound simple, but I know at least 2 of my peers who had to get extensions on their deadline. If I missed it, I would have been disqualified from this round of scholarship applications, the next round would be after my visa expired, so I would then have to get out of the country, apply from abroad, figure out what to do with my car, rent etc. You get the picture, not a desirable outcome.

Fast forward to today, 30th June 2017. In the month since submission, I've taken time off. After a full month of non-stop rushing, your brain and body falls apart in relief. I finished off my review paper and got it submitted as well. Weirdly, in the past week, I've started getting restless and antsy. After 6 months of having a huge goal to focus on, suddenly just being forced to sit around and wait feels uncomfortable. It's also very difficult to motivate yourself to work on things when you have no idea if you're getting kicked out of the country in the next month. The next big thing was the scholarship outcome. Either this was the end of my journey here in Australia, or the start of a new journey for the next 3 years.

On 29th June 2017, I got confirmation that I had somehow finished my Honours degree with a perfect CGPA of 7.0 and that my scholarship had been confirmed (dealing with Griffith admin is a whole other story. We were left hanging unnecessarily in suspense for way too long). I would be officially starting my PhD in the first week of July. The moment felt surreal. I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, scream, or a combination of it all at once. I think my biggest feeling was one of relief. I had not wasted the past year, I achieved what I set out to do and it gave mom a huge boost of morale. Looking back at it, it's been strange, this transition over the past year. Just a year ago, you could have asked me if I was going to do a doctorate degree and I would have laughed in your face. If you asked me a month ago, I would have told you there is nothing I want more. Despite the little gripes and idiosyncrasies of life in academia, I may have finally found my calling. For now at least. I'm looking forward to this journey, the path will be long an full of terrors. I hope to share with you my stumbles along the way. And yes, we got a celebration tattoo to mark the end of the Honours.

Accurate representation of this week.

My big problem with the Honours program, having completed it: For some strange reason, the honours program is considered an undergraduate course. We share the same exact course program with the students doing their graduate diplomas. Same classes, same deadlines, same everything. And yet, they are categorised as postgraduates while we were undergraduates. The biggest problem with this, as I outlined above, is that we are not allowed to be involved with the undergraduate courses doing their bachelor's degrees. No marking, no tutoring etc which is a big source of income. The other thing is not being assigned a hub or working space (I used the Queensland Library as my temporary office), and whatever other benefits a post-grad gets. A little footnote, but a strange one indeed.

Thank you for reading, if you've made it this far. I hope some of it gives you an insight into the life and strife of the honours program if you're considering it, or going through the same battle right now. I may write another more concise '8 tips and tricks to acing the honours program. Number 3 will shock you' sort of post for those thinking whether doing the honours is even worth it. I've included my acknowledgements if for some reason you'd like to read it. And lastly, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to get in touch!

Disclaimer: This entire post is very contextual and you should not generalise anything from here. Everything you've read is from my own personal experience and results will probably differ from individual to individual.

Becoming Minimalist

Last night, I watched 'Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things' on Netflix. It was the straw that broke the camel's back in my constant struggle with consumerism and materialism. I went down the rabbit hole of the minimalist lifestyle - read blogs, articles, and searched it up on youtube. Almost immediately, having gathered my bearings about what minimalism was all about, I was excited to embark down this path. Today, I started my journey and in this post, I want to share why I'm embracing minimalism and how I'm going about it.

Let's start with what becoming a minimalist means. If you want further information, I'll link the websites I've read at the end of the post, but this is what it means to me. As stated in the documentary and on The Minimalists website, minimalism is basically simplifying your life. Ridding your life of excess to focus on the things that add value and quality to living. I've always been intrigued by articles about people who have adopted extreme minimalism but I was never ready to take a plunge that drastic. In my mind, before today, minimalism seemed like a very boring way to live. There were always stories about people who had only 10 items in their closet, only a futon in their bedroom, and so on. Pushing the extremes to live on the bare minimal. Having read more about it though, minimalism is basically what you want it to be in your current situation. More importantly, it does not only focus on your possessions (although this is the key reason for me). In ridding excess, the question is always, 'Does this add value to my life?'. This encompasses relationships, time, work, activities etc... basically all the opportunity costs when making decisions. Ridding yourself of toxic relationships, overwhelming jobs, things that weigh you down. Decluttering.

"We work jobs we hate, to buy shit we don't need, with money we don't have, to impress people we don't like."

In a sense, I have sort of been skirting the edges of minimalism through-out my life. My wardrobe is very monochrome, I default to all black everything quite often, I've shunned 'climbing the corporate ladder' and I've not had a real 'home' for the past 5 or so years. Constantly travelling helps with not building clutter as I always preferred to try and travel light. However, in the past year, I've settled down in Brisbane and I've allowed the clutter to build up. Being into sneakers, streetwear, and fashion has probably not helped either. Whilst travelling, I would still keep track of the trends, but didn't have the money or space to accumulate all this junk. Now that I've had a little more spending power (everything seems so cheap when you're earning and spending AUD), I've come to the realisation that I've spent the past year wasting way too much time and money on things. 

It's hard not to. Advertising and consumerism is constantly in your face these days. Open your facebook or instagram feeds, your email, twitter,  youtube, or just turn on your TV. There's a constant message of you need this, or you need that to achieve happiness. 'The influencer era'. The latest cars, fashion, tech, so you can get 1 step closer to becoming your idols. Especially now, with all the Mid-Year/End of Financial Year sales. I opened up my email inbox and there were no fewer than 13 emails from local retailers telling me 'Now is the time to shop! 50% off storewide' (I spent a chunk of last night unsubscribing from newsletters). Afterpay, interest-free payment plans, exclusive discount codes, store credit etc. And I have fallen for these sales time and again, buying stuff I probably didn't need. $80 for a complete outfit that would've normally cost $200, paid over 4 months?! It'd be rude not to! Huge discounts are hard to resist. Walk into any fast-fashion retailer. Stuff is so cheap and changes so quickly that I pick things up without thinking, just because it's $20 or $10. 'Meh, it's this cheap, why not?' And then never use it. You know this, when you do your annual clean and find that cute shirt or novelty item buried in your closet. 'Oh, I forgot I even had this!' It's not the quality items you use daily that weigh you down, it's the stuff you buy at DFOs.

"Collect moments, not things."

The other thing that sparked this 'a-ha' moment was my room. I think that the state of your room is a reflection of the state of your mind. Whenever I am overwhelmed with work or stress, the effect is mirrored in my room. An assortment of papers, clothes and things will start to pile up in various places. It quickly becomes a mess. When I looked around my room last night (I've been on-edge for the past week, waiting to hear about my scholarship), it was cluttered. There were things stacked on other things, boxes of stuff I'd kept around 'because they look nice' or 'maybe one day I'll need it'. Clothes I hardly wore cause they no longer fit or I don't like the look of but 'it's a waste to throw away or donate it because I paid x amount for this or that'. With so much clutter, it's hard to focus on and appreciate the things that really matter. The things you like the most. The things that make you happy. Not to mention having to clean that many more things. Clear your room, and it clears your mind. I've always been a fan of the minimal aesthetic anyway.

So what have I decided to do? Today I donated 30 pieces of clothing, including shoes and various accessories. I threw away old documents, old bottles and boxes that I kept around simply because they looked good. I gave away books I'd already read. There's not going to be a drastic change overnight, I'm not going to move everything out of my room and be left with only 30 pieces of clothing etc. No, it's a gradual process and the focus is more on how I make decisions in the future. When I moved into this house about 8 months ago, I decided to go with an open clothing rack. It was a financial decision back then and I planned on picking up a proper cupboard somewhere down the road. Now, it's an integral piece of this new journey. Anything that doesn't fit on my clothing rack, I don't need. If dust builds up on something, it's because I don't wear it, and therefore, I don't need it. I got rid of the storage boxes under my bed for stuff that didn't fit on the rack. This way, it's strictly one in, one out (for the time being, I'm doing one in, two out). If I buy something, I have to sell/donate/throw the thing that it replaces. This keeps me from impulse buying or stress-shopping and prompts the question 'Is buying this thing going to improve on what I already have?' It will also help with quality over quantity. The goal is to have a wardrobe where everything is a favourite piece. Again, ridding the excess. Personally, being a very indecisive person, having quality over quantity, or fewer options, also helps with time management.

Open Clothing Rack

What this also means is more gratitude. Be grateful everyday for what you already have instead of constantly chasing the next thing, a better car, a better house, a nicer watch and losing sight of yourself. Sure, you can use those things as motivation but if you're working your butt off just to buy a nicer car, do you own the stuff, or does the stuff own you? Do things because you want to, not because you need to to fund that next luxury item.

One very important thing to keep in mind, is how things add value to your life. In the documentary, there's a section where someone asks about getting rid of all their books even though they love the tactile feel of the pages, the smell, and so on. If you think your collection brings you happiness, then by all means, go ahead. Keep that hobby or collection. As long as it doesn't get in your way or stress you out about findings ways/time to store/maintain them. Remember, you decide how you want to approach minimalism. It goes without saying, this is not for everyone. If you have to stress and force yourself, it defeats the core purpose of a more fulfilling life.

"Love People. Use Things. The Opposite Never Works."

Alright, I've rambled on long enough. I hope it didn't come across as preachy. As I continue this journey, I'll share how being a minimalist extends to my lifestyle, relationships, and activities as well. Thank you for your time, have an amazing day. If you have any feedback, or just want to share your thoughts, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Resources:
Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things (2015)
Becoming Minimalist
The Minimalists
Jenny Mustard

The Year of Isms, Ologys, and Everything in Between: The Honours Program, Part I

It was cold, I was fraying at the edges, overwhelmed, confused, and honestly a little rattled. Everything hit me at once like a pile of bricks in the face as I walked out of my first university class in 5 or so years. I had some catching up to do, the Honours program had officially started. I also needed some extremely heavy metal music.

But I digress, let me take you back to the start. How did I end up here? If for some reason you’re interested, you can go back through my blog posts where I share my 6 months of living and working in New Zealand, a free and roving spirit, a sabbatical if you will. Long story short, I had grown weary of working in the tourism/hospitality industry, but still very interested in the industry as a whole. Whilst in New Zealand, I’d worked as a freelance copywriter, but going further down that path was going to be a bigger struggle than I was willing to risk. 

As the universe would have it, toward the tail end of my New Zealand stint, I randomly met up with my lecturer from back in university for coffee and a catch up in Dunedin. She sold me the idea of combining my interests of writing, tourism, and training into doing research. Incredibly, she offered me the chance to join her at Griffith University to do the Honours program, as a pathway toward a PhD. This took me by surprise. I’d never ever considered a doctorate degree before. As it is, being in the tourism industry, I’d had my fair share of ridicule for completing a Bachelor’s Degree. ‘Why did you spend 4 years in university to stand on the front desk or be a waiter’ etc. I let the idea sit and aerate for a couple weeks, then decided to plunge into it. I had always gravitated toward the training/mentoring/man-management parts of working in tourism, and transitioning into teaching or lecturing in university made sense. It was one of those ‘maybe someday’ things that I stored in the back of my head. But I thought - If not now, then when? If not you, then who?

I took the offer, and in a very limited amount of time, got myself to Brisbane, Australia. I knew this path would be fraught with road bumps, and as you will find out, there have been more than a few. The first of which was when Griffith University ‘lost’ my documents that I had express air-mailed to them, less than a month from which I was supposed to fly to Australia. This meant I had to make, then send them another batch (which I had to have certified all over again by my previous university). And I needed Griffith’s approval before even being able to apply for my student visa. Needless to say, I didn’t unclench until the visa got approved, hopped on a plane, and restarted my life again, this time in Brisvegas, Straya.

Semester One.

Because I had to rush through my decisions and application, I opted to stay on-campus. 1 less thing to figure out (house-hunting). My thought process was to live on-campus for a semester, find some housemates then move out. I quickly found out that there was a fundamental flaw in this plan. Almost everyone who chose to live on-campus were exchange students who were going back to their own countries after 1 semester. It was not all bad, living on-campus had several benefits. Always being just 5 minutes away from class had it’s perks. Since I’ve moved out, I have also come to appreciate not needing to find parking when being on campus. Having a gym (which we shared with the Brisbane Roar A-League team) right outside my door was also nice. The free food and activities for college residents didn’t hurt either. At the start of the next part, I’ll outline why eventually moving out was a significant improvement though.

But first, let me try to paint my first impressions of Griffith University's Nathan campus. Universities back home in Malaysia are very different. They’re usually concrete behemoths plonked in the middle of urban areas. There’s usually not much space and the architecture is utilitarian - cold and sterile. More importantly, they lack character. As we pulled into Griffith, my brain-to-mouth filter malfunctioned and I actually said out-loud to my driver ‘Holy shit, this is huge’. Nathan campus is perched on top a small mountain (Mt Gravatt I believe) and it’s a protected forest area. Immediately, I found it pretty amazing that the university and dorms were surrounded by wildlife and flora. There are hiking tracks right out of the university, and you’ll see wild turkeys, koalas, and crocodiles on campus just roaming around minding their own business. Okay, settle down mate, maybe not crocodiles but you get the idea. I settled into my flat quickly, which was shared with 7 other students, looking forward to the start of the semester.

This is what orientation looked like. Well, not really but you could get to this path directly from the Uni.

Views from the six. I mean my room, and it wasn't room six either.

So the semester starts, I needed to fulfil 40 credit points each semester. In semester 1, as recommended, I took all 4 compulsory courses. Qualitative Methodology, Quantitative Methodology, Research Design, and Special Topics in Honours Research. My first class would be Qualitative Methodology. I trudged my optimistic self to class and immediately was met with a reality-check slap to the face. Sat in a classroom surrounded by post-graduates in various states of their research, terms like epistemology, paradigm, interpretivism, post-modernism started being thrown around. Some of the more advanced post-grads were asking questions like, ‘Do you think an interpretivist paradigm would be suited to a mixed-method?’. I had to check if they were speaking English, because I understood nothing from that sentence. Bear in mind, I had completed and presented a thesis back when I was doing my undergrad, but this flew straight over my head. With all the courses, the lecturers constantly reminded us that, ‘If you don’t ask or share your thoughts, we cannot help you.’ Here I was thinking, I don’t even know what I don’t  know. It’s like being thrown off a cliff and then being told ‘Hey, ride the fall line, watch out for crevasses, and don’t ride across that cornice. Do you have your ABS and Beacon on transmit mode?’ WHAT DO ANY OF THOSE TERMS EVEN MEAN?! Don’t get me wrong here, I was very fortunate to have incredible lecturers in all my courses. But it was definitely a case of ‘Are you talking too fast, or am I hearing too slow?’ I can't even begin to imagine what it's like for students where English is not their native tongue.

This is where the importance of building strong relationships with your peers come in. I cannot overstate the importance of having friends doing the same courses where you can bluntly discuss how stupid each of you feel out of class. That ‘I’m not the only one’ feeling is incredibly important for staying motivated. Again, I was extremely lucky to have peers who were on the same exact path and wavelength. Needless to say, we were pretty much joined at the hip in trying to stumble through the semester in one piece. I feel like this is an integral part of surviving the honours. Having someone to share your mental breakdowns with who knows exactly what you’re talking about. If you call your parents and say stuff like ‘I think I’m going to use the black swans analogy to address falsification in my case-study justification and limitations.’ I’m fairly sure they will either hang up or fall asleep mid-sentence.

My second road bump appeared relatively early in the semester. About a month into the program, on a routine Skype with my parents, I was told that my mother had been admitted to hospital. She had difficulty breathing and the tests found that she had been diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. Now, friends who know me well enough have described me as ‘emotionless’ or ‘calm’. For better or worse, I often keep my feelings and emotions in check and do the rational thing. The constant overload of information from the courses combined with being away from home though, completely broke me. I was a complete mess for at least a week, breaking down at night when I was alone, contemplating the what-ifs and battling the guilt of not being at home to support my family. My dad, brother, extended family, supervisor, and close friends from back home were amazing in checking up on me and reassuring me to take things 1 step at a time. I have all of them to thank for getting me through the past year. My mom, through her chemotherapy, also constantly assured me that it would not make a difference if I gave up the honours and went home, and that she would like to see me complete what I’d started. At a bigger level, this was a huge source of motivation through-out the year. If she was strong enough to fight the cancer, I would be strong enough to crush the honours. Very quickly, this drove me to stay laser-focused as I wanted to make sure none of the time I spent was wasted.

Taking things 1 step at a time was an important technique in completing the Honours. My mantra, unhealthy as it was, was ‘There is no plan B’ and ‘Failure is not an option’. To do the PhD, I needed a scholarship. To get the scholarship, I needed first class honours and an academic CV that would put me ahead of the other applicants. This meant, in addition to my Honours Dissertation, I had to have at least 1 peer-reviewed publication and shown an apt for the rigours of academia, whether that was through being a research assistant, tutoring, and so on. If you don’t just focus on the immediate task at hand, that pressure quickly becomes suffocating. The thought that constantly ran through my head was ‘If I don’t get the scholarship, I’ve effectively wasted a year, and a lot of money, doing the Honours here in Australia, whilst being away from mom who’s battling cancer’. The consensus was that doing the PhD program at home in Malaysia would not suit my lifestyle and I would feel stifled. Deep down, I also felt like going home with my tail tucked between my legs would be a failure.

This unhealthy habit of overthinking everything is one that runs through-out the research industry, in my opinion. When you think about research, and what the day-to-day tasks are, you’d be forgiven for picturing a bunch of bespectacled tweed-jacket wearing folks sat in think tanks discussing important topics, or with lab coats on, developing the next big thing. Yes, there are aspects of it that resemble some of that (I do not wear tweed coats btw), but a large part of it is spent in isolation. I spent countless hours staring at walls, lying on my bed staring at the ceiling, muttering to myself, second-guessing my opinions and thoughts. It’s like a vignette effect focusing on your thoughts and tuning out the outside world. With most of the discussions, it’s through barely coherent emails or texts back and forth, hashing out ideas with increasing aloofness. My default pose most of the time was hunched over a notepad or laptop, headphones on blaring to tune out everything else, burrowing deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of whatever I was trying to figure out. I guess the point I’m trying to get to is, you need activities outside of your research to give your brain a break. Reconnect with the world and reset every now and again.

A wall.

Whether it was subconsciously or not, I picked this up early and started to set aside time for these ‘resets’. The Griffith Mates hosted and organised a myriad of activities which students could partake in for free. I signed up for as many as I could, within my time constraints. Keep in mind, I was also working as a research assistant and doing some freelance copywriting alongside my actual studies (contrary to popular belief, instant noodles as a sole source of nutrients is not the best idea). Guided tours of the city, cultural nights, networking nights, free movies etc. These were all great and meeting new people was always good, especially because most of the time, the others who showed up were also international students and I got to mingle around all these different cultural viewpoints and quirks. My main go-to though, was joining the Mt Gravatt Environmental Group. Every other Saturday, I spent a couple hours up in the mountain clearing lantana, planting trees, and so on, having conversations which had absolutely nothing to do with university or the Honours. It was a fantastic way to disconnect from the research world. 

The other big event was the Queensland Tourism Awards, in which I was selected to be a student judge. You know those gold, silver, or bronze rating stickers you see in hotels or restaurants? Every year, industry experts gather to judge submissions by these hospitality establishments and hand out awards for the best hotels, restaurants, eco-retreats, attractions, etc. Being part of this process was really eye-opening and we spent 6 full days of judging. Being invited to the fancy Awards Gala dinner probably didn’t hurt either. If you get the chance, I recommend applying for this. It’s good fun, looks good on the CV, and you also get fed daily. And let’s be honest, which student is going to say no to free food and unlimited free coffee?

Mt. Gravatt Environmental Group.

Gala Dinner.

Griffith University contingent at the Queensland Tourism Awards 2016.

Back to the 4 courses in semester 1, having each course broken down into 3 assignments each was great. I was honestly amazed at how much I progressed as the semester barrelled on. I know earlier on I said speaking up and asking during the classes was daunting, but the support given to me by every single academic I asked was invaluable. I’d start emailing lecturers questions about trivial details and getting in-depth answers; eventually building a rapport with all the lecturers and being able to just chat about random stuff. In fact, I was able to put one of my lecturers down as a referee in my CV, and he was happy to vouch for me. Even just looking back at the state and direction my thoughts were in at the start of semester 1, compared to the end, they’re nothing alike. It's such a cliche saying, but if you treat it like the journey is more important than the end, I truly believe you'll get a lot more out of the courses. The countless reiterations of my focus, approach, and even the core topic of my dissertation moulded and shaped it to what it was in semester 2. We were extremely lucky to have the lecturers that we did, and that is not lost on me. As this chapter, and semester 1 drew to a close, I was buoyed and relieved to find out that my efforts paid off. I somehow managed to score first class in all 4 courses and finished the semester with a perfect GPA of 7.0. To my surprise, I also somehow was awarded the top scoring student for 2 out of the 4 courses. But this was only the beginning. Semester 1 was setting the foundation to begin writing the dissertation, a whole other basket of eggs.

If somehow you’ve read this entire post, stay tuned for Chapter 2, where I share my experience with actually ‘doing’ the research, writing the dissertation, and applying for the PhD scholarship. When I originally began writing this, I intended for it to be 1 short post with the entire experience summed up. Unfortunately, I’ve rambled on and I’m doing this more for myself. Like a time machine for my thoughts. If any of this has helped you, or you want to ask me any questions in further detail, please do not hesitate to get in touch and I’ll be more than happy to give you my 2 cents. I will also eventually write up a more concise ‘tips and tricks’ for the Honours program style thing.

Disclaimer: This entire post is very contextual and you should not generalise anything from here. Everything you've read is from my own personal experience and results will probably differ from individual to individual.