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.