The journey begins. . .

Hello! My name is Harrison Vieth, and I’m a PhD candidate in Psychology. I study language production, specifically the nature of lexical access. While my ego requests, nay demands that I continue with an exposition about how wonderfully accomplished and amazing I am (feel free to insert sniggers as you see fit) what I shall instead write of is a general account of an ordinary day in the PhD life.

Having awoken to discover that I’d had roughly 4 hours of sleep, (due in part to not being able to sleep, but also due to an obsession with a certain video game or two) the immediate concern is the acquisition of coffee. If you saw some disheveled, semi-zombified homunculus of a 20-something year-old shambling about the SBS building or at Merlos last Thursday, that was almost certainly me. As you might be able to tell, I love coffee to an amount that many regard as being slightly concerning if not at a clinical significance just yet.

At the moment, I have several deadlines to meet. The first and most powerful is a marking deadline. I tutor a second-year course, and the first set of assignments has returned and thus we tutors must nose-to-the-grindstone and mark. For the more painfully capable tutors *coughNoniecough* this is the course of a weekend's work. For those of us far less practiced, it takes a week or so, especially given I have a near OCD-like tendency to go back and check things. Over, and over. . . .and over again. While I am told this is a normal symptom of New Tutor Syndrome, it's still painful. Still, the pleasure one gets from tutoring outweighs this, for the most part, save when one must resist the consequent urge to take some kind of non-lethal firearm to my next tutorial in order to more forcefully educate the philistine undergrads in my care of the finer points of concision and clear writing. Of course, I wrote some shockers in my undergrad career and thus my rampant hypocrisy remains checked for the foreseeable future.

I'm also designing my third experiment, still in its infancy as a result of tutor deadlines looming. The nature of the behavioural experiments I run (to be the subject of the next blog post) requires a great deal of fine-tuning the stimulus, and thus this week and the following week will be finalising that. While it does sound like most of what I do involves sitting in front of a computer screen, it's just as tiring in many ways as any other activity, and also just as fulfilling.

Alas, the candle burns down and I must return to my marking, but fear not (if you were afeared in the first place), I shall almost certainly write again in the near future about any number of things, including experimental testing, data analysis, and the various legal proceedings involved in rationalizing a marking-based psychotic breakdown.

-Harrison

PhD Tips and Tricks (or learning from others' experience)

The first day of Spring just passed us by, meaning a number of post-grads have recently notched up their first semester and a bit of PhD life. As with any other new undertaking a lot of lessons have been learned by the fledgling PhDs. The student-led Social Lab Group decided to create somewhat of a repository for recently enrolled PhDs, comprising both the lessons we learnt and some useful tips for surviving your first semester.

I'll preface the list by saying the tips seem to fall into two (maybe one) broad categories; 1) DO THESE THINGS ESPECIALLY IF THEY SCARE YOU, and 2) USE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY TO TRICK YOURSELF INTO BEING PRODUCTIVE.

• Conduct your first study as soon as possible, and definitely before you feel ready.
• Make yourself accountable by creating small goals and deadlines and announcing them to your advisor or scheduling meetings on their due date. It's not your advisor's responsibility to harass you about this, but simply telling them of what you plan to accomplish by X date or Y meeting can be a good motivator.
• If you're looking to wrap up a meeting, taking a moment to summarise the key points out loud is both an effective hint and it makes you look totally engaged and on top of things.
• Visit the journal websites to sign up to their free email notifications for new issues.
• When reading a newly released journal article that appears to have completely and perfectly investigated your PhD topic, you should print it out and get out your angry highlighter and big red pen and lay into it. Identifying what the authors in their incomparable stupidity have failed to look at, control for, or explain is not only very therapeutic, but will help you realise that a) you still have a contribution to make, and b) people care about the topic you're researching!
• Get in as much writing practice as you can. If you don't have any data of your own to write up, your advisor will definitely have some data somewhere (e.g., old honours student data) that they would be happy for you to cut your teeth on. The best of this is that your lack of emotional investment in the dataset will make the inevitable and crushing rejection substantially less crushing.
• Look for potential paper collaborations as a 3rd or later author. Providing comments - even doing substantial editing - on a draft initially written by someone else is by far less exhausting than starting from a blank page.
• Encourage, accept and laugh (as applicable) at criticism you receive. If someone is giving you honest and constructive criticism, that means they care enough about your work (yay!) and want to help you improve it (double-yay!). By seeking out criticism you are seeking out opportunities to improve your work and your understanding.
• It is important to note that as a PhD student you are in research training, and are not expected to have all the answers. You are in research training, and not expected to have all the answers. You are not the exception to this expectation.
• Tutoring is great for you. It allows you to develop presentation experience, deal with left-field questions, work on explanations for that much-venerated "intelligent but non-specialist audience", hone your time management skills, and pays well. You should do it at least once during your PhD, the earlier the better.
• Force yourself to present wherever possible. Say "yes" to things like lab group, 3 minute thesis, RHD-Day, and conferences. When someone asks you "what do you do", use that opportunity to hone your 30-second version (and your self-control when they follow up with "so why does that matter?").
• Attend conferences, summer schools, small group meetings (mini-conferences), seminars, lab groups and coffee dates wherever possible. The importance of your peers' and colleagues' contributions to your work, whether formally or informally, cannot be overstated. They can ask uncomfortable questions, point out flaws, grant blinding insight, listen to you whinge, and order another bottle of wine. How invaluable!

So, on behalf of the students from the Social Lab Group, I hope you can take something away from this post that helps you at some point during your candidature.

Feel free to add any of your own tips and tricks in the comments :)

Morgan

Tutoring for Fun and Profit

Well do I remember my first tutorial – so many thoughts running through my veins and emotions knocking about my head (or some combination thereof). Primarily, I remember thinking: “I hope that I don’t vomit” and “Why, oh why, did I choose to wear a transparent yellow dress?”.

Now, with a bit of luck your first experience tutoring wasn’t, or will not be, like this. But first tute nerves, that rowdy student, and mental blanks are inevitable parts of tutoring. Fear not, however, gentle reader – it is my firm belief that tutoring can not only make you money but can also be enjoyable (or less unenjoyable)!

So first, let’s cover some ground. If you are thinking of going in to academia you should tutor. Tutoring is a stepping stone to lecturing – and yes, odds are that if you go on in a university YOU WILL be lecturing. Tutoring looks great on your CV (especially if you tutor across a variety of subjects) and gives you invaluable experience for the further teaching that WILL come (until, of course, you score that amazing fellowship that allows you to turn your back on eager young minds).

We are gearing towards the end of January now, and as such, you will be starting to think about what classes to nominate for tutoring, and I hope, reflecting on how you can get through the tutoring semester with the least pain.

So, do a little mental exercise with me if you will. Take yourself back to a tutorial when you were a wee little undergraduate student. There you are – sitting in the back, chewing on the end of your indelible ink pen, and thinking of England. What did you wish for in that tute? If you were anything like me, you were thinking “Please, please, please, please stop boring me”, followed by “I’m hungry”. As a tutor you may not be able to do anything about the second point, but as for the first, well there are a few simple things that you can do to make tutorials less boring for your students, and yes, for yourself!

Students, like animals, will respond to your mood. In short, if you are afraid, they will sense it. Tutors and lecturers who get positive TEVALs uniformly report that their most common positive comment from students regards their enthusiasm. Students want desperately to feel excited about their field of study – and as tutors you are often the only teachers who talk to them personally, and infect them with the psychology bug. Whatever you may be tutoring, think about what you love about psychology, and try to communicate it to the students. Maybe you are tutoring something that is traditionally dry (like stats), or in a course that you are not familiar with. But my money says that you can still find things there that will peak the students’ interest. For me, while teaching stats, I consistently think about the amazing findings that stats unearth. ANOVAs may be boring, but when I, the intrepid explorer, employ an ANOVA to unearth an amazing finding about human existence, suddenly ANOVAs are just that little bit more sexy.

Aside from enthusiasm, I always like to inject a little bit of unrelated fun in to my tutes (and now lectures). Add a picture or two to your slides, begin your tutes with music, and tell an amusing anecdote that relates to the content of the class that you are tutoring. You may feel like a complete dork in doing so, but odds are your students are dorky too, and will appreciate your effort. Students (like romantic partners) love to feel that you are going that extra mile for them.

So, to conclude – I hope that my little pep blog has inspired you to be the tutor that I (and Tony Robbins) know that you can be. I will now end with two of my favourite and most memorable tutoring moments:

1. 1. Leading my PSYC1030 students in an example relaxation exercises, one of my students got a little too comfy and let out the most gargantuan fart. The class erupted in giggles that quite literally lasted for 10 minutes.

and

2. 2. Feeling overtired, I wrote my meanest comment on a failing PSYC3020 essay that I ever wrote – I said “you and I both know that you can do better than this”. I felt terrible about it for ages – until, that is, I received this student’s second assignment in which they had taken the comment to heart, worked incredibly hard, and scored a 7!

Good luck guys, and happy tutoring!

Love, Fi Barlow

studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??
Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au