My First Six Months as a "Real" PhD Candidate

Tl;Dr - It's essentially the same as before, except turned up to eleven in terms of time spent, papers read, pages written, etc. 

In my post from September last year, I laid out the next steps for me in my program and I hinted at soon being able to share who my supervisors would be once I was officially accepted as a PhD student at Cattolica. Happily, I can spill the beans on everything that's been happening over the past handful of months and bring you up to speed before I head back to Italy in early April for our spring seminar.

Officially Accepted - Dial Cranked to Eleven

During the fall seminar in Milan, my cohort was given the low-down on how the last pieces of the application process would play out. Basically, once we turned in the various documents that were required, the last step would be an interview via Zoom with the CHEI Director and two members of the faculty from Cattolica. I had my interview in early October and don't actually know how much I'm allowed to say about that process, so I'll just note that it was a lovely experience that mostly boiled down to answering questions about my proposed research, including timeline and methods.

Not long after the interview, I was notified that I'd been officially recommended for admission, and within a few weeks, I became official! Woohoo! 

With that, I was formally introduced to my two supervisors and immediately started panicking. Not really, but a little. 

From Tutor to Supervisor(s)

irstly, I have to shout out Ravi Ammigan, PhD. He served as my tutor for a year during my time as an "Applicant" (read a previous post on what that means), and he was genuinely instrumental in helping me narrow my focus into solid research questions that I'm now pushing ahead with. Huge thanks to him!

The process of being matched with supervisors must be stressful for the CHEI staff, but from my end of things, it was a breeze! I had been given a chance to suggest a few names, so I naturally shot for the stars and named the researchers that I read most often in the virtual exchange space. Believe it or not, they both agreed!

I'm still amazed and a little starstruck if I'm honest, but I'm happy to share that my supervisors are Francesca Helm (University of Padova) and Robert O'Dowd (University of León). They've already proven to be excellent sources of tough but fair feedback, and I'm excited to have them on my side for the journey ahead.

The PhD Cocktail: 2 parts Reading, 2 parts Writing, 3 parts Planning, and a dash of Crushing Imposter Syndrome

Since the Milan seminar last September, I've focused much of my time selecting and diving deep on my survey method (Q Methodology), which I'll talk more about in my post-seminar blog post in April. Like many in the CHEI program, I don't have a deep research background, and so I've needed to spend a lot of time learning.

My research seeks to understand viewpoints and practices among COIL practitioners, but to get to a stage where I can ask questions, I need to have clearly-defined terms to use as a foundation for the survey prompts. To that end, I've been working to create contextual definitions for the values that I propose exist within/emerge from COIL literature and discourse. This is a different kind of work - much more about theorizing than I'm used to. It feels a bit like sailing to me: I have a general sense of where I want to go, but I need to follow the stronger winds to get there. Where I choose to guide the boat (point the argument) either results in a joyous frenzy of typing or puts me in the doldrums - stuck until I feel another breeze.

It's been slow going, but I'm hoping that this first one is the longest and that I can take lessons from it that will speed things up for the next....6-7 terms that I need to propose definitions for.

My hope at the moment is to spend the summer finishing up this bit of the work enough that I can start building out survey prompts for the study. Hopefully, that study will launch sometime early in 2025. That's the plan, anyway.

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All of this is to say:
I'm still at it, I'm still loving the journey, and I'm still not sure that I belong in a PhD program with amazing, talented, brilliant people. Until it all crashes and burns, I'm going to keep pushing forward.
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Thanks for reading!​