Halfway Through Year One - Seriously?!

​Well here we are once again on the back end of a doctoral seminar with the Centre for Higher Education Internationalisation (CHEI) at Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. As has become tradition, I'm putting together my thoughts here for whoever may be interested in what it's like to pursue a doctorate part-time in the Italian system while working a full-time job.

For those of you keeping score at home, I am now about halfway through my first year as a doctoral candidate. At this stage, I'm gearing up to submit my ethics review documentation for my research study and will be spending most of the time between now and September polishing my literature review and writing a methodology chapter draft. Consequently, I'm going to be diving deep into my methodology, so I'll probably cover that in a standalone post sometime this summer. 

First, let's talk about the seminar. The spring seminars are held in Brescia, a gorgeous Italian city not far from Milan. In stark contrast to the fall seminars in Milan, the Brescia seminars in the spring tend to feel more laid back, more collegial, and personally, I prefer the small city atmosphere to the bustling metropolis of Milan. 

As CHEI grows, the wonderful people who organize the program take great care to improve each seminar and tailor it to be super effective in creating a fantastic atmosphere for learning. This seminar was structured differently in that the first two days of the week were spent in coaching sessions with members of the academic team and visiting scholars from abroad. We were blessed with the presence of two fantastic scholars - Gerardo Blanco and Miguel Lim. These first two days were certainly intense and involved some pre-reading and critical thinking, but it's a great opportunity to verbalize the thinking that we've been doing since we last met in September and to be challenged to go even deeper. 

The remainder of the seminar was split between listening to presentations from other folks in the program and having many spur-of-the-moment discussions about the direction of our topics with anyone and everyone willing to spare five minutes. For me, these seminars feel like a perfect blend of academic intensive and spiritual retreat, where we are both challenged to be our best scholarly selves and given the space to voice our questions, doubts, and even fears. This is not a competitive environment, but rather something like that support group for those of us ill advised enough to pursue independent research of internationalization globally. 

I also had the great pleasure of meeting one of my supervisors during the seminar. Francesca Helm, who for those interested in virtual exchange and COIL needs no introduction, very graciously offered to attend the seminar specifically on the day of my presentation. I cannot express how much it meant to me for her to be there and how wonderful it's been up until this point to work with her and Robert O'Dowd, who serves as my second supervisor. I am in very good hands on the supervisor front. That being said, it's also a bit unnerving to have such world-class scholars guiding me through the next three years of my research!

The week was a resounding success, and great gratitude must be given to Fiona Hunter and the members of the CHEI staff and academic team for organizing what I feel is the best seminar yet that I've attended in the last three years. 

Now, let's talk a little bit about my topic and what I'm going to be up to between now and the September seminar in Milan.

My pursuit of a values-based framework for understanding Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) marches on, and has continued to take form as I read, question, and seek the overflowing wisdom of my colleagues across the world. Very soon after the seminar last fall, I stumbled across a methodology that genuinely fits my topic and my style of inquiry perfectly - Q methodology. I won't go into detail in this post, but this is a great video if you're interested in a easily-digestible overview of how Q methodology approaches studying subjectivity and perception. 

As tends to happen to just about everyone in the CHEI program, I've been continuing to refine my research questions and scope of inquiry. I'm now preparing to look at how coil practitioners understand coil itself and look at it through an existing values framework which I believe will reveal interesting insights regarding similarities and differences across contexts. COIL is still a new and unfamiliar endeavor for many across the world, and there are disparate understandings of the approach which can simultaneously make COIL both challenging to undertake and very exciting to research. 

I'll end the hinting here and leave the rest for a full-fledged post on my methodology this summer, but stay tuned for a deep dive sometime in the next few months. 

I think that it's important here to say that when I started my journey with CHEI, I felt uncomfortable with the idea of being a researcher. I've never done a full-fledged research project, and things like methodology and theoretical frameworks caused me a lot of anxiety in the first two years of the program. But now as I sit halfway through my first year as a "real" doctoral candidate, I find myself with a shifting identity. I can occasionally envision a future where I am more scholar than practitioner. It's a very interesting feeling to experience a draw towards research and perhaps a way from the day-to-day running of programs that I do now. It's not a change that will happen quickly if at all, but it doesn't scare me anymore to imagine it.

As a matter of fact, I was able to support a COIL initiative at another university by presenting on values-forward approaches to COIL collaboration. It's a weird feeling to be asked to talk about your research to a group of established academics because they want to hear what you have to say.

Outside of the PhD journey, I'm leaving on Friday for a month in Europe, where I'll be accompanying a group of students to Dublin and meeting with partners in Amsterdam and London. It's going to be a very full month, and I am both excited and nervous to be traveling for so long. But, I'm looking forward to meeting up with many colleagues in Europe and taking a deep breath after what has been a roller coaster of an academic year. 

I think I'll leave this post here for now with more to come sometime later this summer as promised.

​Thanks for following along, and for reaching out with questions about the CHEI program and what it might mean for you to pursue such an opportunity. It certainly isn't for everyone, and that's fine. For those who do find themselves intrigued by this type of doctoral program, I'm always here to answer your questions honestly and to help you think through your journey.