Academic Life III

I am working on an update about my recent trip to Queensland, but I just had a rather stress inducing supervision meeting, so I'm feeling the need to blog about that first.

As per Academic Life II, I have started writing. What I ended up handing in to my supervisors was a draft of my survey questionnaire. In our meeting today we spent nearly 2 hours going over the draft; questioning the ordering and phrasing of certain questions, discussing my rationale behind asking certain questions, and mostly, expanding on the different areas I'll want to cover off in my survey.

The result was that everything is way too big to be reasonably dealt with (and I'd add that that's quite an understatement). My supervisors were expressing anxiety at the size the the inquiry we had just created, but I was calm, knowing that this process was inevitable and choosing to embrace it full on. Then we ended the meeting and I started to process what I had just set myself up for... and the terror began to sink in.

Over the next two weeks, I will be creating a monster of epic proportions. A survey that will cover off every possible aspect of every possible avenue I may wish to explore. It will be beyond massive.

I am making a monster so that I can then destroy it. Once I have laid out all the different ways my research can go, I will have to decide which ways it will go.

It's like in Buffy the Vampire Slayer when she has to fight a demon that is non-corporeal. They make the demon corporeal so that she can fight it, even though this usually means dealing with a much bigger, stronger, and nastier demon than before. (With, of course, the exception of the season 4 Halloween episode, where once the demon took corporeal form it was very tiny and easily squashed.)

So, to quote Buffy, "Wish me demons!"