[Air-l] First post

[Mary-Helen Ward]

It was me who chose not to go beyond the borders of Sydney Uni. If  
you want to involve participants who are enrolled students in any  
institution in Aus you need to go through the ethics committee of the  
institution where they are enrolled. One ethics committee is quite  
enough to deal with. :)

The student experience varies from discipline to discipline, from  
faculty to faculty and from student to student. It varies according  
the student's gender, age and stage (I'm a *very* mature student  
myself). And then there's the supervisor's age, gender etc! It's such  
an individual experience that I'm not planning to be able to draw any  
conclusions from my study.

Thanks for the book recommendation - I hadn't come across that one  
and it look interestingly theoretical (which most books on the PhD  
aren't). There has been one published here recently called  
'Doctorates Downunder', an edited book, most of which is in the 'how  
to get it done' genre. Useful, but not an a very complex conceptual  
plane.

There has been quite a bit of work done here on the PhD in the last  
ten years: government funding of research degrees is still high in  
Aus, so how to ensure high completion rates in short times is a  
concern; the tangled question of whether PhD programs should include  
generic attributes (and what they might be); the mysterious  
supervisor/student relationship; how your experience as a student  
affects you future work as a supervisor. PhDs in Aus traditionally  
don't include any course work - they are assessed solely on the  
thesis, like the UK and NZ systems. So the whole thing is quite  
different from the process that students in the US go through -  
probably much lonelier (especially in soc sci and humanities where  
people rarely work in teams), and certainly less examined (in every  
sense of that word).

M-H


On 30/08/2006, at 6:50 PM, Marcela Musgrove wrote:

> Hey. I'm kind of surprised that your university is that strict on
> allowing participants from other institutions--I don't know anything
> about University of Sydney but think the experience would vary
> immensely at different places. FWIW  I just bought this book called
> "Three Magic Letters:Getting to PhD" with a pretty extensive survey of
> grad students which might help even though it's not online or
> ethnography.
>
> Marcela