PhD blog: 32
Graham Foster
- April 2009.
The story so far… Graham is well into his unfunded part-time PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University. His original aim was to investigate American literature post-9/11.
Caught in a draft
I have now completed all of my funding applications and, while I don’t particularly want to write about my expectations lest I jinx the whole thing, it nicely illustrates an aspect of PhD study that is very important. The redrafting process. My proposal, over the last few years has mutated and grown and been edited and mutated again and been worked on etc. It goes on and on and I’ll detail the process here:
1. May 2006 - the initial idea
I decided to embark on a PhD in 2006, and my first task was thinking about what my thesis would be. Over the first few months, I wrote a very long and extremely rough draft of a tentative proposal. I knew I wanted to study North American Literature, more specifically the novels of Douglas Coupland, and I had an interest in the 9/11 terrorist attacks (something that Coupland has written about in fiction, non-fiction and drama). So, after some basic reading around the subject, I decided that it was interesting to examine the way American Literature had been affected by 9/11. It’s important to note that the first draft of my proposal was long (about 3,000 words), extremely rough and, compared to what I know now, not very in depth.
2. September 2006 - working towards a deadline
In the autumn of 2006 I began to see what was required for the application process for a PhD, and what was needed to apply for funding. The university required that I submit a 500-word proposal with my application form (and the same again for the funding application for both the university’s internal studentship and the AHRC bursary). So I began trimming the proposal and attempting to tighten it up.
3. April 2007 - what I thought was the final draft
I handed in my application in the Spring of 2007 and I was happy with it. At least I was happy with it then. For the purposes of writing this summary, I looked at the old file on my computer and was red-faced with the academic naivety it showed. It was loose, general and ill-informed (that’s my opinion. God knows what the application panel thought about it). However, it was enough to get me accepted onto the PhD course at MMU, but not to get funding.
4. April 2008 - another supposed final draft
One thing I’ve learnt during my time doing PhD study is that if you think a proposal is a final draft, you should work on it more. While my second attempt to get funding was much more organised, and my proposal was tighter that the previous year, it still didn’t cut the mustard. Again, I looked at the file and could see lots of holes in it, and it just didn’t say anything about the research I wanted to embark on. These years of drafting and redrafting my proposal were valuable, because…
5. April 2009 - the really real final draft?
This time, I treated my proposal with much more respect. For the last four months I have been working on it, and I called on all of the research that I have done over the past two years to sharpen it. I focused on what is important, on what I actually want to write about in my thesis. I changed the angle of the thesis so it is now less general, and I narrowed the range of authors I am studying. I stopped trying to second-guess what the funding people wanted and concentrated on trying to display what I was interested in. Over the past four months, I have done countless drafts (so many my DoS says he has ‘a filing cabinet full of them’*). At first I scrapped all my other proposals and started from scratch, building up the proposal to a longer 2,000 word draft, and then editing it down bit by bit until it met the requirements. In the end some drafts only change individual words, or the tense of certain sentences. The amount of work I put into the proposal was overwhelming, and I hope it pays off. I don’t know what my funding applications will bring, but I know that I am extremely prepared - because I took an obsessive approach to the redrafting process.
*My supervisory team has been extremely valuable in helping me, giving me feedback and pointers on how to fine-tune the proposal. I’m extremely grateful to them…
Read my previous PhD blogs
Graham's other blog (on BlogSpot)
Suggestions to editorial@prospects.ac.uk
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