Friday 4 January 2013

PhD conferred!


I made it! My PhD was officially conferred in November 2012, but I've been very slack in blogging about it, and have been working full-time during the day, and at nights, on weekends and in my spare time I've been celebrating, attending conferences, putting the finishing touches on a forthcoming article about youth research ethics, working on an edited collection I'm editing with my supervisor titled 'Mediated Youth Cultures', working on my own book proposal, and so on and so forth. I've also started blogging over on bradyrobards.com which is a bit more grown up (professional?!) than this blog, so no more posts here.

The reports from the PhD examiners were wonderfully constructive, supportive and were returned to me so quickly! They pointed out the wobbly bits, and gave me some excellent suggestions on how to tighten those sections up for the book. I had a few typos to correct (despite having proofed it what felt like thousands of times!) and an extra page to add in my methodology to clarify part of my research design. So the actual revisions probably took me half a day to do, but the advice on how to proceed in turning the thesis into a book will keep me going for a while. I'm so indebted to my two wonderful examiners, Prof. David Buckingham and Assoc. Prof. Annita Harris, not only for their thorough reading and feedback, but also for getting the reports back to me so quickly. This has been truly invaluable for the job search.

There are too many people to thank and acknowledge for their contributions to my work (and my life) throughout the PhD in a post like this, but I've had a crack at doing this some justice in the formal acknowledgements at the beginning of the thesis. I've taken the first 11 pages out of the thesis and put them up over here, including title, abstract, table of contents, and acknowledgements.

Where to next? For now I'm in a professional job at Griffith as a student advisor, helping students in the School of Humanities (Arts, Communications and Journalism) transition into life at university. It's a great job as I really enjoy working with students. I will have some more (long-term) job news to share shortly. Stay tuned!