Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Research proposal accepted!

The research committee of my university met today, and amongst other subjects discussed my research proposal. Following is an extract from a letter sent to me by the DBA Operations Manager:

The Doctoral Review Committee considered your proposal at their meeting this morning and I am delighted to inform you that they believe you are now ready to proceed to the supervised stage of the programme. There are still some issues with your proposal but these can be addressed under guidance from a supervisor.

A supervisor has been appointed, although apparently the committee has to obtain university approval for his appointment. At least it's not the same person who 'mentored' me.

[Edit]
Looking back over the blogs, I see that there was no mention that I intended to submit my research proposal, so there is no background to it being accepted. What happened was that I worked on my proposal and sent it to my mentor; he wrote back suggesting a few things. I responded to what he wrote, and then he wrote back saying that there was no point continuing the mentoring if I don't adopt his suggestions; he told me to submit what I have written in order to obtain some objective criticism. That letter really annoyed me; there have been suggestions which I adopted. I felt quite misunderstood and asked for a new mentor, to which the mentor (who is the departmental head) replied that there is no mechanism for changing mentors. As I still had a few days before the submission deadline (once every seven weeks), I worked even more on my proposal, checking to see what I had done in my original proposal. I added a few bits and pieces then submitted. 

My mentor was gracious enough to congratulate me on having the proposal accepted; I hate to think how we could have carried on. The entire mentor stage had been very difficult. Since the acceptance, I have yet to hear from my new supervisor. Something tells me that he is sympathetic to IT (I think that my original supervisor mentioned him) which means that the supervised stage should be more fruitful than the mentoring stage.

No comments: