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

Hi Mary-Helen, I'm also blogging about my PhD research, which is about religious bloggers. I'm not in Sydney, so I guess I can't be part of your sample. But check out my blog if it interests you. http://teusner.org/ paul teusner -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Mary-Helen Ward Sent: Wednesday, 30 August 2006 12:14 To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] First post Hi Sarah (and everyone else) Unfortunately my ethics permission only covers students enrolled at Sydney. I was advised that if I wanted to have students from other institutions in the study I would need to go through the ethics committees of the institution they are studying at. So I decided to confine the study to USyd. The ethics permission also requires me to keep the address of the blogs in the study private (which most of the participants have asked me to do anyway). But do start a blog and send me the link - I'm always interested in PhD bloggers! My own public PhD blog is at http://manainkblog.typepad.com/faultlines. It's mostly just notes from my reading and landmarks along the road. M-H Sarah Stewart wrote:

Hi Mary-Helen

I am doing my PhD through the University of Queensland. I have been meaning to start a blog but haven't got around to it. I have had a number of challenges along the way (which I am told will make me a much better person!!). So if you need another participant, please let me know. Sarah

Sarah Stewart PhD Candidate Senior Lecturer School of Midwifery Otago Polytechnic Forth St Private Bag 1910 Dunedin New Zealand Tel: 0800 762786 sarahs@tekotago.ac.nz _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

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