There have been a lot of challenges since beginning my MRes course at University of Portsmouth, even bearing in mind the advice given to me that I should make as many contingency plans as possible. However, what has been most difficult has been planning to overcome myself in the research process. In this blog post I shall outline the natures of challenges faced and overcome. It is not the case that this is some kind of quest, merely that, given the circumstances I vastly overestimated my own abilities to carry out the kind of study that I wished to undertake. What has finally coalesced is, I believe, worthwhile research but not quite the project that I had planned. Below, I outline my learning during the MRes course so far with reference to the Vitae Researcher Development Framework (RDF) (Careers Research and Advisory Centre Ltd., 2011) in bold parentheses.

My original proposal was for a quantitative study that relied upon an overly optimistic sample size of volunteer participants. This sample was drawn from a population at my new place of work. Because I was a new instructor in an intensive English programme, I had few free teaching periods available when my students did. Furthermore, I had not Continue reading →