I laughed at the title I just wrote – Mixed Update! Hahaha everything seems very mixed at the moment! Everything I tell you!

I spent $200 to buy a better coffee machine for the staff room and no one uses it. That probably explains why no one has said thank-you.

Recruitment has officially started for my PhD. I sent a proper newspaper style “advertisement” to go in the student newsletter. But between last year and now the newsletter has become a news website. I can just imagine that all students check that regularly – NOT! And the nice article I sent became one line without the QR code… and that one line invite is about 7th down the page. I’m really not surprised at all that I have not got one single response.

I’ve also been in a fairly large amount of pain in my hip and knee because my pelvis is out of alignment at the moment and that is making me kind of miserable – impacing my sleep and ability to concentrate etc.

So that is all the moans and whines I think!

It looks like the NAEEA Mental Health and Wellbeing SIG I’m a part of is going to go for a grant next year – based on the autoethnography project that I am leading. So that is pretty exciting. We might even have someone else join us (email pitch is going out soon) but I wont say who unless they say yes 🙂

I did have over 300 comments on my literature review and introduction chapter but now I have only 189 left. I was hoping to get that to 150 (ie half) by the PhD meeting I have this Wednesday but that is not likely. Most of them were fairly repetitive. I needed to go into more depth, or perhaps I should say I needed to unpack things more. I need to use more international sources then narrow down to Australian and finally down to Enabling Programs if I can. It all made sense to me. I guess I would summarize it by saying that I needed to lift the whole thing up a notch. There is also a lack of clarity because I’m trying to pack too many ideas (well too many nouns) into each sentence at times. My supervisors aren’t following my train of thought because it’s not clear enough. I mean they would never say that in their comments because that might show weakness and mess up the power dynamics. But it’s clear from their comments, and from my writing that that is what is going on.

It’s also been amusing to see their self-efficacy in action. Both supervisors offer significantly more comments on the sections that are within their areas of expertise. I guess that wasn’t unexpected exactly, it was just a weird thing to observe. It was even weirder when one supervisor acknowledged that! I laughed and I didn’t know what to say. In the end I think I made a comment about “well that’s why I choose this supervision team” or something to that effect. Anyway, I do have all the bases covered as far as supervisors being all over the content, at least I do at this point.

In other good news the Self-Efficacy SIG autoethnography project is swimming along nicely. I have a couple of tasks to do for that one, but nothing urgent or stressful so that is a win.

I don’t have any other projects at the moment and I am struggling a little bit with that but it is forcing me to work on my PhD, even when I’m in pain and I don’t really feel like it. Overall I am ahead on the writing timeline by 3 weeks. I have that same 3 week to finish off the 189 comments I mentioned before and judging on how that has been going so far I think that is easily achievable. So writing and editing timeline is looking A-OK. It’s just the recruitment which I’m worried about.

This is week 2 of term and so far teaching and the Academic Learning Centre (ALC) stuff is all going smoothly. I was just checking how to pronounce one student’s name prior to doing this update. I’ve got some short samples of student writing to look over but I’m otherwise on top of everything. I have to prepare a powerpoint for next week’s ALC workshop and I’ll update my Essay Writing powerpoint for class this Thursday. It’s a short to-do list really. Marking will change the relaxed nature of it all! But I have a couple of weeks yet.

Well I guess that’s all folks. Mixed report card – some areas with no worries and some frustrations as well. Life must be normal or something!