I have been making good decisions lately. I have said no to a number of opportunities that I would REALLY like to take. I have however updated the word document I have listing all the things I want to do and write in the 5 years after my PhD is done. I only have that 5-year window when I am officially an Early Career Reseracher (ECR) and I intend to take full advantage of it.

An article finally came out from the internal grant we got way back in 2019 while I was still at Federation University. It took us a very long time to finish it because we got distracted by a collaboration on the same project with Michelle from South Africa. So the data and findings from the project have been combined with other data and then published. But we hadn’t published just our main findings. Now we have. The article is called “Student belonging during COVID-19 emergency remote learning: A case study from an Australian regional university” and it can be found here: https://ajal.net.au/downloads/student-belonging-during-covid-19-emergency-remote-learning-a-case-study-from-an-australian-regional-university/

In other news, I submitted two short articles to the Educational Justice Journal after the symposium. Their website is here: https://edjusticeinstitute.com/home/ejj/

The journal is not ranked but they also don’t have a fee to publish and after the symposium I have met the main academics running the journal. I’m not 100% certain of who their main audience is, I suspect mostly Americans but I still think it will be a very relevant audience to my work on equity here in Australia. The first short article I submitted was with Sue about the VET project and the second was from the social equity discourse solo project. That second article, solo project, solo authored. Honestly I wrote it in one afternoon as it was only 3 pages long and it is a project I know backwards.

Anyway, bit of a miracle but the VET project article was accepted with some edits (that we haven’t done yet) but the solo paper – accepted with no edits!! That really doesn’t happen very often right? I was shocked! I thought it was a mistake and emailed the editor back – twice! Hahaha~!

My PhD is ticking along. I am right in the middle of coding. But I’m worried my codes are too big and broad and they are actually topics or maybe even themes. It all made sense when I started – I think I am just second-guessing myself. I will finish it all first THEN show my supervisors and get them to have a look. I’ve used Bandura to make “code buckets” but it’s then the “sub codes” under those that I should focus on.

I should have the coding done by the end of October and themes sorted out in November – ambitious? Probably but that is the goal. Then I will be on leave – working away – but technically on leave from study.