Dissertation Diaries: October 2022

October has been a busy month with my dissertation, with many new developments to update you on! Following on from my last dissertation diaries post, the break I had over the summer was necessary to return to it with a fresh mind. Regarding progression, I met with my personal tutor and identified further research areas to enhance my bibliography. At this point, I have completed my annotated bibliography, finalised a title, completed a proposal and published a survey. All of these things have been completed alongside the support of my supervisors. 

I will admit that this month has been challenging in terms of managing the workload, I'm taking most of my modules in this first term meaning that I have a multitude of assignments alongside planning my dissertation. Regarding my schedule, I have Mondays and Wednesdays off work and off uni so these are my work-from-home days. These days I catch up on reading, do any seminar prep and add more to my dissertation proposal. I've found that meeting regularly with my supervisor has helped because we've set provisional deadline targets to help keep me focused and on track. I've just included the plan I made to outline the future steps of progression. I used a pre-made Office Template that my supervisor provided me with. 

A crucial part of my research was publishing my survey, a form of primary research, that allows me to understand public perceptions of popular culture and its relationship with the fashion industry. I'd be hugely grateful if any of you had the time to complete it. It takes less than 10 minutes to do and forms a considerable part of my research for my project. Making this survey was a slightly harder process than I initially expected because I found that it was difficult to word the questions that would allow for the most insightful responses. 

Moving forward, November will include working towards the end of Phase 2 by writing the Research Ethics Review and preparing to start writing. I have another meeting with my supervisor in a couple of weeks, by this time I hope to have collated some of the data from my survey and begun the analysis process. I would've completed some of my other assignments by this time so hopefully, I can dedicate more of my time to moving onto Phase 3 slightly ahead of schedule. I know I probably won't be saying this for long but for the first time in a while, I'm finally researching something that I look forward to writing about! Let's see if I'm still saying the same thing in May!