You Can Write A Postgraduate Dissertation
The second academic year dawned and I was back to positivity! I was back at work, I had submitted everything required of me, and there was just a dissertation preparation document to submit, how hard could it be? I struggled for ideas. I had written so much about gaming that I began to wonder if I was going to end up with writers block on the whole subject; as a result, I tried to move away from it for my final piece, and began searching for other options, or at least a wider overall concept to draw from. Nothing suited, and I struggled to find anything that in the circumstances would hold my newly impaired attention well enough to research it properly. After a long tutor discussion, I was inevitably turned back to gaming, but with a slightly wider remit this time. It was something of a wild card, and my tutor had some doubts that were alleviated as far as possible by improvements in methodology, but I had become interested in what I saw as a changing approach to wider stream media, in response to the boom in the gaming industry. Television programmes, films, teaching, even warfare had all begun taking a game-like approach; games were suddenly cool, and there was a gaming focus in many other sectors that I wanted to draw out. I put it into my dissertation proposal and submitted it; in the meantime, I kept my eyes and ears open for indications that I was correct, and for the first time, used a Google sheet to list information rather than a paper based system.
The first week’s class of the PGCert is all about research mind mapping. Until I saw the slides, I had no idea that this was the purpose of my old MA Google sheet, and had been the purpose of every pile of dogeared papers that I had previously piled up to write something big before that. Usually, they had consisted of post-it notes (half of which were lost), torn out scraps of paper, some with my shopping list on the back, and often, to-do lists, many with a liberal smattering of highlighter pen where some areas had become more crucial than others. Some bits were brutally scrubbed out with biro, these sections not to be done now under any circumstances, because Things Had Changed. As my Google sheet grew longer, I began separating it into sections and chapters. As it was cloud based, I could access it anywhere. On my phone at my mum's for dinner. On a train. In the middle of the night unable to sleep. As I wandered through the library at work, I would notice a new text, and skim reading, add a quotation or two, which lead me to add a reference sheet at the end rather than risk losing track of the quotations. I began noting down games that interested me, and that seemed relevant. Then events in the news. Without me really noticing, it became 24 pages long, all bullet points, all in my own personal shorthand, which had developed from years of work and study. Always before, my notes had been a mess, because they were on many sheets. Now, they were still a mess, but it was a mess organised on one major map, and the kicker was I hadn’t even done it on purpose. I just had a dodgy memory now so needed to only have to remember one document title. I never, ever read it, just kept adding anything interesting, and if it seemed confusing when I glanced at it, I did a bit of tidying, added some section headings, numbers, extra spaces, basics like that.
The final year had one module of another three assignments, the dissertation proposal, and the dissertation itself. I worked as much as I could on the non-dissertation module, then booked a week’s leave to finished it off properly. This left me just at the stage of dissertation write up, when I really started to feel the drain again of full time hours, and the migraines, already chronic, became rapidly more regular and severe, often occurring several times a week, with the rescue medication becoming less effective at controlling them. Beginning to worry that I was not going to get through the last stages, I buried my head in the sand and just kept adding to my mind map. Falling down the stairs no less than nine times in a few weeks, I finally relapsed fully, and was referred to Neurology. Rescue medication was not the answer, and the migraines were simply too dangerous. I was taken off all pain medication, initially for an expected period of six months due to anticipated contraindications, and the process of weaning me onto a specialist anti-seizure medication began. The new tablets gave me severe Ataxia, which was like being permanently underwater, without the drowning part. Speech, hearing, and balance Did Not Work Properly. I was signed off work because I could not stand up straight, let alone walk. I can honestly say the next eight weeks were some of the hardest of my life, though I did make it back to work (with my face still numb and unable to taste anything) after six weeks. Despite my already having limited driving to when I was migraine-clear, my family insisted on my car being traded in against an automatic, in case of numbness in my left side becoming more prevalent. The new car was more expensive, and much more reliable, and despite having to adapt to an automatic, I appreciated the trade within weeks of returning to my own steam. Anything outside of a set mileage was taken by train or bus, in case I needed collecting later on.
Despite all this though, we had been exactly here before. I was once more incapable of working, but unwilling to relax into the dangers of doing nothing in the knowledge that I was going to be returning to work shortly, and my new set answer for that was to temporarily become a full time researcher. I opened a new Google sheet and started writing a dissertation. The first thing I realised was this was an impossible task, and cut off from other people, it was really hard work to focus when my mind just did not work well. I also made things harder for myself initially by starting from a completely blank slate. All I ended up with really was a bullet point list of what I had actually been doing in terms of work on the dissertation, which I initially thought was pointless. I knew what I had been doing, didn’t I? I didn’t, it wasn’t, and luckily, Google Drive autosaves literally everything. What I did then was go back and make a Google sheet version of my dissertation proposal, that was based on the chapters I had said I would write rather than the actual proposal framework, and opened that information out with what I had actually been doing. I immediately found I had to refer to bullet list A, that I had initially dismissed as pointless. Score 1 for accidental file saves. After a day or two of this, my mind started to stutter and blank, and I could see there was not nearly enough information in there, and it was not good enough at this point anyway, so I closed the document, left it for a day, and went back to playing the games.
It was finding more games to add to the mind map that sent me back there. I made a copy of that too, and instead of really overworking it (I mean I hadn’t even read it!), I just wrote it up. Some of it was irrelevant, and I deleted those sections from the new copy straight away. I still have the original sheet so they’re not lost, and they may be useful for later things, but they were clear tangents to the subject at hand. I could see straight away that the word count was already there, and would even potentially need editing. I had taken plenty of time over collation and it had been gathered from a huge range of sources, as and when I had seen subjects or thought of them. Some of the areas were relevant and interesting but I had not supported them well with evidence. I had added a reference sheet as I had gone along, so could again find all the references already present, and work from there to generate further research. I then began comparing the work I had already completed on the initial document using the starting point of the dissertation proposal, with the developed mind map. As my thoughts had been working along similar lines, these crossed in several areas, and I amalgamated the blurred sections. This was the basis of my dissertation. My first action was to read and edit, and highlight any areas that still needed work against the original chapter requirements of the dissertation proposal. There were some, but none were insurmountable, even for someone working from home, as most of the footwork was already complete. I submitted my first version very soon after, and received comments back. The main complaint my tutor made was that Scalar was capable of a significant amount of media and I had not embedded any, despite having plenty; I even had personal film of my own gaming progression and images. I had one week left. I managed to work through almost all the requirements, but this was my first use of Scalar and while I very much appreciate the end result, I did not find it intuitive to use with a deadline, and I never did manage to fully embed all forms of media, so there were some I had to take out and find alternatives for.
I submitted the final piece, within the required timescales and before deadline, just before returning to work again. I was proud of the finished piece, and was overjoyed to be awarded a Distinction overall at Masters level. I completed my usual process of swearing never to be involved in any form of education again, I was utterly done this time, completely exhausted, etcetera, and then while at a library convention in Birmingham a few weeks later I noticed that BCU had a PhD supervisor who could handle a videogames PhD; I had looked at the end of the MA course and was quickly made aware that this is not that common, especially for people who cannot move away for university due to home commitments. BCU also had a part time and distance learning option, and the government had opened student loans for doctorate level courses. Okay, I thought. Why not? I probably won’t get anywhere anyway.
