Today is the big day for me. That's what Professor Ken Peasnell has told me when I came accross him in the office corridor. Why? Apparently the office has circulated an e-mail inviting all lecturers and PhD students to attend my 'Upgrade Presentation' at 4pm today. What exactly is an upgrade presentation? Well, when you first registered in the first year, you are not exactly a PhD student. You are in fact an MPhil student and only through an upgrade presentation that you will be confirmed as a PhD student. If you fail this upgrade, you will be required to submit your thesis for an MPhil degree only. So it seems to be an important process towards getting your doctorate and usually this upgrade presentation is a presentation of your first research paper (you are required to complete three research papers for submission as a thesis towards your accounting doctorate programme). The problem is, I haven't got any complete paper yet since I haven't finish downloading all the data and thus no analysis has been done. So why an upgrade now?
It seems that the department are trying to make sure the student do an upgrade far earlier than previously done. Usually the upgrade is done when the student is in the end of the second year or beginning of the third year. In my case, since I have 17 hypotheses and 16 models to test, it will be more than six months before I can come up with a complete paper. Therefore, they think it is better for me to have some sort of proposal presentation to be followed up by an upgrade presentation when I have all the analysis and results. This way, I can get the academician feedback whether my research do contribute to the knowledge in accounting and what I'm going to do for the next six months will not be in vain.
The presentation was webcasted over the internet since our PhD director is currently in Greece and he need to watch me present my research ideas. There were about 15 people in the audience, mostly lecturers in accounting. And I think only two of them did not ask any questions and both of them are PhD students. In the end I got lots of useful feedback and comments which I will take into consideration when I'm starting my data collection and analysis.
A huge applause towards the end indicates that my presentation is a success and my research is a novel idea? Only time will tell, or in this case, in six months time.
It seems that the department are trying to make sure the student do an upgrade far earlier than previously done. Usually the upgrade is done when the student is in the end of the second year or beginning of the third year. In my case, since I have 17 hypotheses and 16 models to test, it will be more than six months before I can come up with a complete paper. Therefore, they think it is better for me to have some sort of proposal presentation to be followed up by an upgrade presentation when I have all the analysis and results. This way, I can get the academician feedback whether my research do contribute to the knowledge in accounting and what I'm going to do for the next six months will not be in vain.
The presentation was webcasted over the internet since our PhD director is currently in Greece and he need to watch me present my research ideas. There were about 15 people in the audience, mostly lecturers in accounting. And I think only two of them did not ask any questions and both of them are PhD students. In the end I got lots of useful feedback and comments which I will take into consideration when I'm starting my data collection and analysis.
A huge applause towards the end indicates that my presentation is a success and my research is a novel idea? Only time will tell, or in this case, in six months time.
No comments:
Post a Comment