While it’s not necessary for doctoral candidates to publish research during their course of study, many do.
I determined early on too that I would seek to publish as a doctoral candidate. My project into grief play was structured into five research objectives (ROs), so my gameplan was to publish research for each of the five ROs.
The first of five ROs required me to determine the meanings, boundaries and terminology of the project. An entire RO on just determining meanings?? Yea. At that point in time, while there was a consensus on what grief play roughly meant, participants were far less agreeable on its specific meaning and on the circumstances where an act or incident would constitute grief play. Without getting into too much detail on grief play itself, suffice it to say that any given incident purported to be grief play would involve the perpetrator, the victim(s), the bystanders, and game management responders – all of whom can disagree whether grief play had occurred, let alone its resolution.
I was fortuitous though not to write my first research paper all alone. I worked with Elina Koivisto, a Finland-based researcher who’d already published work on MMORPGs. We’ve become friends, and she was at our wedding too.:)
It’s fun to think about it now. Our work hours were different: she was, literally, on the opposite side of the world and timezone. So, we tried all kinds of communication tools to collaborate, eventually deciding on IRC and emailing. Our work styles were different too, and we certainly learned a lot from each other. In her acknowledgements page of her own doctoral thesis, she wrote that working with me has also led to changes in the way she herself does research!
So, our first paper was for a local conference in Singapore, hosted at NUS in June 2004. That was the first time I spoke at a conference, but as these things go, I don’t think there are many teachers who aren’t comfortable in front of an audience. Even if it was an international audience, many of whom who have more letters behind their name than I had in my own name, and whom you have to explain your research to too.
2004 was my most productive year: I wrote, presented and published several papers, and won an award for one of them. The highlight for that year occurred when both papers I submitted to a conference in Copenhagen were accepted. I spoke for one. The picture here is of me during my presentation at the IT University of Copenhagen in Dec 2004. Elina – who returned to co-write with me the second paper – did the second. Ling accompanied me on the trip, and we had a wonderful 8 day stay in Copenhagen, followed by a short holiday in Bangkok before we returned to Singapore.
I should get Ling to write something on our Copenhagen trip from more than 4 years ago before age really catches up on the both of us and we completely forget its details!
The next post in the series: on Working in Perth.:)
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