This blog post is written by one of our current TMRP DTP students, Ella Howes. Ella is based at the University of Leeds and is a first year student.
If you are overthinking what to put for ‘thoughts on project’, then don’t worry. I did too! Even though I had lots of thoughts about the PhD, I wasn’t sure which thoughts were the right ones to include…
What I am realising now, two months into the PhD, is there are so many directions you can take a project in. And that direction is really influenced by your particular interests and experience. So, I suppose this section is your chance to give a bit more insight into what your individual approach to the PhD would be (for which there are no right or wrong answers!).
Here is how I approached it…
- Before answering this question, I spent time brainstorming different ideas. I put down anything that came to mind when I first read through the project description. I thought about what particularly interested me about the specific project and what I was most curious about. I also thought about how I could build on the ideas suggested in the project description. After listing all these ideas down, I looked to see which ideas I could develop further.
- I then focused on my three ‘top’ ideas. These were the ideas I was most interested in. They were also ideas that gave a bit of insight into the direction I wanted to take the PhD in. For example, I spoke about a framework I thought would be helpful to use to structure the results of a systematic review. I shared a bit about why I thought this framework would be really valuable to the research. I also suggested a few questions I might want to ask in qualitative interviews.
- You could just focus on one idea specifically -I just about approached it with three which then meant I couldn’t go into as much detail because of the word limit
Here are a few other hints and tips to help with your thinking. But I want to emphasise that this is so project dependent, and these tips are just to prompt thinking (they are not hard rules to follow!).
- Talk with your potential supervisor before submitting your answer! This is an opportunity to sense check your thinking and see if it aligns with where your supervisor sees the PhD going (actually this is the only hard rule I’d say to follow!)
- Try not to repeat what you have said elsewhere in the application (or even what’s written in the project description). Save your words to share your individual thinking!
- Some other general ideas of things to include could be:
- What methods you might use and why?
- Is there an interesting avenue you might want to take the research? Why?
- Of course, there are so many dependencies with research (and what you can focus on). But that shouldn’t inhibit your thinking. This is your chance to show your individual thoughts on how you envisage shaping the PhD!
Hope this has been helpful – and good luck!
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