Self-assessment as PhD tool: some thoughts on process and pedagogy

Well this log hasn't been updated for some time. A part of me is disappointed while another is content with the reality of these past six months. This being the case, I decided to to collect my thoughts on self-assessment as a learning tool in doctoral studies. The following text is therefore highly subjective and somewhat personal in nature.

I became cognisant of monthly self-assessment as a meaningful tool during our doctoral program's start your studies seminar (Väitöskirja käyntiin) in 2014. This monthly review of progress was recommended by my good friend and longtime model for being a historian, Jaakko Tahkokallio. In his seminar presentation Jaakko talked about his process, the good and difficult and the bad. Ever so passingly he mentioned that at some point he undertook monthly evaluations to see, whether thing were progressing as planned. This was a revelation!

I'm a strong believer in developing process agilely. I prefer to understand the meta in any job I do and through that reflect where I need help, development, and tools for better command of my work. As far as I understand this relates to my highly rhythmic temperament. I do routine well and having understood this, can influence my life by intentionally and systematically targeting my routines. I didn't learn this during my studies but with help from significant others, when I decided upon a 30 something health overhaul. Still the same personal, psychological tools apply.

First, understanding emotions related to work, professional identity and professional community has been really hard. Finns (especially CIS men) tend to have built their identity around work and professionalism. This applies extremely well to me. Yet we don't always do emotions that well. Success, failure, interaction and status issues all apply on an emotional level. I found the linked column "Want to lose weight? Train the brain, not the body" by Laurel Mellin extremely helpful in this. As the title shows, this didn't happen in my academic training. Still that's what I've largely used it for. I also participated in a pilot program started by my pension fund (MELA) with TJS Opintokeskus (the info is only in Finnish). This put me in touch with professional work consultants used to operating with academically trained professionals and possibly more importantly with my peers, with whom I've been able to process practically everything.

Peer support is the second essential component I wish to stress herein. Various informal and formal networks have sprung up among PhD students in Helsinki and statewide during my studies. Still, these take time to develop and many can become unintentionally closed groups for friends. The support structures for unfunded doctoral students are still most fragile and many students can and do stay alone with their insecurities, unrealistically high expectations, fears and such. Participating in support structures takes active effort and so far projects like the one linked above, demand having a grant in the first place.

This leads me back to self-assessment. Why did I decide to take part? As I've noted before in an earlier post, it became a perceived need during a monthly review of progress. Mine follows this pattern:

• How did the last month go? Emotions, successes, failures, whatever comes to mind.
• PhD work progress in detail. What got done, what didn't, why?
• Other studies, projects, events and networks: what's happening, what's taking time?
• Content analysis: ideas, problems and possibilities related directly to my thesis.
• Funding issues: I feel this needs to be addressed regularly in order to cope with the monumental feelings of deficiency and frustration involved.
• To do: what's coming up during the next six months or so?

A colleague of mine has developed this further and uses a purpose built IT tool to manage todo-workload. Long to mid term stuff moves into short term lists during self-assessment and so forth. I just use a text file, so whatever works, works.

During my short stint in London, I was supervised in this process: monthly meetings with the professor and rundown on everything I had done and was planning to do. It felt a little heavy handed but this might be related to my own progress and process. Such close guidance will work for some, especially early on. It doesn't do away with personal development as that is a real development goal in learning to become a researcher. Still we could do more in recognising it as such and defending the necessary pedagogical resources involved. As it stands, I feel this issue is insufficiently addressed currently but as always YMMV.

Having said that, things are progressing and they must. The crunch in funding and temporal resources of doctoral education is putting a lot of pressure on university teaching staff and recent cutbacks have seemingly done nothing to help them manage their own responsibilities as support personnel and structures have been slashed and administration restructured. Academia is running up the hill, but is there cliff at end? I hope not.

Personal development in research education is necessary but it should not mean solitary development. Some academic survivors of yore may have learnt inopportune or even downright problematic survival mechanisms but that doesn't mean anyone, anywhere should. I hope recent programs, systemic pedagogical processes and peer help mechanisms survive and flourish. Should they do so, is entirely up to us and that is why at this late hour (in my PhD studies that is) I continue to participate.

The anatomy of an article – small nation, big ships

First, I had such high hopes of being able to actually keep this blog at least semi-active. No such luck, as the dissertation has quite reasonably taken most of my time and will. Clearly I haven't had the will to document the minutiae of that work, but I will try to make up for it in the future.

That being said, I now have a happy story to tell.

For the past year and a half I've worked with a colleague from Aalto University, Saara Matala, on a little side project to both our dissertations: the national history of Finnish icebreaker development, 1878-1978. Why is this significant? It was my first international peer reviewed article in scientific journal and the first on that I did with someone else. As such, it was a learning process of many hues.

Revisiting the history of Finnish icebreaking service

Saara approached me with the idea of revisiting Finnish winter navigation and icebreaker development soon after I had returned from London. It would take the two of us to do this properly. She was not wrong, although it took a bit more than what I thought at the time.

We quickly worked out a first draft, then rewrote over a couple of coffee infused sessions at Aalto in Otaniemi. We had ideas and we had questions but the argument was still elusive. After a good many revisions we felt confident enough to share the draft with our supervisors and a colleague, who also took the time to comment our English.

Unsurprisingly the draft didn't survive that contact. We had too much stuff in the piece and were pulling the argument to differing directions. Not a good thing. So we rewrote the whole thing again. Having worked on the article for about six months, we had the opportunity to take the case across the world into SHOT conference in Singapore in June 2016. More critical comments, questions and ideas followed. By then we were confident however that there was it there. Working our arguments into a conference paper helped immensely with constructing our argument and doing away with unnecessary bits and pieces.

A year ago we sat down again and went through our work again. The draft was rewritten for the Nth time. We had identified a journal to aim for. Since we were revisiting a hundred years of history, this was never going to be a concise piece. Therefore our target was the journal History and technology, as longer articles get published there as well. This revision was done with their style guidelines in mind.

Then we submitted... and waited.

Finally the editor answered. He had good and bad news. The introduction needed work, badly, but there was something there. Not a yes but not a no.

Rewrite and resubmit

So we set to work again. Argued by the white board, drew concept maps and slung revision versions at one another over the email. Saara left for MIT in the fall and we worked out a new version in the hectic weeks preceding her departure. More colleagues read the draft and commented at this point. While much of the content was already there, framing the question and being poignant was hard to come by. Writing together had a helpful effect, as we could both exorcise each other's bad habits and help one another to kill our darlings. During the more hectic stages fo work I would write something in Finland in the morning and sent it to Saara who would pick up from there U.S. time and thus greet me the next morning with a new version.

This went on for a couple of months that I have little memory of (but lots of archived emails). Finally in November, we had a version the editor felt confident in sending to peer review. Winter came, oscillated and my anxiety grew. Somewhere there we had been asked to participate in a lecture session at Tieteen Päivät at my university in Helsinki in January 2017. As Saara was in Boston, I held my first big lecture in front of a lot of people i knew and some I came to know later through this work.

While we waited for peer review comments, the whole icebreaker thing met a perfect storm. It is quite difficult for anyone else to grasp how important these ships are in Finland. I knew this and still I wasn't at all prepared to the interest our research would fan. I got called to speak at transport infrastructure sessions and to give lectures at the Maritime museum of Finland. Journalists wanted to talk to me and people I've never met started calling me. We struck a dialogue with a German historian, who's been doing work on icebreakers for decades and wanted to exchange ideas and materials with Finnish researchers. Meanwhile Saara took our icebreaker story on a tour of North America. This unpublished thing had wings.

And then we received the peer review comments. Were they crushing, o were they!

Learning to do science

While it was easy to talk about icebreakers to Finns, we evidently still had a lot of work in framing our arguments logically. The editor was still positive and pushed us back to work. So once gain we took to MS Word and tore our piece to shreds. Read more research and theory, rewrote the introduction and the conclusions and generally tried to stick holes into our own boat. What fun!

By spring, I felt exhausted and somewhat annoyed with this story. I was getting quite good at talking about it, having practiced over and over. I even got a chance to write a short popular piece about it in Finnish in the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies journal. I felt all this exposure to our ideas was somewhat out of place, as we still didn't have an actual academic publication. Frustrated, I hardly enjoyed the attention, even if engaging others is a good thing for science. I felt unsure, even false, an impostor. And that was absurd, because I had done the work, over and over again. Endless days combing over archives to find the smallest of clues missed by previous historians and then disseminating all that with my colleague. But the feelings were there.

We sent our corrections and errata back to the editor. He came back at us with more questions and clarifications. Still by April this year, I had a feeling of hope. Clearly the editor wouldn't go through all this trouble if there really wasn't something there. Really really. So with steely eyed resolution we took the paper once again.

Finally, quite recently we got a message from the editor, we could hardly understand: "we're almost there..." it started. What did it mean? Would this ever end? What would I do then?

Closure snuck up on us. After a long 18 months, all of a sudden we were in a hurry. Final corrections, permissions to use pictures, revisit the bibliography. Emails were streaking between university serves hourly as our final sprint gathered momentum. Our last session felt electrified and when the FINAL_final_V3b (or whatever) slipped from our computers into academia obscura, emptiness took me over. I went over the publication agreement in a daze, not fully understanding that to so many this is a menial, commonplace occurrence. Land ahead!

What then?

Our article is currently here (early online publication before paper): http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2017.1343909

While my monograph dissertation is on track to be done in 2018, this article collaboration experience has served an important purpose. Working with others is becoming more relevant in history, I feel. Having had a chance to try it out, I now think that any research idea in our field should go through some kind of self-evaluation of how could I do this with to make it better. Writing with a colleague isn't necessarily easy, but it hat helped me frame my own research interests, strengths and weaknesses and to communicate much better than before.

More importantly this piece is so much better than anything I could have accomplished on my own. Maybe someday, but as a learning process, this has been invaluable and well worth the trouble. To that end, I also feel privileged that the journal editor took the time to push and guide us in the development of our craft.

To conclude, I can also say that the process opened a new and significant path into the future. While working on this article, we recognised important phenomena for analysis.

Any article I write in the future, will probably not shake me like this one did, and that's the point. Doing a phd is a learning process and doing articles on a significant level forces us to learn.

(We had great help from a lot of people along the way. Our supervisors and other informed colleagues took the time to read the work in progress and help us with their comments. All the seminar and conference exposure forced us to hone our argumentation in significant ways. While only two names appear on the article, the academic study of history is by no means a solitary endeavour.)