Welcome to my blog 👋.
(25/05/2025)
It has been a great pleasure to help organise and manage this year's Pint of Science events at the Hop Garden in Birmingham! There's a plethora of research taking place at the University of Birmingham and Aston University, and it was great to see how researchers present their work to the public (over a pint 😉).
(07/04/2025)
I'd like to introduce my PhD project InSITE:
Investigating the Social Determinants of Youth Suicide. It's a three-part interdisciplinary
PhD project that aims to explore the social determinants of youth suicide and self-harm.
Its
taken a
while but I'm finally happy to properly get this going! Soon to come: study one!
I just wanted to take this time to also explain the development of SRN Midlands.
The idea came
during the
initial few months into my PhD. When looking through
literature there was little guidance on how one should go abouts conducting sensitive or emotionally
demanding research. There are a fair few articles on reflective experiences which is great but when
it came to the nitty
gritty detail there is a lack of literature.
I'm interested in what when well? Were there any
issues? How did you overcome them? When talking to people about how they handled sensitive research,
many people just relied
on prior experience, so
how do we combine these experiences so we can learn and develop our skills?
This is where SRN
Midlands comes to play, the network allows
PhD students to share their experiences with condcting sensitvie and emotionally demanding research
and raise potential issues. A large gap that we identified was a lack of potential support services
for research students, many were quite generic or unavailable to us so this is something we may look
to tackle as a group!
(25/03/2025)
A lot has happened in the first 6 months, from starting my own research network - SRN Midlands, to planning managing two large scale research events (oh, and starting this blog)! I've participated in numerous training sessions, written countless drafts, and felt overwhelmed and out of depth one too many times. I've encountered obstacles, learnt that getting things wrong is okay and normal, and how much of a pain university bureaucracy can be. The last few months have definitely been huge in my personal development, to say the least 😅. But am I enjoying it? Absolutely yes!
As for my PhD project, it's moving, albeit slowly... Though I've had it drilled into me that a PhD is a marathon and not a sprint, don't rush and take your time! I've got a clearer plan on how my PhD will be carried out and managed to refine it into three empirical studies with an initial plan for each one! I'm now working towards my confirmation review now 😬 how time flies!
