ABSTRACT
Laura was a student in a humanities department, studying towards a master’s degree in a creative field. We met her through her supervisor, Rosie, who responded to our call for participants, suggesting Laura as a student suitable for our study. Our first contact with Laura was by email, while she was in her home country in Eastern Europe during the spring break, before work on the dissertation began in earnest. From the first email exchange, it was clear that Laura was passionate about her dissertation project. She was also very keen to participate in a research study, excited by the prospect of writing a dissertation ‘diary’ and doing think-alouds on her writing process. Indeed, she sent us more materials on her dissertation project work than any other participant (including about 7,000 words of writing logs, five recorded think-aloud sessions totalling about two hours, eight drafts of various parts of her dissertation, and her hand-written and typed dissertation notes of more than 14,000 words). Her diary entries and think-alouds provide a fascinating insight into her approach to dissertation work, her personality, and her world. In our face-to-face interviews, she was always keen to share her thoughts, emotions, and experiences, her current passions about the books that inspired her, ideas that engaged her, frustrations about the difficulties she was encountering, moments of pride when she felt she achieved a milestone as well as moments of self-doubt, and creative crises. We witnessed countless ups and downs in her dissertation journey, all the more dramatic given Laura’s intensely emotional response to the world; she was, in her own words, a ‘moody person’. She suffered from low self-confidence, often feeling insecure and highly anxious, and having crippling doubts about her ability to complete her project, bordering upon fear. These emotions would quickly give way to feelings of great elation after her reassuring meetings with her supervisor or when having a new exciting idea about her project, which would, in turn, be just a short-lived moment before the next bout of self-doubt. Her personality, together with her creative energy, enormous enthusiasm, and her openness to new challenges on the one hand, and her lack of established work routine and often disorganised approach to study on the other, was a complex mix, and an important factor in the story we describe in this chapter.
