The third year of the Professional Doctorate programme (ProfDoc) has demanded discipline daily throughout 2019. The love and support of my family and friends have become more remote and for those who are close to me, they have developed a thick skin. I have extracted myself more and more from normality and civilisation in general. My day to day existence has become that of a professional doctorate student. I live breath and sometimes sleep (sleep is a term I would use loosely) and sometimes dream professional doctorate activities.

These activities have demanded so much from me and the people around me. However, the production of this progress report is testament to the significant moves forward in the past year. I will complete this ProfDoc in 2020 no matter what! A series of events have brought me to this particular realisation and determination to deliver. The most impactful change occurred in November 2018 following my research into my subject area and discussion with my supervisory team. I decided to change to a Grounded Theory approach. This decision initially created additional work in terms of starting from the beginning again and allowing the data gathering process to inform the direction and content of my doctoral study.

At the beginning of 2019, I used Linked-In, Social Media, Facebook Messaging and Word of Mouth to reach out to my potential participants, stating clearly the aims and objectives of the study. By March 2019 I had conducted the pilot which would support a series of refinements to the semi-structured questions. By June in the same year, 11 participants had been interviewed with themes and coding began to emerged, and by the end of October all 18 interviews were concluded with transcripts typed up and codes transposed into Nvivo.

On the 14th of November the process of extracting the findings from Nvivo into a chapter had begun and by the end of the year (19th December) a draft submission of the findings chapter had been delivered and feedback from the supervisory team provided fruitful feedback.

Day one of the final year in this academic journey to become Dr. Eileen O’Neil started on the 6th of January 2020. Re-engaging the brain into the doctoral study following festive holidays was a little bit of a challenge. However, the desire to create, produce and to add academic knowledge to my subject area has ignited me once again.

Here’s to the successful completion of the doctoral study in 2020 

#ProfDockers