It has been an amazingly hectic 3 months since my supervisor indicated that I needed to get my act in gear and get ready for my Candidacy Exam. In my 3rd year of the PhD program, it is mandatory for a student to present the Research idea, define the research space/domain, identify the research direction within this domain and try an convince a panel of reviewers that there is some ounce of merit in progressing down a selected path. Let the defense begin!
At UOIT, the PhD Candidacy Exam guidelines are similar to most Canadian universities, where a doctoral student is to prepare a PhD Candidacy Report and a PowerPoint presentation explaining the merits of the chosen research direction. Your job is to submit the report (5 weeks prior to your date of the exam) convince the reviewers that there are definite benefits to allowing you to proceed down the path that you have chosen supported by your supervisor.
In my situation, my research area was already focused towards the area of Exergames and Older Adults Motivation towards physical activity. I spent the past three months collating my writing from past published papers, scavenging from unpublished graveyard of unsuccessful papers, grant applications and frustrated musings from lack of caffeine and assembling imagery from various iterations of my steps taken in research to-date.
Well, this collection was indeed quite a confusing pile of junk or nuggets depending on ones point of view. Hence, I reminisced about my learning from Industrial Design, and created a hand drawn mind-map of the research undertaken thus far, started adding pieces of research done to the mind-map and added post-it notes onto a cork board that I could change as needed.
After this manual mind-map sketch (storyboarding), I felt a bit more confident that this process of collating and scavenging research and written material from the past was not an attempt in futility. I then transferred the mind-map into a digital version using bubble.us to fall back on an electronic version, a document in flux to be changed at will.
This made my task of writing easier and it was a process of assembling and connecting the sections together as the report snowballed into an 85 page document (without references) and 20,888 words of academic jargon compiled and connected with the underlying theme of what was set out to be my research direction. Well, I am at a stage where I have posted my report to my supervisor for comments and edits and I hope that there would be detailed feedback to enable me to hone this document into what could be the starting point of my Thesis