Because the main purpose of this project is to help deal with problems, or, even better, to anticipate and avoid them, many items which could have been included under this heading are in fact better covered in other parts of this site. With many some repetition is unavoidable and should, in fact, be helpful.
Another apparent red herring: you will be told over and over (and certainly by us somewhere in this site): “always define the question”. Well, I refuse. I will just pick out a few possible pitfalls and irritations that you might encounter, and, hopefully, throw some light on them.
You could be lucky and get a honeymoon period when you start. This may turn out to be merely a trailer as to how the course will pan out, or it could be a cosy rose-coloured dream, a dancing on the beach through wine-tinted spectacles, sort of illusion. If the latter the shock of submission dates creeping up will be that much more frightening. Keep cool. Try to manage your personal timetable and the volume of preparation to suit what you can safely afford to give. If you feel there is a serious chance of failing to meet the deadline, then do not leave matters to the last minute to inform your tutor. Seven days to go and there is room for manoeuvre and advice; 24 hours and there’s not. You need to know whether there is any elasticity. If not, you do not want to be staying up all night, and still handing in unpolished work.
One of the most frightening experiences is to find out, when partway through an exercise of any sort, that you might be on the wrong track altogether. With that nasty deadline approaching for an essay, or well into a dissertation draft, what could be worse than to have this happen to you? Maybe you have talked to a colleague, or have read something in the course of routine research, or have woken screaming in the middle of the night and suddenly you think you may have gone completely on the wrong line. It’s easy to say, but don’t panic! Go back to defining the question, which you presumably did at the start. Have confidence. Firstly you may have been right, but anyway there may well be more than one way to look at the issues. Your approach may not be the usual one but if it is arguable or justifiable stick to it, with any essential modifications. Only rewrite if your case is untenable.
Many courses will have weekly or periodic reading lists. And what do you find when going to the library? Nothing. They have all gone. There may have been three or four copies for 14 students. I won’t say who is likely to have had them first. I might be accused of “ not forgetting the war”, and there’s probably at least one lost on the floor of a professor’s study for the last three years. So, what do you do? Try to anticipate what you will need a few weeks in advance and maybe you can come to a sharing arrangement with a keen and forward student who is often on campus at the right time.
These are just a few small samples of problems, and so keep reading the other articles.
