I earned both my BA and MPhil degrees in communication from the Department of Media and Communication. Among the many things the department taught me in the past five years, two lessons have the most profound influence on me.
The first one is to be independent. By that I do not mean we are totally on our own and have nobody to turn to when encountering obstacles. In fact, most of the faculty members in this department are extremely supportive – from reading and listening to student's research ideas to providing classes for pretests.  However, they cannot help us unless we do have some research ideas in mind or real pretests to conduct.
I had exactly this problem at the very beginning – I did not know what to study for my thesis! That is probably the worst thing that can ever happen to a graduate student. For months, I read through most of the major journals in our field (and related fields) and piles of edited books, only hoping to find a topic that really spoke to my heart. My advisor, Professor C. C. Lee, had kindly offered to let me use some of his latest dataset to generate a research topic. Grateful as I was, I kept thinking it would only be great if I could have a topic that was uniquely mine. So again and again, I decided that I would try just one more time and see if I could find the topic.
In the end, I do not have a topic that is truly "uniquely mine". In fact, I guess that will never happen. In the course of developing the thesis, I "borrowed" numerous ideas from other researchers who studied similar topics, my advisor and panel members, and whoever else that were willing to discuss with me about the set up of control and manipulations. Yet I can still claim that this was my thesis because I integrated those ideas instead of letting those ideas, many of them promising enough to generate another set of studies, replace mine. I constantly had to battle against an urge to settle on some other paths that looked much safer. This process was a painful yet exciting one. It was painful because of the uncertainly I had to endure with the kind of crazy idea I came up with; when I asked some professors in private how likely my hypotheses were going to work out, they said "I really don't know". That was scary because seasoned researchers would normally have a sense of strong and weak hypotheses. Yet the exciting part is I might be making some really interesting discoveries! So that is the trade-off of having more or less independence in selecting thesis topics – you can either live in anxiety hoping for a moment of excitement (and expecting the worst) or feel somehow secure while still getting the same amount of training. I guess I had been quite lucky that a key hypothesis of mine worked out pretty nicely.
The second lesson is that developing good ideas and obtaining nice findings do not complete the training process; writing up does. I used to think that writing-up was some secondary job that I could quickly get done. Not until I started writing my drafts did I realize how mistaken I had been. Describing the results is easy, but to organize your own argument, existing literature, the theories you are using, findings, and discussions of findings together into a coherent whole requires huge amount of time and thinking. Sometimes, I knew what the flow of idea was like, but I simply could not put it into words. There is probably nothing more frustrating than sitting in front of the computer screen for a whole morning but only coming up with two fragmented sentences. Sometimes I could not help but asking myself: Is this my own thesis that I am writing?
When the first draft was finally ready, it was already a whole month since I finished analyzing the data of my second experiment. Excited, I sent it to Professor Lee and Dr. Francis Lee for suggestion immediately. While I did not expect too much positive feedback at that stage, I definitely did not expect that they would find my draft difficult to read! Having read the draft once more myself, I had to admit that they were right. Unnecessary jargon was sprayed all over the pages, and sentences were too long and complex for one to understand. Many of the arguments sounded pre-mature, and the rest of them needed further elaboration. So I spent another month re-writing most of the chapters. This process was, again, painful, but it was completely worthy of the effort. I had a chance of re-thinking about some of the questions I was not very clear about before and re-reading the key articles to my study. I also took my time, found a couple of articles that did similar things as what I was doing in my study, and followed their organization of ideas. By the time the second draft was ready, I felt I had a much deeper understanding of my thesis itself and of how it fit into the "larger picture". Only by then I finally had a sense of accomplishment.
For the reason of space, I cannot go on and talk about other lessons I have learnt so far, such as to "get your hands dirty" by actually trying out ideas instead of only contemplating about them and the kind of devotion one needs to his/her work. Yet I believe the above two – to be independent thinker and taking writing seriously – are probably among those easy to get but hard to practice. I am still learning them. (Andrew Zhang obtained his MPhil in communication from CityU in 2008. He is currently pursuing Ph.D. studies in communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara.)
Andrew, Zhang Jingguang (MPhil Cohort 2003)
31/10/2008
