The Sussex Junior Research Associate scheme is a brilliant opportunity to learn about doing independent research. In 2020-2021, two second-year linguistics undergraduates, Harriet Nye and Joe Thompson-Smith, won funding to work on their own projects for 8 weeks over the summer.
In this post, our guest blogger is Joe Thompson-Smith who reflects on the experience and shares his timely research findings on media representation of the NHS and its workers before and during the covid-19 crisis. Thanks for contributing Joe!
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Learning about the Junior Research Associate (JRA) scheme at
the start of second year, I knew I wanted to complete a research project. The
idea of completing a dissertation has always seemed daunting to me and I
thought the scheme would be the perfect way to enhance my academic skills
before starting my final year.
Completing a rewarding introductory module in discourse
analysis in second year, I was keen to create a project related to the
discipline. However, it was only during lockdown and noting the clapping,
reference in the media to frontline workers and seeing the Thank You
NHS signs that my project began to take shape. With Dr Charlotte Taylor as
my supervisor, I put together my first research proposal. I proposed to
empirically investigate the British media representation of the NHS and its
staff in April 2020 and compare this to the representation in November 2019,
before the arrival of coronavirus. With the help of Charlotte, I adapted my
protect to be corpus-assisted. I decided to use methods from Critical Discourse
Analysis (CDA) and apply this to two corpora, made up of newspaper articles
from April and November that I retrieved from online resource LexisNexis.
Much to my surprise, my application was accepted and before
I knew it, I was starting work on my project! At first, it felt intimidating. A
great deal of self-discipline is involved: there are no set readings or essays
to complete. I had total ownership over the project - it was up to me to
complete the work and find appropriate readings and resources to compliment my
research.
I also had to set deadlines for myself to send reports to
Charlotte, who would give me feedback and advice accordingly. I was also
supported by a mentor, Linguistics PHD student Eddie Brown, who had previously
completed a JRA and gave me advice based on her experiences. Likewise, the JRA
team supported learning through workshops and sessions to help with academic
development, writing and for creating an academic A1 poster.
It was a real learning curve, as well as developing
self-discipline and taking total responsibility, I also had to learn to use
software for corpus analysis, and even learned a bit about statistics to fully
understand how the software functioned. Often as English students, we group
ourselves as not being good at maths or science but going in with an open-mind
I learned a lot and definitely understand more about statistics (in a corpus linguistics
setting) than before. Patience is also important: at times it was tiring going
through long concordance lines, but it was always rewarding once I had
completed a report and discovered a new finding.
The biggest take-away for me was the importance of
fine-tuned research. I remember thinking 8 weeks was a long time, and
subsequently proposing quite a broad, exploratory project. I found out some
interesting things but really only scratched the surface of my datasets! This
is a really important lesson that I will be applying for my dissertation and
any potential future projects: don’t be afraid to focus on the minutiae.
Crucially, I feel a lot more prepared and now have the skill
set to begin a corpus-assisted and discourse-related dissertation. For any
second years considering applying or interested in pursuing postgraduate
studies, I would say go for it! The experience and opportunity are brilliant,
and it is also a great way to earn some money over the summer.
If you would like to learn more about my project and my
findings, my presentation is below.
Joe Thompson-Smith
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If you would like to read more about JRA experiences, head over to Sarah Fitzgerald's guest post written in 2015 and Eddie Brown's guest post from 2018. Since then, they have both gone on to the PhD Linguistics here at Sussex.
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