Finally, a break

Two months ago, in my last blog post, I wrote:

I will write blog posts more often. 

 Oops... But things have been crazy crazy crazy.

The honours students are finally done with their projects, theses submitted, and I am so proud of the both of them for scoring a H1 (highest honours)! Woohoo! Now...it's nearly time for next year's honours students to begin :)

I've also been fiddling around with my own project, really trying to narrow down exactly what my "story" is, and the questions I'll be able to answer (achieve-ably) within the next two (maybe two and a half) years. Seeing as my last "real" content-filled blog post was back in August, there's a bit catching up to do.

Long story short, I've sort of changed the direction I'm taking in my PhD (a number of times in the past three months...). When I arrived in Australia, the honours students were already starting a project investigating visual perception in dogs. I found it really interesting so I was heavily involved in their projects and planned to look at canine visual perception via a number of different methods/tests. But at one point, the dog trainer in me went - "wait a second, how can we justify using these training/testing protocols when we don't actually know what methods are most efficient/effective?" So I went back to the drawing board, and now my actual research topic is more relevant to the world of applied behaviour. I'm looking at certain dog training techniques and the underlying motivations and mechanisms that make them work (or not!).

Having changed my topic about six months in, I was a little behind. So of course I've crammed as much as humanly possible into the past couple months. In the middle of October, shortly after getting back from my sister's wedding in California, I presented a research proposal on my new topic to my Research Progress Committee and had my project (and candidature) approved (woohoo!). I've also submitted ethics applications for a couple upcoming projects, and wrote a literature review that will be officially submitted to a journal on Monday. This coming Friday, I'll be presenting my project ideas at a Postgraduate Research Festival on the La Trobe Bendigo campus. It's technically a Health Science student event, but a couple of us Psych PhD students asked to be involved, just for the chance to share our research and meet other postgrad students on campus.

Everything is still pretty crazy, but I decided I needed a weekend off these past two days, so I took Audrey for a trip down to Melbourne. I dropped her off with Jess on Saturday during the daytime since my housemates wanted to go karaoke-ing in the city, then today we took Audrey and Charlotte to the beach for Audrey's first beach adventure!

Pictures, because text is boring: