Speak Out October 2020 DIGITAL EDITION FINAL

Feature

The COVID-19 curveball

Impacts on higher degree research students

Rebecca Smith, Rebecca Sullivan & Harmony Turnbull

When making the decision to commit to a PhD or research masters, it is well known that the road is unlikely to be smooth. However, the desire to contribute to the knowledge base of our profession and improve services for people with communication or swallowing difficulties drives us in this journey. With acknowledgement of common challenges, three speech pathology higher degree research (HDR) students at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) could not have predicted the impacts of a global pandemic. Ethical considerations for vulnerable participant populations of people with communication and/or swallowing difficulties who are at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19 necessitate alternatives to face-to-face data collection and alterations to research design. With participant recruitment set to begin in early 2020 for full-time research students, Rebecca Sullivan and Rebecca Smith, both found themselves asking how they could alter their research. Part-time research student Harmony Turnbull also found herself in a similar situation as restrictions continued into the year which held implications for her research as well role as her part- time role as Associate Lecturer and Clinical Educator for speech pathology students. In this article, Rebecca Smith, Harmony Turnbull (both based in Sydney) and Rebecca Sullivan (based in Melbourne) reflect on how they continue

to adapt and adjust as they work on their research projects in the time of COVID-19 pandemic. Need for resources and supports Commitment and success in any HDR work requires access to many internal (resilience, flexibility, creativity) and external (mentoring, training, readings) resources and supports. Progressing with HDR during a global pandemic required even greater support. We looked for ways to innovate and trialled various online communication strategies as a way of providing peer support within and across research groups, particularly since we no longer had the casual, in-person chats with colleagues. Microsoft Teams became a place where we were able to send instant messages of support, share memes of joy or sorrow, ask questions, and bounce ideas off each other. Our Microsoft Teams chat started as a casual chat and has since firmed into a solid friendship - some days it was just beneficial to speak to someone going through the same experiences. We also found ourselves scheduling more. “shut up and write” sessions (SUAW) to aid focus and make the most of valuable writing time. The group work environment kept us accountable to the task at hand since

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Speak Out | October 2020