This is adapted from the Acknowledgements section of my thesis.
Now is the time to give thanks publicly for my learning journey and encourage others who have suffered setbacks and not to give up.
Success at last
First of all, I would like to thank my Mum and Dad who gave me the brains and stamina to go on this journey to a PhD which has taken me over 30 years to complete. I started at the University of Toronto, Canada, in 1980 and finished in 2011 at the Curtin Graduate School of Business, Australia, so there has been more than the usual number of people involved in supporting me along the way. After three years of coursework I had to stop the commencement of my thesis in Social Policy due to a severe whiplash injury from a car accident in 1983 which left me with chronic pain for two years. I felt deep disappointment on not being able to complete my studies and it added to my misery and pain at the time. The idea of completion was resurrected off and on over the years. I felt that it HAD to be done.
I went to the Dean of Business in a local University who knew of me rather than really knowing me and he sat there patiently listening to my ‘story of failure’ and suggested, quite wrongly, that I should enrol in a DBA program. I felt humiliation – and pardon me from saying this all you managers on or who have graduated from DBA programs, but it wasn’t the type of doctorate that I wanted. My beef was that he didn’t think I was had the intelligence to do a PhD. I enrolled at a local university in Perth, Australia, in the DBA program which I undertook part-time, finishing all the coursework necessary to commence the thesis. However, my supervisor moved away! A good career move considering there was talk of the program being shut down.
I decided to change to the ‘PhD by Research’ program at the Graduate School of Business, Curtin University under the guidance of Prof Alma Whiteley who is noted as being the supervisor with the most PhD students in the Curtin School of Business, a fact that testifies to her dedication of engendering higher degree research in the Curtin Graduate School of Business.
In that 30-year journey I learnt many things from countless people: academics, staff and many students, all of whom assisted me in my learning and accomplishing this task. This ranged from learning complex quantitative methodologies to applied statistics and philosophy, finally evolving into a qualitative researcher using grounded theory under the tutelage of Adjunct Assoc. Prof. Iruita at the Curtin School of Nursing.
I was able to apply my new found love of grounded theory via a competitive grant from the Women’s Development Program, Office of Women, Commonwealth Government of Australia, and produced some original work about unemployed women managers. With this confidently under my belt, knowing how well grounded theory works, I then sought candidacy for this thesis in impression management and executive fraud, an area I knew nothing about but was given full rein to learn all that I could, apply qualitative research methodology and wait for the new findings to bubble up.
Through this journey there have been many people who have encouraged me, my adoptive mother is one of only two people who has seen this process from start to finish. She always knew what this piece of unfinished business meant to me and used to tease me with: “And, how old are you going to be when you finish?” Neither one of us thought it would be 3 decades later! The other person who witnessed this learning adventure from beginning to end but from an entirely different perspective was my eldest daughter. She was three years old when I started, and now she has her own young children. Her constant encouragement has been wonderful to receive. My youngest daughter came into the piece a little later, and more recently there has been a race to who was going to be a doctor first. I have beaten her by 2 years in our friendly match, but as she retorts- she will be a real doctor –as every PhD holder riles against! Her support too has been unquenchable even when things have gone wildly against our plans.
I didn’t realise that my career ‘about turns’ were going to affect me so much financially, neither did I expect my health to suffer as a consequence, and there is no doubt that it has delayed my PhD considerably after enrolment at Curtin. I have to say a big thank you to all the medical staff who have pulled me through several life threatening crisis episodes together with the pastoral care from several trusted counsellors, as well as the many staff including at Curtin Business School who have been kind to extend my stay as a part-time candidate despite my life’s ups and downs.
An incredible thanks has to go to Apple (YAY!!!!) who fixed my laptop screen even though it was out of warranty – you guys rock! Not only the hardware people assisted me, there have been many software providers including QSR International with NVivo 8, (I preferred the previous name of NUDIST which produced more laughs) and VMware Fusion who have assisted my progress via a Mac laptop (everything is so Windows biased) as well as the Curtin IT people including Jared Gleim who managed to tease and prod Endnote into operation for me.
This may sound a bit odd, but I would like to recognise my detractors along the way – there were many. Every scholar has them at some point. Your lack of appreciation of my work hurt me terribly at the time but the pain urged me further and stronger to completion. Your part is acknowledged but now in a positive way.
On a lighter note, my heartfelt gratitude is sent to all my friends who have supported me over the years. A very special thanks to Marilyn Monaghan who came in my hour of need of severe pain via fibromyalgia and quickly had the details in hand; to Ann Buccilli, and Suzanne Rice who felt every inch of the way with me over the last three years and made me focus on the goal.
No acknowledgement can be written without a special note of appreciation going to my co-supervisors Prof Alma Whiteley and Assoc Prof Therese Jefferson, who have provided me with detailed guidance and encouragement when I needed it the most as I came to grips with producing an examinable thesis. Thank you for your support, which was beyond the call of duty at times.
Another thank you goes to all of those people who made the study feasible by being very open interview respondents about their experiences, even when at times it was difficult to relive it. Their voices are the ones that are heard in the Research Findings Chapter, and it is through analyzing their voices that I made this attempt to capture all that was said to me.
Finally, there is one person that deserves a large thank you for two things: John Westall, proof-read the thesis several times to improve the grammar and my idiosyncratic punctuation. He kindly dropped more important items on his agenda to do this for me. However, all the errors that are in the thesis are still mine, hopefully after all this scrutiny, there remain only a few.
John is also my husband, he has given me unconditional support and total encouragement to achieve this amazing milestone of my life. He has been the key to my doing this, undertaking all the household chores willingly, putting up with my long hours, and still cheerfully handing me a glass of wine followed by a nutritious meal as I entered the front door late at night.
So many people along the way, but I thank you all.
