Setting Aims And Objectives, 05/01/16, A.J.D's Ph.D progression blog

January 05, 2016

Setting Aims And Objectives

It’s traditional for people to set themselves New Year Resolutions in the rather limited hoping that they’ll be able to stick to it but usually break it within a short time of making them! I don’t go for that sort of thing but instead I go for setting aims and objectives of the year, which contributes towards achieving the overall vision that I have for where I want to be with what I do.

Having just started getting back to my work I have been thinking about the aims of the year and the objectives that shall contribute towards achieving those aims, and the tasks that need to be carried out in order for those objectives to contribute to those aims, and the resources that are needed to assist with the completion of each task. Setting aims and objectives is important because aims and objectives provide directions and enable you to attain a realistic and measurable positioning in your research and put in place some sort of focus for the year, or whatever time frame you choose to define. It is an activity that I recommend every Ph.D. candidate involve themselves with so that they can give themselves not only a focus but a means of ordering the objectives, activities and tasks that they need to carry out during that particular time frame, and therefore to reduce confusion and misdirection.

Setting an aim means that you set yourself a fairly abstract, none specific goal to achieve during that particular time frame. For example, an aim that I have set for my research this year is “Pass the Upgrade Process.” Fairly abstract and doesn’t contain any ideas of any resources or activities that are required: it is simply an aim to achieve; it gives a direction. Setting an objective, or a series of objectives, entails a more specific description of what task needs to be completed in order to achieve a particular aim. I write aims using fairly abstract language; I write objectives using specific and clear adjective and noun relationships. For example, an objective to achieve the aim “Pass the Upgrade Process” is “Write the Upgrade Paper by September,” which tells me that there is a report that needs to be written by a certain time: it gives an adjective – noun relationship within the context of time.

These objectives can be listed as long term, medium term and short term although simply using these titles is quite ambiguous so it is always best to give some sort of a time structure to these objectives. For example, a shorter term objective to the objective “Complete the Upgrade Paper by September” is “define research practicalities” giving much more of a specific task to achieve in the shorter term and I have placed it in the time frame of between now and Easter.

From then on, you can begin to list the tasks that are going to be carried out to achieve each objective and the resources that are going to be required to complete each task, if you want to go that far. It might be an idea to detail as much as you can, when you can, and use this as evidence for project management.

So, setting aims, objectives, tasks and resources is an extremely useful skill and process to carry out whilst going through your Ph.D. as this can offer you a direction, a focus, and helps you to not steer off course and become confused because it is really easy to steer off course whilst doing your Ph.D. research. This is because there are so many, limitless, avenues of research and debate but obviously to cover all of this in a thesis even of eighty thousand words would not be sufficient.

I would love to delve into the debates and perspectives of Grounded Theory and what many authors have said about it and debate with what they have said, but I simply do not have the room to cover absolutely everything and there would be a danger that I would be so focussed on arguing and debating Grounded Theory perspectives that I would lose track completely of where I should be actually going at a particular time. Setting these aims, objectives, tasks and resources set the grounding for suitable and appropriate direction, but that doesn’t mean that the Ph.D. becomes extremely structured or rigid. You must be able to follow a path but be flexible enough to join that path to different paths if you discover something relevant.

So to summarise, setting aims and objectives enables your progress to become: