The Open Uni doesn’t just expect a dissertation from you to obtain your MSc, it gives homework too. These TMAs (tutor marked assignments) are designed to allow the dissertation to evolve properly and give the supervisors chance to comment and make suggestions.

Remember because this is a research project there is no ready made ‘right answer’. The first TMA has been sent off and come back with 62% - perhaps I might have hoped for a bit more but I’d lost some marks by writing one of the sections a bit too academically rather than as a more general overview. Although marked it doesn’t count towards the final overall mark, its designed to see you have a reasonable research idea, and a way of tackling it in a reasonable timescale. Overall the feed back was positive and encouraging. It also included some extra comments from another academic, which doesn’t normally happen at this juncture. So the weight of expectation as eyes scrutinise my work or feel good from sparking some interest? I’ll take the latter and pop a post-it note up quoting “very exciting and novel project”. Since few understand what your studying, you need all the encouragement you can get!

Meanwhile it’s onward to TMA02. Every time I seem to nail one thing down it raises another issue. For example having managed to convert some software into a network graph and written a small software program to analyse it, it seems I’ll need some serious computing power. One problem solved, another created. It does at times feel like a never ending rabbit hole. The ‘trick’ is to be clear at each point about what you want to understand, how and why. Tackle it, draw conclusions, rethink, rinse and repeat. Fortunately being a software developer this is a fairly natural mindset - you don’t get far with unstructured wandering.

Summing up: it’s feeling a mountain to climb, constantly discovering the mountain is bigger than you think, but making steady progress.