CRADLE PhD student chooses research as her new career pathway

18 October 2021

In this post we hear from CRADLE’s fourth and newest strategic PhD scholarship holder, Anastasiya Umarova. Anastasiya shares her thoughts on the authentic meaning behind her decision to undertake further study and aspirations for the PhD journey ahead.

I’m Anastasiya and I am a life-long learner. I’ve never thought that I would say that. I’d had a long journey before I landed at CRADLE two months ago. It is a lie to say that I had dreamed about an academic career my whole life. That all changed one year ago.  

My background is teaching. I have more than five years’ experience from Russia in teaching German and English as foreign languages. To change my career and become a learning designer, I started a master’s course in digital learning. In my final semester, I conducted a small-scale research project. It was small, but it was real, with ethics approval, recruiting respondents and primary data collection and analysis. That is where the magic happened. It was love at first sight. 

Afterwards, the question altered from ‘whether to ‘when’. I had no doubts about the ‘where’ part. Half of my reference list was from the CRADLE team, so the answer was pretty obvious. 

My PhD topic is about feedback and feedback literacy. More specifically, I focus on postgraduate taught/coursework students who are often overlooked in the academic literature compared to their undergraduate or postgraduate research counterparts.

And although I am still at the stage of identifying a gap in the literature (one of my PhD student colleagues compared this period to swimming in an ocean of literature), I am really looking forward to winning a Nobel Prize. I’m kidding. I’m looking forward to making at least a tiny contribution to knowledge. A more down-to-earth wish is to start producing meaningful results. 

Feel free to catch on me on Twitter @AnaUmarova or via email [email protected]