To complete your Confirmation you essentially have to show convincingly to a panel of members that after one-year of candidature you have:
- A relevant motivation and background research
- Identified a meaningful way to contribute new knowledge to your chosen field, either by filling a current gap in knowledge or enhancing existing knowledge
- Expressed your research objective and questions you plan to answer
- Detailed a methodology on how you plan to actually answer your research questions
- Estimated and planned a timeline on when all this will take place
This will be presented in the form of a report, and then a 20 minute presentation to the panel. Yay! Due to my extremely poor time commitment skills, combined with my uncontrollable tendency for perfection at times, my report was about 5 days late and way longer than required. I woefully underestimated how long it would take to complete, originally thinking I could do it within 4 or 5 days, when in reality it took more like 11. In the end my supervisors still aren't 100% happy with it despite my best attempts to be as detailed as possible and the fact that I added much more detail than I ever intended.
Negatives aside, it was actually one of the best experiences of my PhD thus far. I mean that honestly too. Submitting late wasn't a big deal, and the less than stellar review by my supervisors is nothing new either (they critique even the best written research papers so I can never win anyway). In the end the late nights were worth it, as I ended up creating a report much detailed than I intended, and while it may seem like a waste of time as the report did not need to be so detailed, all this extra information can now form a good basis for my first few chapters of my thesis. This start on my thesis is something I wouldn't have accomplished if not under the threat of the report deadline.
But the most beneficial outcome of having my Confirmation in a few weeks is that it forces you to clarify your entire research, from the motivation, to the questions, even down to a estimated timeline of how your remaining years of candidature will progress. All this is now in a document that I can refer back to in later months, I now have a clearer definition of all my research, and I actually have a brief idea of the direction I am going to take over the next few years.
I originally viewed Confirmation as a drag. It took so much time away from me, time I thought I could be spending doing more on my literature review, or even on other work I need to do. Now that it is written... well I guess hindsight is a jerk.
My presentation isn't for a few weeks so I have some time to prepare my slides, but I am going into it much more confident than before at least.
