sophiie.burns
Member
- Joined
- Aug 24, 2022
- Messages
- 6
- Gender
- Female
- HSC
- 2023
The PIP is due (2023) in a week today and I thought I'd share some unsolicited advice on how I stayed organised during the completion of my PIP.
1. get a 'PIP BINDER'
Get a small 25mm binder and put everything PIP-related in it. Secondary sources, focus group questions, brainstorming pages, and notes for annotations EVERYTHING! I personally had the type of binder where you can slide the paper in the front and make a mind map of everything my PIP topic was going to include: from the theories relating to the impacts and the methods of primary research I was going to use.
View attachment 1690194851018.png
2. Make notes on secondary sources
This may be an obvious one but making comments (if digital) or writing notes (if printed) on the sources themselves is a life saver. Making notes on the source allows you to come back to ideas that came from specific parts of the source that inspired or connected to an idea.
3. Do your primary research early
Do your primary research as early as possible! It took me weeks to organise my focus groups meeting times and hours to do my content analysis' - don't put them off do them early.
4. Brain dump
Don't stress about having the perfect introduction for your central material chapters on the first try - just brain-dump everything you want each chapter to cover, then tie in secondary sources and primary sources and go from there. IK it sounds obvious but as someone who gets stuck, it's sometimes helpful to be told the obvious.
ANYWAYS
hope this helped x
1. get a 'PIP BINDER'
Get a small 25mm binder and put everything PIP-related in it. Secondary sources, focus group questions, brainstorming pages, and notes for annotations EVERYTHING! I personally had the type of binder where you can slide the paper in the front and make a mind map of everything my PIP topic was going to include: from the theories relating to the impacts and the methods of primary research I was going to use.
View attachment 1690194851018.png
2. Make notes on secondary sources
This may be an obvious one but making comments (if digital) or writing notes (if printed) on the sources themselves is a life saver. Making notes on the source allows you to come back to ideas that came from specific parts of the source that inspired or connected to an idea.
3. Do your primary research early
Do your primary research as early as possible! It took me weeks to organise my focus groups meeting times and hours to do my content analysis' - don't put them off do them early.
4. Brain dump
Don't stress about having the perfect introduction for your central material chapters on the first try - just brain-dump everything you want each chapter to cover, then tie in secondary sources and primary sources and go from there. IK it sounds obvious but as someone who gets stuck, it's sometimes helpful to be told the obvious.
ANYWAYS
hope this helped x
I found it really helpful when making notes on annotations, keeping track of title ideas and drafting paragraphs. it was also helpful for word banks or sentence starters to for addressing primary research and secondary research. 
