Do it! Don't worry about it. It is, if you get the money, the least work you could do for that amount of cash, and any part-time job will be more effort. It's worth a few days of flattering people and cudgeling your brain (NB don't get those two confused).
I've been told, and haven't had it proved wrong, that you need to prove three things for the AHRB: That you (1) are the right person to do (2) the right project in (3) the right place. In as far as you are able, for (1) if you can show a personal history of interracting successfully eiththe subject matter, you're onto a good thing. For (3) if you can make an egregiously clunky reference to an archive or resource that you're going to need to be using that is at the place you want to study, or a particular research centre, seminar series or module that will be essential, you're also quids in. (2) is sticky, but it's the thing people usually spend most time thinking about, so I thought it was worth sticking it in context.
Go for it! They give you a load of money. Also:
they seem to want an awful lot of detail about a dissertation that doesn't exist yet except as a hazy notion in the dark recesses of my mind. Should I just make something up? Would they make me stick to it?
This shouldn't deter you at all. (Unless something has radically changed in the last eight years. Check all this with a member of your proposed department also.) Wait while I wipe away the smeary dust from my memories of young freshfaced Ex and see what I put on my AHRB MA application. Ah, yes: my dissertation was going to be 'on the cultural construction of normality'.
So I've just finished an undergraduate degree in sheep- and stoner-watching, and I was going to definitively sort out in a 20,000 word MA thesis how we, culturally, define ‘normal’. Derrida must have been shitting himself.
I hope it amused the AHRB board. In the end, I whittled it down to looking at the power-feminist repackaging of Mills and Boon romances in the late eighties and early nineties. I like to think that if you read between the lines, you can tell that I have a thorough handle on the construction of normality, but just didn't want to show off, or make the Frankfurt School cry.
Nobody called me on the huge gap between my original proposal and the result, or came round to repossess my brain, or even asked to see the result, as far as I know, although the merciless bastards did ask that I jot “Thanks, AHRB!” on the acknowledgements page of my thesis. I imagine it gets a bit more rigorous as you crawl up the funding ladder, and they hold you to your promises.
Your ideas will always change in the eight months of an MA before the thesis, or there wouldn’t be any point in doing the middle bit. If you use the proposal as a useful place to jot down some ideas; by the time you come back to it, it’ll be handy as a mental place-marker, or, as in my case, a laugh. |
