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Moving the discussion abroad

As I’ve been working on my Master’s degree here in Taiwan, I’ve gone out and looked for resources, tips, strategies and more for doing a dissertation and handling pressure during graduate school. I’ve found that, while there is plenty of websites/blogs/etc. talking about getting through the dissertation at home, very few discuss going through the process abroad–and not just in the sense of “from the US to the UK” but going to a country with a completely different language, where the degree requires you to write your paper and do your research in that native language.

It’s something I have recently been wanting to really emphasize in this blog. As I said, though, the focus will be on Asian languages as that’s where I’m located, but I believe it can be applied to any similar situation.

Some things I’d like to touch on include tools of the trade. Often it’s recommended to use Mendley, Sente, EndNote, etc. as the primary way to collect and organize resources and citations. However, these don’t really work well when dealing with Asian languages, and the citation systems don’t have options that fit citation styles used in different countries. So what do you do? As a result, I hope to bring to the table some suggestions on how to streamline this process as well as offer tips for what tools you can use to help you through organizing sources.

A lot of this really seems to hit a very niche market, and while there’s probably only a few people that may benefit from this, what I hope to show is that doing a degree abroad in a language you’re interested in is very achievable and if you have the opportunity, you should totally go for it!

Anyway keep an eye out for future posts on this and related topics! If there’s any specific questions or something you’d like to see in a post, please leave a comment below!

2 thoughts on “Moving the discussion abroad”

  1. Just letting you know there is one reader in this tiny niche 🙂 Wrote my bachelors degree in Chinese and hope to continue to masters this Autumn. So looking forward your posts!

    1. Wow, sorry this took me so long to reply! I don’t know why it ended up in the spam folder 🙁

      Glad to know there’s more readers in these niche! I think it’s a tough place to be, but it’s also very exciting at the same time. Good luck on your master’s!! What topic/field will you be looking at?

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