Monthly Archives: October 2011

Think I’m on to something…

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Another morning looking for ideas for a dissertation… never thought it would be this hard! At the moment I am leaning towards the idea of doing something about children with type 1 diabetes. Something on what type of support they get to cope with the chronic illness, and if it needs to get better, etc. I suppose this interest comes from my own experience when I got diagnosed with type one diabetes. I remember having to spend about two weeks in hospital, and about a week and a half in it suddenly dawned on me; I was going to have to live with this for the rest of my life and I think I cried for about two days straight and the nurses on the ward did try to cheer me up, but never was I offered some sort of other help to be able to cope with the fact that I, as a 14-year-old, now had a chronic illness that would completely change my life. I think that if I would have got some sort of help to cope with this my life would have been somewhat different. Maybe happier, and maybe I wouldn’t have had problems with my general glucose control or had eating disorders… But hey who knows..!? Anyone thinking this sounds like a good dissertation idea?

But I don’t know!!

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Ok, so you read my last entry about my dissertation idea being slayed by my programme director… Anyway, since then I wrote to her and got a reply back with her apologising, saying that she was a bit defensive over some shortcomings of UK law, etc. So, that was a bit of a relief, I wasn’t just completely stupid, but she got a little bit emotional over the issue.

Since then I have tried to come up with a few different ideas and angles to some sort of dissertation… But I don’t know what I want to do! I seriously have lost all sense when it comes to this, am browsing the internet (not just googling, but actually looking in different academic databases and peer-reviewed journals) like mad to get some sort of gist of an idea… But I just don’t know. Every time I come up with something, someone else has either done it or my idea poses too many problems!

For instance my first idea was to see if there is a link between emotional intelligence in children and if their parents use physical punishment. I’d measure the emotional intelligence with the ‘Emotional Quotient Inventory: Youth Version (EQ-i: YV), but where do I get that from? Does my uni have it? Or would I have to buy it myself (which would be something like £150!!)? I was also thinking of using a semi-structured questionnaire on uses of different types of discipline. But the problem here is; are parents going to admit to the use (even mild forms) of physical punishment?

My second idea was to do with societal views on children with autism, I would basically just make a questionnaire and ask people what they thought of children with autism, if they thought they should be in mainstream education, if they think they are more likely to violent acts, etc. But the issue here is that what is the point of doing that? We already know that we need to raise autism awareness, and that a lot of people do not know what autism is, etc.

My third idea has to do with children and type 1 diabetes and their rights when it comes to their treatment. I think I would have access to children with type 1 diabetes, as I know some children in the school I worked in who have type 1 diabetes and I think I could ask my diabetes doctor for help on that as well. So access to children with type 1 diabetes would not really be a problem. Only problem here is that I don’t exactly know what to do, and what the point of this would be?

Other ideas I have are:

  • Prevention of child abuse (possibly a comparison between Sweden and UK)
  • Attitudes to children’s rights in the UK, how can we make people more positive to children’s rights?
  • Prevalence of corporal punishment in the UK (a bit hard due to time constraints and traveling expenses)

Any ideas or some help, anyone?

Just realised…

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… that I haven’t written anything about uni! So, here we go.

As you know I started about a month ago and so far I have been enjoying most of it. At the moment we are doing a module on Children’s Rights, which I have a bit of a hard time getting my head around. I find it really hard to understand the whole thing with the law and things in this country. I seriously don’t understand why this country (UK) even signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child when they hardly follow anything? Or as one of my lecturers put it the other day “We don’t follow it because we don’t like to be told what to do”, so seriously what is the point?! Where I’m from, the stuff we sign we follow, or we don’t join it. Anyway, I suppose law is tricky and is sort of meant to be tricky, why else would we need lawyers? And they did say that this module is meant to be tricky. So I suppose I better get my head down and do all the work and end up understanding it.

All lectures are extremely interesting, but intense! I feel like my head is filled with information every day I get home from lectures and I don’t know where to put it all. I mostly end up bombarding my Robbo with the information. The best things is that we are getting to listen to all these lecturers from different places, that work with children in different ways. It’s amazingly interesting and makes you want to do something equally as cool.

Another great thing is that I have met all these really cool people from all over the world; the US, Norway, Romania, Holland, Greece, Cyprus, China, Kenya, and Jersey (i.e. one of the channel islands), and obviously little me from Sweden. So it’s quite a mix and it’s great to get to hear about everyone’s background and how things differ from country to country. Ah-mazing ( as my old friend Seb would have said). I’m getting on really well with most of the girls, we seem to have a little group of girls that hang out while in uni most of the time. We went for a little social thingy on Saturday and had lunch and spoke to each other about different things. We also went for lunch before lectures on Thursday which was very nice.

Only thing that still bothers me is the dissertation… I still don’t properly know what I want to do, and it freaks me out! I had this idea that I had been thinking about for a long time, and which sort of was the main reason why I decided to do this programme, and when we were discussing our projects yesterday with our supervisors, one of the other supervisors (the lady that actually is the programme director) just said “And what’s the point of doing that!?” and it felt really humiliating and a bit demeaning when she said that in front of everyone and just basically slayed my idea completely. Cried almost the whole way home, because this subject is something I am really passionate about, but according to the programme director there is nothing new in this area I can possibly find out and we already know EVERYTHING about it. So at the moment I am not too sure about why I am doing this programme as I really wanted to go into this sort of thing after my masters… Cried almost the whole way home as I felt so lost, humiliated and stupid…

Anyway, suppose I need to pick myself up and get back into the saddle again.. Back to the drawing board and start again…

New shoes :)

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Decided that I needed at least a new pair of shoes as the autumn is getting colder and colder and my old black ballerinas (which I use the most) are wanting to retire. Got two new pairs in the end, a pair of ballerinas and a pair of brogues;

Ballerinas.

Pretty, pretty!

Brogues! Perfect autumn shoes!

 

 

14th October

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So yesterday I took my Robbo to an Afternoon Tea at the Waldorf Hilton Hotel, in the Good Godfrey’s bar. It was all just so delicious and pretty and nice! We both loved it! This is what it looked like :)

Nicely laid table!

Tea and coffee served!

The "plate tower" with finger sandwiches on the bottom plate, scones, jam and clotted cream on the second one, and desserts on the top one! Delicious!

One of the dessert that I had! So good!

One of the desserts that Rob had, he said it was yummy yummy for his tummy!

Such a gorgeous little afternoon! Really enjoyed my time and it felt really nice to do something different together! So basically I think you should all go for an Afternoon Tea in the Waldorf Hilton hotel in Aldwych, London. It’s worth it’s price!