Good evening everyone (if you are in the Uk, that is!)

I have been admitted onto a Phd programme in politics, but I have no idea what my research will be about! My potential supervisor kindly helped me draft my research proposal, but the problem is that now, I am totally confused about what I will be investigating! I feel so grossly unprepared and dread the day when I will be starting the Phd!

What can I do now? Is it possible for me to change topic and come up with a new one (within the same geographical focus)? How can I approach my potential supervisor on my reason for amending everything?

Many thanks.

Hello, I'm not sure whether you are saying you don't have much of an idea about your selected research topic (you have a draft proposal though) or you have no idea about what to do?

I'm going for the former because you say you have drafted a research proposal and your supervisor has helped you...so you must have a general area you are researching and you must have outlined some parameters for that research in your proposal as well?

Not only that, you have a supervisor so this person might have been selected because of their knowledge in your general area of interest?

If this is the case, you need to read now all the seminal (significant) literature in your general area and try to identify any gaps in the research-they will just be little things nowadays. Once you have identified a gap (an area in the general topic that hasn't really been looked at in depth-or through a particular research philosophy or methodological 'lens' or perspective), exploring that area becomes your topic. But you sucessively narrow it down over several weeks and months of reading and exploration.

So if you were looking at the politics in a particular geographical area, over a period of time, from the perspective of say whether neo conservatism had shaped the development of local and regional goverment processes post 9/11 in Wales (just a random topic-don't expect it to make sense-just providing an example)- you would be looking at what research had already been conducted in this area and whether there was an aspect that hadn't really been explored. I've deliberately chosen the example above because for many of us, PhD topics come from quite ordinary areas of real life-that seem quite mundane but when really examined fully turn out to be more complex and rather different than our 'common sense' understanding of them leads us to believe. Don't think your topic needs to be 'earth shaking'-most of them are not.

This aspect might lead you to factors that needed to be considered that had been previously overlooked. You then might relate these factors back to a particular political theory or look at it from the perspective of various theories to see whether they shed any light on what had happened. It might be politics but would include some historiography as well.

But 'nutting' out this topic and area would probably take you three months or more, so your real research proposal and plan would form more solidly around half way into your first year perhaps. Does this make sense? Don't think that you are expected to have all of your topic sorted before you start. Part of the research journey is determining and 'nailing' down the actual topic. Hope this is helpful ? :)