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As an international PhD student studying the internationalization of higher education, my personal experience was inherently related to the circumstances that I was researching. The personal and the cognitive encouraged each other. This chapter discusses the interrelated nature of the affective and productive aspects of my PhD experience by focusing on three major influences on that experience. It further explains how those affective drivers defined not only the subjective experience of my PhD but also the direction and structure of the PhD itself. As such, I intend to make explicit what it means to complete a PhD as an international student in Australia – at least, what it meant for me.

There are numerous existing resources which claim to discuss the most important factors a potential PhD student should consider when looking for a possible supervisor. Commonly discussed topics include the supervisors’ record and approach, but there is much more to finding a reciprocal and beneficial relationship. This chapter will address some of these less discussed factors to look for when selecting a supervisor, including sense of humor. This chapter will help the hopeful PhD student maneuver the uncomfortable − and often overwhelming − waters of selecting a supervisor by pointing out the questions students forget to ask, the character traits they don’t think to consider, and examples of supervision selection gone wrong. It starts with the often-confusing process of knowing where to start looking, then highlights five frequently ignored factors that deserve more consideration, and finishes with warning signs to look for that mark supervisors to avoid.

This final chapter pulls together some of the observations and findings from the others in the book, and presents a final argument for undoing the ‘affectless consensus’ of research. It synthesizes a number of ‘affective scenes’ that are present across the various chapters, and uses these to build an argument for why affect should not be understand as simply synonymous with emotion. It concludes with a proposal for an ‘affective project’ to build off the findings that are found in the book.

A piece of frequently given informal advice to those starting in the world of research is to ‘pick a topic you'll be able to stick with for three or four years’ – and often that's the end of it. This chapter suggests that we should understand the importance of confronting the ‘affective gap’ in how research is currently conceived. It does so by considering how usually we do not engage with the issues underlying this ‘sticking with’ and what allows us to sustain our attention and effort across the years of a research project. Through a case study of my own confrontation with the question of how I chose and changed my own PhD research topic, this chapter introduces the idea of affective research through an exploration of the concept of affect and its relevance to research. The first part of this chapter explores affect through a brief overview of four different scholarly literatures, to provide an initial framework and some clarity for what is often an opaque subject. This is then grounded through an affective engagement with the issue of choosing a research topic and how this affects our research. It concludes with a brief overview of the other chapters in the volume.