Hello to the internet, welcome to my first blog post. I am hoping to use this blog to share my experiences both as a PhD student, and as someone researching ADHD who also has ADHD and some other acronym-based labels mixed in there.

To start off I am currently a first year PhD student who started in October 2022 at Lancaster. Despite only just starting my PhD I am actually in my fourth year at Lancaster after doing my BSc in Software Engineering here from 2019 to 2022 (gotta love the COVID years). My PhD is in Computer Science, and I am researching how to make academic assessment more accessible to students with ADHD using technology, so not your typical compsci topic. I have three supervisors for the project, one of whom is actually in educational research rather than my own computing and communications department. So, I have a wide variety of knowledge and experience to help and provide insight into quite a niche area.

The reason I am researching this is very much related to the fact that I actually have ADHD and have had the diagnosis since I was in primary school. Because of this I have often had a very different academic experience than neurotypical students (this meaning anyone who doesn’t have anything like ADHD, autism, dyslexia, etc). I think some of this was because ADHD isn’t very well understood sometimes in education, so I decided to try and change that. To do this I plan to get a better academic understanding around ADHD and use that to find ways to help students going through a similar experience to myself.

So far, I am looking at how we can use technology to create an assistive tool that supports a student while sitting an exam. This would aim to overcome concentration and memory issues common amongst people with ADHD. However, it is very important to remember that there is a lot more to ADHD than just those symptoms, something I hope to expand on as this blog progresses.
Currently this ends up looking like me trying to find existing literature, struggling, then finding vaguely productive forms of procrastination, and eventually finishing the reading. However, PhD is a long journey, and I hope to be able to share both it’s highs and lows on here.

So, I am looking forward to using this blog to both share my experiences and also hopefully share bits and pieces of my research as it progresses. And hopefully I’ll help people learn more about ADHD and neurodiversity from an authority on the topic, through both lived experience and eventually by qualification (if the next three years go according to plan) 😊