According to professor Sandra Walklate, doctoral students need to acquire several types of skills, such as, inter-personal skills, which include getting along with the supervisor, understanding one’s own stages of motivation and maintaining self-confidence and patience. Similarly, Shapiro (2011) values the academic skills (technical) such as managing references, taking notes and keeping, and management skills, avoid meeting brick walls, keep life work balance. and Stability, (Laureate Education,2013: Shapiro, 2011).

     As an MBA student, I could meet with my supervisor daily, we discussed my strengths and weaknesses. Like most of my colleagues at UOL this is my first online experience. Relationships with work colleagues and family played a role previously, in my MBA journey being surrounded by a social support network was, and still is important. Therefore, I do need to face stress and look for that moment when my co-workers and family help me alleviate that stress.

Although most of the ideas presented through the media were discussed in previous modules, my feelings and reactions are different, today, as I approach the second half of my doctoral journey.

   For example, on a macro level, it is known that organizations look for something that represents a competitive advantage, on the other hand, on a micro (individual)level. Students can  use the same concept and find their competitive advantage which might be choosing a topic that is under- researched .

Lee(2005) discusses research planning and presents time management, in the same context Stephen covey presents the Seven Habits of Highly effective People, he discusses interesting frameworks and systems that are helpful to students perusing their PhDs, keeping themselves in balance(Covey,1992).

    Another suggested strategy is  Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats SWOT analysis, is a matching tool that help develop four strategies, SO (Strength opportunities) strategies), WO (weaknesses opportunities) strategies, ST (strength-threats) strategies, and WT weaknesses-threats) strategies. As a student perusing my EdD and getting ready for my final thesis, I plan to match my strength with opportunities, for example, my strengths are using statistics to analyze data, find out means, regression and standard deviations and my research is a qualitative design, I would discuss with my advisor switching to a mixed methodology.

From my experience at UOL, I managed to build relationships with my peers and other researchers through social media and WhatsApp. It started when I posed a question on UOL community stream, few students responded at the beginning, and today we are over fifteen students, those who are in the thesis stage share their experiences with us, as Lee (2008) mentions, networks  strengthen students relationships ,allowing them to share their experiences and concerns.