Rachel Sing-Ee Tan

My recent trip to the State University of Zanzibar was my first time to travel for work. It was also my first time to Africa and I am especially grateful to Dr Maryam and Umayra for hosting Dr Ben Daniel, my supervisor and I. I am also grateful for Ben’s patience and guidance that helped me to successfully collect rich data from my interviews. Here, I share some of the experiences I enjoyed whilst I was not conducting my research. These experiences, whilst extremely enjoyable, also helped inform my understanding of the research context. I am thankful that our lovely department administrator, Candi, chose an excellent hotel in Stone Town that was within a 10-minute walk to my interview location. Stone Town is a UNESCO World Heritage site and the name was chosen because the buildings were constructed using coral stone. I was living in a 19th-century town and in the middle of historical and cultural sites. The buildings’ architecture have Arab, Persian, Indian, European, and Afri...

My PhD Field Work At Zanzibar My PhD on globalisation in higher education provided an exciting field trip to Zanzibar in January 2016. My research looks at how globalisation has impacted on an emerging university in the developing world. I interviewed the staff at the State University of Zanzibar (SUZA). It gave me two lessons. First, I am a Malaysian student of Chinese descent studying in New Zealand, and the trip widened my cultural horizon on East Africa. Second, I learnt the skills of data collection as a social scientist and it is these that I am sharing in this blog post. In my field trip, I learned to distinguish formal data, such as interviews, from my informal data, such as my field notes. For the former, I conducted semi-structured interviews that were recorded and transcribed. During interviews, I kept notes that highlighted potential key topics for further probing with in-depth questions. By conducting the interviews, I had on-field training on how to bui...