Researching an overseas topic at the University of Leeds

This article aims to provide guidance and motivation to international students in the UK who want to research a problem from their home countries. Lecturers and dissertation supervisors could also be interested in the analysis and recommendations made. The document presents the experiences of an international student at the University of Leeds during the dissertation process. The research project was a qualitative multiple case study that examined the relationship between educational effectiveness and the styles of management and leadership in three public teacher training colleges (TTC) in Mexico via online interviews. In a narrative style, the experiences are described from the perspective of the student, analysing the difficulties faced when studying a problem that is not located in the UK, and the actions taken to solve this. Four main difficulties are addressed: the problem of deciding on a research focus when in a country different to that which you wish to study, complications when constructing a literature review, the many inconveniences of data collection when conducting online interviews, and translation issues during the analysis of the data. To conclude, some proposals are presented that could be implemented at an institutional level to solve these problems.