In the afternoon of January 17, 2018, Dr. Hong Yanbi of the Department of Sociology of Southeast University was invited to deliver a wonderful speech entitled “From the idea to Research and Papers: Experience from a green pepper(a young university teacher)”. This is also the first salon seminar for HOPE CityU Education Salon. Dr. Hong introduced himself frankly: “I am a 'green pepper'. I was doing my field work in the Muslim inhabited area for a period of seven months. Based on this field work, I formed my own doctoral dissertation. So I would like to share the experiences and methods of this process with you”.

Through the analysis of his doctoral thesis and case essay "Capital and Habitus," Dr. Hong Yanbi elaborated the writing process of dissertations. Starting from the basic steps of several academic writing problems, such as finding the research question, building the theoretical framework, exploring the in-depth phenomena, doing the literature review, determining the research methods, obtaining data and rewriting, Dr. Hong put forward his own views on the key issues in the process of writing doctoral dissertations. He believes that the writing of academic papers should be based on the needs of research questions, and to judge a thesis on "question-centered orientation" rather than "method-centered orientation", that is, the research method depends on the research question. The integration of pedagogy and other disciplines is also a new trend in the future, such as the integration with sociology (using the fieldwork of sociology, etc.), the integration with psychology (using the methods of statistical analysis in psychology, etc.).

In the meantime, Dr. Hong also conducted an active discussion with the participants. The participants put questions actively around many issues, such as topic selection, the method choice, the literature retention and other practical questions. Likewise, Dr. Hong responded to these questions one by one with witty words. One doctoral student proposed the question of the contradiction of dual identities between a full-time "green pepper" and a full-time doctoral student. Dr. Hong joked that he was also a "green pepper" (a young university teacher) who was deeply touched by the question and suggested the students that the most important thing is to find out what the research questions they want to do.

The event was chaired by Dr. Shao, the FED Programme Coordinator. Many graduate students from FED attended and participated in the salon discussion. In addition, the salon is also of great significance, and successfully opened the prelude to [2018 CityU Education Research Forum and FED Postgraduates Education Forum].