So what exactly happens at postgrad level? →[More:]
I just signed on for a vacation research experience scholarship at my uni, where you spend 6-8 weeks researching something with a faculty member and present a poster of your findings. It's the Creative Industries faculty so odds are high it'll have something to do with the arts. It's meant for students intending to do postgrad degrees; I'm mainly in it because I like research and I wanted something to do.

However, I have no idea what I'm getting myself into. My sister did a Ph.D. in biotech, which involved unintelligible theses and waiting around for lab results to show up. My only conception of an arts-related research degree is sitting around doing a lot of reading, followed by writing a super dense dissertation with names about 50 words long.

That doesn't really appeal to me - academic writing leaves me cold. I'd rather do something more practical and write up something that can be used for practical means, without needed dictionaries to decipher. I've done some assignments in university like this, which I've enjoyed. My uni apparently has practice-based research, where people create works of art as part of their degree, but I'm not sure what else they're meant to do.

I LOVE research, finding out about things; I just don't want to get lost in referencing styles and reading stuff from the same old white men in the 50s.

SO! Long story short: What do you do in a postgrad/grad school degree? Is it interactive? Do you get the chance to do something real-world (like run a project) or are you contained to the ivory tower? How "academic" do you have to be?