Pöchhacker, whose early research work was theory-oriented, focuses on this aspect of doctoral work through his own personal history, which he sets against the background of existing theories in Translation Studies and of the status of theory in interpreting research. He shows how the choice of one’s theoretical framework is strongly influenced by environmental factors in the host institution, and describes his personal route. He started out his doctoral project with a naturalistic corpus which he intended to analyse, which would have made his dissertation essentially empirical, but he ended up focusing on theory. Pöchhacker describes his critical analysis of existing theories, perhaps the most common basic paradigm in theory-oriented research, and discusses relevant aspects of modelling and testing.