things i learned in my phd, by erika, ages 3 1/2
Last night on twitter, the usual suspects of @thesiswhisperer, @witty_knitter , @bradyjay and I started talking about possible blog topics. And we soon homed in on the idea of all of us blogging on a single topic and interlinking our different perspectives. Some more people joined the twitter discussion (~waves~) and soon (after some bad puns and an X-Men reference) we came up with our first blog topic: things I learned doing my PhD.
The lovely @thesiswhisperer, Inger , suggested one thing. I am a verbose overachiever (see also: indecisive), so here are my top three.
1. I learned to manage my time and resources better. This is an ongoing project, but one that definitely improved over the course of my PhD, and especially in the last year (in between bouts of me wailing and going ‘why didn’t I do this earlier?’). To contextualize, I was working on average three paid jobs at any one time (teaching, adjunct work, RA work, at the International College, and of course the old fallback of retail /o\), dealing with the usual personal pressures (I busted my hip about halfway through and spent nearly a year walking only with difficulty), and studying in various patterns of full and part-time.
Before that, I had studied full-time with the financial support of my parents. Being responsible for all these other elements made me rethink a lot of my patterns. For instance, I had one of the first-generation palmtop computers (an ASUS with a version of Word loaded onto it!) and given I couldn’t drive with my hip, I started using my bus/train trips as ways to catch up on my reading and editing. I started allocating ten minutes at the end of each day to file away papers and articles. I got religious about keeping my diary with all my appointments, shifts and obligations, and started putting in not only deadlines, but also notes days or weeks ahead of that to remind me things were coming up. I embraced my filing cabinet at my office as something more than a place to stash snacks.
Finally, I started using my own skills better. I am a visual-kinesthetic person, so instead of doing what I was ‘told’ to in terms of organization (i.e.: lists or writing-orientated management) I figured out systems that worked for me: books were organized on my shelf so their spatial relations told me what was in them at a glance. I acquired the old fax rolls (showing my age here!) and rolled them down the passage of our sharehouse to physically map out with coloured markers what would go into my chapters and how to slot my ideas into the linear structures required for a PhD. (Yes, I had the world’s most understanding housemates!). I started to use what was once seen as a ‘weakness’ in my thinking and found ways to turn it into a strength – and it’s a strength that led pretty much directly to my current job, but that’s another blog post!
2. I learned that a good project is a finished project. I took an embarrassingly long time to finish. I could talk about my supervision problems, my lack of preparedness (I went straight from honours to PhD, which is kind of like going from making plane noises while running around with your arms out to piloting a 747), a whole bunch of stuff. But in the end, I went into the PhD without a clear goal and pathway as to where I wanted to end up. I had vague, romantic ideas about academia (now well and truly popped), and as a result, I fuffed about for a very long time.
This isn’t all bad: I read widely, developed a wide knowledge base which has stood me in good stead, did conferences and got teaching experience. But it did mean I took a long, long time to complete. Looking back, I definitely had completion anxiety: will this be good enough? Everyone kept telling me something I didn’t grasp until I graduated — the only good thesis is a completed thesis. The PhD is not the magnum opus, your great life’s work. It is a driver’s license, a test in a safe little bubble to see if you can go away, ask a question, and answer it. That’s it.
3. I learned that you need to have balance and boundaries. This one has really been driven home to me as I’ve met other academics who came up in ‘pressure cooker’ postgrad programs. It’s simply: work to live, don’t live to work. Even as a postgrad, I noticed some people were in the lab at all hours, sending emails at 3am, bragging about how little sleep they were getting and how much time they were spending on their work. And it struck me, then and now, that it was a type of performance, a self-prescribed role as if to say to the world ‘I have worth.’
I learned, and am continuing to learn, that quantity does not equal quality (and sometimes time spent doesn’t even automatically equal quantity!). I learned to make clear decisions about ‘work time’ and ‘not!work time.’ If a PhD is a license to research * then it makes sense to use that time to figure out how you work best, not how to work constantly. I learned that I do my best writing between 8am and noon. After lunch, I that I am good only for filing and talking my head off. And I never work past 6pm. Or weekends. I don’t take a sense of my own ‘worth’ purely from how many hours I spend in the office.
Because when I was a postgrad, weekends and evenings were spent in retail hell, getting paid. And now I’ve got my license and am getting paid to research, weekends and evenings are my time. And what a lovely reward they are!
I learned a lot more than this, of course (like how to cite properly, and which seminars had the best free food! ) but those are the ones that carried over most into my post-PhD life. I’d love to hear from others as to what they learned, or are learning as they do their PhD!
* feel free to take a moment to do your best James Bond impression. Done? Okay, back up to the text
