Skip to main content

The Diary of a PhD Student: New year, same PhD.

Do you remember when these blog posts were all about emotional breakdowns and panic attacks? Don’t worry; I’m sure there are more to come. But, over the Christmas period, I seem to have had something that feels akin to an epiphany when it comes to my PhD – or more specifically, these final months of it. Three years ago I had all the time in the world to finish this degree; now I have around six months. That’s a self-imposed deadline, negotiated, somewhat optimistically perhaps, between my supervisor and myself – I can take more time if I really need it – but I also know that now I have June in mind for my submission, June is the cut off. And so somehow, my three years equals a lifetime theory has gone out of the window entirely, with those three years having been whittled down to just six months.

In my last post I reported back a little conversation I had with my second supervisor during our pre-Christmas catch-up, where she told me how important it is to enjoy the next few months. And this handy little piece of advice has led to a lot of outpourings over the Christmas period.

‘I should have enjoyed it more.’

‘I should have treated it less like work.’

‘I should have moaned about it less.’

‘I should have just been grateful that I was lucky enough to be doing the only thing in the world that I actually want to do. How many people are lucky enough to have that?’

And my favourite wobble of them all:

‘It’s all going to be over soon and I’ll wake up at some point in June and someone will ask what I am, or what I do, and I won’t be able to tell them I’m a student. And what happens then?’

This last one has been recited to a fair few listeners over the last four weeks or so – apologies friends, family, total strangers.

The truth is that maybe I could have enjoyed it more and treated it less like work. But another truth is that if I had treated it less like work then I might not be in the position I’m in, work-wise, that I am now – and, by all accounts, it’s a pretty good position to be in (assuming my supervisors can be believed; which, of course, they can – they are, after all, Gods).

So the point of this bite-size blog then – given that I’m not panicking or moaning at you – is to promise myself one or two things for the final six month run of this degree:

I will enjoy my PhD. Even when I’m panicking – which I will definitely still do, and that’s okay.

I will enjoy my research, even on days like this:


And I will remind myself, as often as I need to, that there is nothing else I’d rather be doing, and I won’t get the chance to do this PhD again – so I need to make it count.

Yes, I will panic and procrastinate and moan and grumble and yes, there will probably be ungrateful, tantrum-packed days where I tell myself I wish I’d never done this. But underneath all that rubbish and self-indulgent trite, there is still nothing else I would rather be doing in 2017 that trying – desperately, frantically, optimistically trying – to finish my PhD.

Happy new year, you lovely and patient reader, and thank you for checking in with me. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Diary of a Whatever I Am Now: Transition period.

Transition: 'the process or the period of changing from one state or condition to another'. I wanted to make this blog more of a regular thing once my PhD was over, for several reasons. Partly it’s just to log what happens next and this, in itself, is two-fold: I want to have some kind of documentation of this recovery process (yes, that’s what I’m calling it) that follows the PhD, but I also live in hope that someone who is struggling with having finished their PhD might find this blog some day, and breathe a hefty sigh on realising that the weird grief-cum-relief they’re feeling right now isn’t totally abnormal – in fact, it might even be quite common. I also want to get into the habit of writing more – something I’m encouraging my own students to do now and I hate giving out writing advice that I haven’t/am not taking myself, and so here we are. This is my first post as a Whatever I Am Now (because I still don’t have balls big enough to write The Diary of a Writer in th...

Copycat: Second book fears, panic-writing, and plans for a sequel

When people ask me how I wrote Copycat , I have to explain to them the constant state of panic that I was in while I pulled this book together. Intention , my debut novel which was also published by Bloodhound Books, was a labour of love that lasted three years in total, and five years to the point that it was published. I wrote that book as part of my PhD programme, which also means that throughout those three years I had a great support network in place to get me through the process of writing a book. The reason behind the Copycat -panic then was that this would be the first novel I would write without someone holding me up, and those first steps to get the book together were nervous and wobbly ones to say the least.             Copycat ’s  first draft came together in about two months. At the beginning and end of most days, I would sit down at my laptop and I would push and push until I managed a few hundred words at a...

The Diary of a Whatever I Am Now: Corrupted Hard Drive.

Take a walk with me. We’ll go back to August 2010, late August, when I finally found out that despite my below par A-Level grades, there was a university in the country that was prepared to give me a chance. Praise be to them. Ahead of starting this journey, my generous mother bought me a laptop. A brand spanking new laptop. That my kind and patient sister, and her partner, set up for me and taught me how to use. They deliberately picked something that would suit the university life style – and they were bang on the money in that respect. That laptop lasted I-don’t-care-to-remember how many assignments and a 10,000 word undergraduate dissertation. Let’s not forget, either, that during my first and second summers home from university, I also wrote two “novels” (I use that word in a bland and unimpressed tone, incidentally) that were typed on that same laptop. From there, we moved to postgraduate studies. More assignments and eventually a 25,000 word dissertation. By this point ...