What doing a PhD feels like sometimes.
So I promised an update on the state of the per her der back in October, and so far I’ve managed to avoid following that up, because I HAVEN’T FINISHED.
I have been working on my PhD since April 05 and am grimly aware that I’m approaching the end of 2008 and I HAVEN’T FINISHED.
Yes, despite having 3 months at the beginning of the year where I holed myself and renounced pretty much every other aspect of my life to write, I HAVEN’T FINISHED.
But why haven’t I finished? I’m really not sure, because I worked all day last Sunday whilst all around me were Christmas shopping, watching football, drinking beer and having fun. I worked until 21:50 last night whilst others watched crap on Living and ate chocolates. At this rate I should’ve finished by now surely?
This is the point where if I were in a film of my life (staring Scarlet Johansson as me) there would be a big focus pull. Spooky voice-over would rasp accusingly ”where has your life gone?”, as something truly tragic composed specially by Morricone sets the scene, the heroine is finally caught out by the truth; that she sat around all day, eating chocolate, playing with kittens, reading Vogue and attending light lunches.
But hang on…
A really depressing fact, which I came across today is that 3/4 of PhD students in the UK take 7 years to complete. Man oh man. I started the PhD in April 05, so I’ve been at it a total of 3.5 years and during that time I changed my status from FT to PT. When you’re registered as PT you only received half the supervision hours and are only expected to work about 16 hr p/w on the thesis. So, a year consisting of 2 PT semesters only counts as 0.5 when the trajectory is calculated. Following that logic, if the PhD took me another year I’d still meet the national average, and I could actually take another 2 years to complete it. God forbid.
Mulling all this over, I started to think quite seriously though what have I been doing? So I had an audit of sorts. In 3.5 years of doing a Phd (nearly 4 years in terms of my life, time and commitment) I’ve presented at 4 conferences (one international) & attended another international symposium. I went to Cuba, Morroco, Thailand and Vietnam, Spain and Italy. I’ve ended a long-term relationship, started a new one, and moved house. I’ve written 2 papers and had one published, taught for 5 semesters, held a FT position as an analyst for 3 months, followed by another period as an analyst later in the year for 5 months, and this semester I’ve begun supervising undergraduate dissertations. And yes, I have not missed reading one monthly addition of Vogue.
Phewee. I feel so much better for this little audit; I’m now able to say I haven’t finished in lower case. So joy to the world, and peace on earth.
I think it is quite common to worry about the big bad deadline, and especially given that people are constantly asking me when I’m going to finish. It’s very hard to impress on people who are not doing a PhD- quite what it is that one does, when doing one, and all the to-ing and fro-ing with supervisors reading drafts, redrafting, progress reviews, transfer vivas, selecting externals.
But I’m rather cheered that I’ve discovered some fantastic PhD blogs recently. It provides a great deal of comfort to know that there are other people out there experiencing similar things.