PhD blog: 8
Graham Foster is a PhD student at the English Research Institute of Manchester Metropolitan University. He is researching how 9/11 affected North American literature. What do I do now? This week has been an important one for me. It has marked the end (so far) of the dreaded form filling. I am two weeks shy of my second term as a PhD student and now I can eventually shed the manacles of bureaucracy and get on with the matter in hand. But I have reached a point that the forms and the hoop-jumping have felt like important work, and without them to structure my daily grind I feel my workload is suddenly formless (excuse the intentional double meaning) and vague. I have so many decisions I need to make: What book shall I read next? Shall I visit the library? Shall I begin writing complex and genius-like essays detailing the theoretical nuances of my chosen primary texts? Should I have tuna or cheese in my lunchtime sandwich? It’s an endless quest for the right answer, and it can sometimes cripple me into inaction.
But far be it from me to lament the passing of the box-ticking and name-writing. I’m glad it’s over and I hope that now it will be a minimal part of the PhD process. What I really should be doing though is preparing for my interview with the panel that decides my fate when it comes to internal university funding for the rest of my PhD. I’ve sat through one of these before, and it’s an uncomfortable experience. Suddenly you are not a prospective fundee, you are a laboratory animal, under bright lights as a team of scrutineers pick apart your very essence. You may think I’m being dramatic, but these panels want to find the best person to give their money to and will try to pinpoint the weakest parts of your proposal. They do this with worrying efficiency, and if you are not prepared to answer every single question in a detailed, intelligent way they will instantly know you are not the right fit. Last year I thought I was prepared. I thought my proposal was looking good, and that it was sufficiently polished to impress everybody who came into contact with it. This was an inexcusable naivety, and when I compare my proposal of this year with last year’s there is a massive difference. I am stunned that I was so confident. But I won’t fall into that trap again; I have a healthy dose of nerves and self-awareness this year, and I will be more prepared than every to face them. Academic DragonsThe panel is sort of like Dragon’s Den, but instead of cold, hard business suits, it is comprised of five or six academics. They don’t have big stacks of money on their desks either so I’m unsure whether I should continue with this analogy. What the hell: The student ‘pitches’ the project and answers questions from the Academic Dragons and, for me, it made me realise that there was much, much more work that needed to be done. For me, the panel was made up of people I knew, people I had civil conversations with in the halls of the university, but if you think that makes them any easier to pitch to, think again. They asked me questions that I didn’t even know were relevant to my project; questions that cut through my proposal painfully and brutally. So I’m putting myself through it all again. I’ll lose sleep, I’ll be pale and nervous for months to come, and I probably won’t eat properly. But by God I’ll be prepared and the preparation must start right now. Or at least after I scurry down the hallway to hand in my funding application before the deadline… Read Graham's previous blogs:
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