PhD blog: 27

The story so far… Graham is in the second year of his part-time PhD in which he is investigating American literature post 9/11.

Bloated in body and brain

Now is not really a good time to be writing a blog post about working on a PhD. While I haven’t been totally inactive over the festive period, I have led a contemplative existence that has been relaxed and, if I’m being honest, indulgent in terms of food/drink intake (although I am one to eschew any hardcore party-centric celebratory nonsense over the festive period, I still managed to consume enough to be ashamed of my comfortable Western lifestyle).

Anyway, PhD work was mainly reading, with an eye to redraft my first chapter. The chapter that I was so elated at finishing. But one thing is for sure on a PhD, there’s never really any finishing, at least not in the first couple of years. It’s drafting and redrafting and more research and so on. That is the yolk of the egg, so to speak. However, the redrafting process has been slow, as there’s one thing Christmas illustrates in very clear terms - the fact that doing a PhD does not necessarily fit with the general business of ‘real’ life, and all the commitments that brings. I hear you cry, ‘Why not take the Christmas period off?’ It’s not that simple really. Using every piece of available time is important and if you are on a roll it’s good to keep it up to a certain extent. Try balancing this with the constant invitations for drinks, the family commitments and the paid work in order to be able to afford the January instalment of fees (I’ve had quite a lot over Christmas which is good, but it did prove to be another straw making the camel’s vertebrae tremble.)

A space/time dicontinuum

Now, starting to get back into serious work mode is difficult, and I have to prepare for another spring term of teaching (which I am certainly not complaining about, but it does manage to consume time like no other thing I know … well, maybe watching 24 on DVD or reading the jabbering, hateful comments on the BBC’s Have Your Say site (both entertaining and deeply, deeply troubling). As I write this it’s January 7 (surely plenty of time to have got back into the swing of things), and you can probably tell it’s taking all of my mental capacity to concentrate on it, even enough to hit the keys. I can’t seem to think of what to write or how to say what I have decided to say. All very well and good, and maybe I can get away with it on a blog (can I?), but when you apply this to the redrafting of my first chapter, there is a massive problem. Also, apply this to a time when I should be managing my time in order to prepare for teaching and do the paid work I have to do, and you can see I’m in quite a mess.

I suppose the point of sharing this is a kind of warning to prospective PhD students. There are no holidays or terms when you do a PhD, as I have mentioned before, so when Christmas comes around it is like the space/time continuum just stops. It’s hard to construct any work pattern as time seems to speed up and slow down at random, and when you are spat out into January, everything returns to normal apart from your dazed brain. In retrospect, it would have been good, in December, to write a detailed plan for January and organise my PhD work to an extent that I could pick it up and continue with little effort. Next year. But as for now, I have a muddled and messy agenda to sort out…

Suggestions to editorial@prospects.ac.uk