PhD blog: 30
Graham Foster
- March 2009.
The story so far… Graham is well into the second year of his part-time PhD in which he set out to investigate American literature post 9/11.
Positives
Glancing back over the archives of this postgraduate blog, I can’t help but notice how negative it is. I seem to focus on the negative aspects of the postgraduate experience: the forests of red tape, the desperate grasping for any kind of financial relief, the pressures of time, the lack of seriousness with which other people take your still being a student, still having to live at home (for financial reasons) at the age of 29, the lack of a social life. It goes on and on and on, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking I’m one of those people that dwells on the negative (I am and I’m not: I do have a good old cathartic moan quite often, but that’s about it. Most of the time I’m just getting on with the business of getting on with it, regardless of the obstacles in my path).
So, I’m going to talk about the positives of postgraduate study. Maybe it’s something to do with the sunshine and the birds and someone using a lawnmower; the general springness of the morning. Whatever the reason, enjoy it:
1. Postgraduate study allows you to make your own schedule, something that suits my frame of mind. Essentially, your study is your own business, and it’s up to you how to tackle it. There’s no essays due in, no trips to lectures, and no frantic all-nighters trying to get work finished. It’s a reasonably contemplative existence (albeit one where the work never stops, and the general scope of the work can be frightening at times). If I want to lay supine on my bed and read on a Wednesday morning, I can. If I’m on a roll and want to write up well into the night (sometimes a productive thing for me), I can sleep in the next morning without any feelings of guilt (however, all of this could account for why people outside The Academy think all students are slackers - they don’t see the work, they see the staying in bed, and the reading, which is something most people equate with being on holiday, or relaxing. The work tends to be invisible).
2. More academically, the actual study is thrilling. At the risk of sounding like a team captain on University Challenge, I love learning. I adore finding out about my chosen subject. I am excited at the point a particularly complex theory book clicks in my head, and I begin to understand it. In my own case, reading novels that I have loved for over a decade, and gradually building up a vast and deep knowledge of them is a high that can’t be explained. In fact, the only frustration I have is that I’m a relatively slow reader, and I can’t process as much information in a given day as I would like.
3. I like how the project is almost a living entity, and is constantly shifting and mutating. At the top of this page, it probably says I am studying how 9/11 impacted upon American Literature. Well, over the past few months my focus has changed and now I’m studying ‘The Literary Fin de Siecle in David Foster Wallace and Douglas Coupland’. This sounds like a completely different project, but it’s not. The more I studied the focus changed and led me down a different path. I like this, adapting to the material I am reading, allowing my research to change my mind about certain things. Everyone’s project should be like this in postgraduate study, because it’s impossible to know the conclusion before you start studying.
4. This one is quite specific to my own work as I’m studying very recent literature, but I love it when a new piece of work is released by (or on) one of my chosen authors. For example, David Foster Wallace died last September, and I was absolutely devastated, but yesterday I found out that the novel he was working on when he died will be published next year. It’s unfinished (which may prove to be frustrating), but having one last chance to read something new from an author I’m passionate about is a gift. This can plausibly have a great effect on my project, see point 3, and I am very excited. This is happening all the time - new criticism, new novels, new journalism. That’s why I love studying such recent fiction - it’s so alive.
I will save some of this positivity for a future post, lest I fall back into my cathartic moaning ways…
Read my previous PhD blogs
Graham's other blog (on BlogSpot)
Suggestions to editorial@prospects.ac.uk
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