This is the second guest post by Maia Sauren, a student at RMIT who has recently submitted her thesis. In this post Maia reflects on the PhD process… Is it a ‘journey’ or a series of emotional states through which you need to pass?
The first half
Step 1: Fear
You open Google Scholar and discover humanity’s research output for the past fifty years has been centred around your topic. There are arguments in the literature about who did what when, and whether it was important. None of them make sense. Your supervisor’s casual conversations in the tea room about an event thirty years ago sends your spine rigid with how much you don’t know.
Solution: muck around on Facebook, develop an addiction to an online game.
Pros: distracting and soothing.
Cons: not a solution.
Step 2: Hate
It sucks your life. It doesn’t let you out at night. You feel guilty every time you leave your desk. You joke about being in an abusive relationship, and stop laughing halfway through the sentence.
Solution: work like a maniac. Come into the lab at 10pm on a Saturday to follow up on experiments, read every book and journal paper in the research area even if you don’t understand half the words.
Pros: get a lot more done than you think.
Cons: life? What life?
Step 3: Sulking
What the hell does this thing think it is, making you feel so crap about yourself!
Solution: punish it by playing in the sunshine.
Pros: hooray!
Cons: still feeling guilty, aren’t you?
Step 4: Rage and defeat
This is such a waste of my time. I don’t wanna do this any more!
Solution: quit. You take leave of absence, or maybe you just stop showing up. Maybe you get back to your job, or shag strangers in foreign countries – whatever.
Pros: I remember this person! – this used to be me!
Cons: none, actually. Get some perspective and live a bit.
Not everyone comes back after quitting. That’s ok.
The second half
Step 5: back on the horse
You’re energised, and you’re resigned to another year or three of toil. You open your (messy, pathetic looking) old documents. Who wrote this rubbish?
Solution: read voraciously.
Pros: start noticing that about half the references in your list are from the same eight research groups, and the rest of the links in any new search point to each other. Your bowels unclench a little. Your experiments clunk along.
Cons: find yourself getting sucked into the old shame-guilt-avoidance cycle.
Step 6: The light is not an oncoming train
You come out of your existential crisis to remember that you have power and choice in all your relationships, including this one. Start feeling the itch of impatience to finish.
Solution: Whiteboard a time map that designates your Ph.D. as a subset of your life, not the other way around.
Pros: time with friends!
Cons: what do people talk about at parties again?
Step 7: Despair
You whinge about how much work you have to all and sundry. You wake at 3am and wonder whether the shame of quitting outweighs the joy, and whether it’s too late because you’ve passed the halfway mark and it’d be a waste after investing all this time. There’s still a mountain to go.
Solution: start looking for alternative ways to end the misery. Get a study group going, talk to that change management friend about mind sets, research work methods – anything to make this stop.
Pros: feels powerful. Very powerful.
Cons: get used to this impatience. Oh, and have you got anything done on your thesis between reading motivational blogs?
Step 8: Grit your teeth
This. Too. Shall. Pass. You have the odd vivid hallucination about being called ‘doctor’ and almost pass out with elation.
Solution: Just keep writing.
Pros: so close!
Cons: so close!
Step 9: Rip the band-aid off
It’s time to be rid of this. Write until it hurts, then just keep writing. You develop a bizarre clarity about the context of your work, you see the patterns, it all makes sense. Your best friend’s divorce? Who cares! You don’t know how to finish this paragraph, why are these people even talking to you!
Solution: get all the help your life has – friends, family, supervisors – and ask for exactly what you need. Surprisingly, they, too, are falling over themselves to do what it takes to have this over with.
Pros: I am invincible! Bring me more coffee!
Cons: sleep is for quitters.
The End
Step 10: collapse
You have no idea who you are; you barely know where you live. You eat and drink because first principles of being human say you should, not because you have any kind of drive to.
Solution: get the hell away from your computer.
Pros: there’s sunlight outside, the birds are singing, and everyone says how pleased you must be to have submitted.
Cons: you stare blankly.
In Summary: Sometimes you’ll find yourself going through many of these steps in one day. I ‘quit’ several times before getting to the next stage – that’s normal too, apparently. Meanwhile, relationships and friends come and go, scholarships begin and end, you move house, your friends leave the country. Life goes on.
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