What's it really like?

Before starting my little adventure, a few people told me it would be interesting to know what it’s like to do a PhD. I’m now three months in and have a much better idea of what it’s all about.

I’m very aware that I’m not having the ‘normal’ PhD experience having started during a pandemic. I always planned to be mostly home-based… but as it turns out, I’ve been to the uni for a total of 20 minutes so far, just to pick up my ID card.

When you don’t know what you don’t know.

For the first couple of months people would ask me ‘what’s it like doing a PhD?’ and I’d respond ‘Great!’.

I had no idea what I was talking about. Everything seemed great because I didn’t really know what was going on – it seemed that very little was expected of me except attend some online inductions and do a bit of reading around the topic of ‘creativity’.

I was in the position where I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I couldn’t see the size of the challenges, because I didn’t have the awareness of where to look.

I was the clueless numpty that happily decided to climb a mountain at sunset in flip-flops – I knew the end destination would have a great view and there’d be some work to get there, but I had no idea exactly how to get there yet.

Now I’m getting it.

The instruction to ‘start reading a bit’ – that leads you to understand just how mahousive your topic is and how much you need to learn, before you have any chance of understanding how you can make a meaningful contribution to it.

And the few casual inductions? That’s you being introduced to all of the people who will kindly not laugh at your flip-flops, but gently encourage you to equip yourself properly for the challenge ahead. And nudge you back on the path if you get a bit wobbly.

I’m starting to understand the gaps in my knowledge – building an awareness of what I don’t know.

There’s a lot to know and a lot to write. But (at the moment) there’s a lot of time to do it in, so let’s not panic yet.

How does this mystical land of academia differ from the working world us mere mortals usually reside in?

In some ways it’s completely different. In others it’s exactly the same.

The main difference is the way of working.
Effectively I am on a fixed term, 3-4 year contract to complete a project. However, I have no boss, I work almost entirely independently, and very quickly I’ll have more in-depth and up-to-date knowledge on my chosen topic than anybody else. Everybody accepts that I’ve never done a project like this before, and never will again. Everyone is also absolutely fine with the fact that currently I don’t have the experience or expertise needed to complete the project, and as soon as I do, the project will be done and I’ll probably leave.

In the corporate world you just don’t hire inexperienced people, leave them to work alone, and accept that once they become really good at something, they’ll be gone.

The main similarity is that people are the key to it all.
Yes, I am surrounded by experts – but really, who isn’t? I now work in an environment where people are experts in extremely specific things which they write about in great depth for other people who are equally specialised. Sometimes they dumb it down a bit to explain things to other students or the general population.

At this point of my life, I honestly could not care less about fuzzy-set comparative qualitative analysis and its basis in Boolean algebraic logic. But I now know somebody who is interested in that, and that’s just lovely, should I ever find out that this knowledge will benefit my project, I know exactly who to talk to about it.

In most of our working lives there is somebody with a ‘specialism’ – we often call them champions to highlight their particular usefulness – the GDPR person, the Health and Safety person, the one who knows what your tax code means. Most people have no interest in these things, they know these topics are essential, and are grateful for the person who has it under control. Sales don’t understand marketing who don’t understand operations who don’t understand HR who don’t understand accounts. But we need them all.

Different environment, different specialisms.

But all simply people.

There is the same love of cake. The same endless chat about the British weather. The same shared lockdown boredom. The same stressing over whether you’re ‘good enough’.

I’m still working with humans, just different ones, in a slightly different context. Nothing mysterious about it.