The Rusty Academic

It's Thursday evening and I just got back from a run. It’s just before 6pm; still light but getting dark. I’ve had my head in Twitter for the past 24 hours, absorbing post after post of women sharing their lived experience of walking alone on streets (and some posts from men offering ally support). I find myself contemplating the route I just chose to run. I tend to change my running routes often and I don’t put a lot of thought into them beyond distance, so they tend to include ‘following my nose’ to a certain extent. This evening’s run took me through a fairly large, post-industrial wasteland-cum-park in north Glasgow, followed by streets in a local neighbourhood with one of the highest general crime rates in Glasgow. I often run here - I don’t think i’ve ever seen anyone else running in either the neighbourhood or the park. But they’re just streets - ordinary people’s neighbourhoods.  The route wasn’t deliberate, exactly. But actually maybe on some subconscious level it was. A r...

Back last October, nearly 12 months ago, I started this blog with the following statement: " An unbelievably short amount of time ago (given how long it feels), I made the turbulent, exhilarating, exhausting, mind-bending journey from a relatively well-paid, stimulating practitioner job that I loved back to academia in the form of a PhD."  One year later, I want to share some specific insight that i've gained into managing the transition from a decade of largely full-time, paid, professional work to becoming a student again (in my 30s). Because there are things that I hadn't prepared myself for - indeed, things I wouldn't have been able to envisage needing to think about.  There is incredibly little written about transitioning from work to PhD, a point made by Jo Khoo who authored a similar blog in 2018, which resonates strongly. Most of my fellow PhDs have come straight from a Masters and/or research roles. I hope to add my thoughts to Jo's (and others'...

I'm going to start by reiterating once again that the entire point of this blog is to capture elements of PhD life live, in the moment. Rather than relaying on looking back and trying to reconstruct past feelings from a future perspective, which in my experience is never as accurate (even if having some retrospective insight is very useful in other ways). Apologies that the blog will therefore almost inevitably be sparked by an emotional peak or trough - often trough - I still hope it's worth reading for someone, somewhere. It's not a cry for help, nor necessarily an invitation for management strategies... Just an honest reflection on how things  feel, for those who are interested.  I have spent the last couple of weeks testing new systems of PhD life; new ways to organise my time, personal life, work life, exercise etc, having recognised that the 9 - 5 (10 - 6) wasn't working for me. The first week consisted of doing whatever I needed to at any given point to remain ...

It's accidentally been a while since I last blogged. Oddly, I didn't think I had anything specific to blog about day by day but looking back, there has been lots to reflect on. "Big" milestones have crept by more or less unmarked (starting to read, starting to write, submitting my first iteration of some literature review to my supervisors...) So easy to lose sight of progress already when it doesn't feel like objective progress at the time.  Yesterday was my 100th day of PhD!  Which is vaguely arbitrary but felt significant enough to comment on. This second semester has felt very different to the first, which was mostly quite chaotic and ended not in a great place. I had to hit the ground running in January in order to submit coursework, but after that there was no longer any excuse that I could really use to avoid starting proper reading. So I did. Not without difficulty and some metaphorical kicking and screaming; but there was a definite day when I rem...

Yes, miserable topic blah blah blah but this is the whole point of me writing this blog (plenty of festive cheer available elsewhere 😛) I am treating this as the last day of term, in the interests of making sure I actually stop trying to work all the time over Christmas - I can definitely see already how that becomes the norm when doing a PhD. It being the first term and me feeling not overly confident in general about how it's gone, it felt particularly important to finish 'well' today.  Quite a bit of this term has been taken up with an intense quantitative methods course, which I need to take  both  to satisfy the funding requirements for the PhD but also because half my research will (theoretically at least) be quantitative. So it feels important to understand it, plus I really hate not being able to understand stuff.  The coursework is due in mid-January and I have spent an inordinate amount of time working on it however it uses a software programme which r...

I suspect these posts are always going to end up being several issues jumbled together, such is the discrepancy between the frequency of me finding things to comment on and the time available to blog! I write this from the perspective of day 12 of being largely house-bound, having sprained my ankle badly nearly two weeks ago. Those that know me will know how active I am usually and therefore the extent to which this is bothering me. I note this because it is unearthing a whole new range of vulnerabilities in life generally that are transferring to, or interacting with, the PhD context.  Last month, I submitted my first 'formal' working document to my supervisor team, ahead of a meeting with them. It struck me at the time that writing something, with ample support but very little structure or outline of expectations (the nature of PhDing), and then sending it off into the blue is a surprisingly vulnerable process. I have had similar experiences in my personal life but this...

This is (inadvertently) a blog consisting of several different parts. Because unbeknownst to me, ALL THE TIME has gone by and despite having 'write blog' on my to do list every day, I haven't quite managed. That's perhaps the subject of a blog all on its own. It's an intriguing effect because it's not like my previous job wasn't ridiculously busy most of the time; I am capable of managing multiple priorities. But time has moved in a way recently where I genuinely haven't noticed that days have gone by. Perhaps a function of not having many deadlines and having relatively unstructured (or at least inconsistently structured) days? This is a mildly tricky factor in the whole 'getting longer term things done' arena, including writing a fairly substantial thesis... Mmm.   In the interests of being a complete nerd, I have (of course) been keeping a very rudimentary daily tracker of how i'm feeling. (Literally, 'how I am feeling' at the en...