The Rusty Academic

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...