The reality of ending term on a low
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 requires you to programme code and I have really, really struggled with this aspect. It's been like learning a new language (stats) in a new language (R - the software). I actually got to the point earlier this week where I felt I was making a tiny bit of progress and I had really hoped to finish much of it by the end of today. But then it broke, in a really big way that I can't fix and I now can't even use it to run the basic stuff (such is the way with code when it breaks). This is deeply frustrating.
So rather than ending well today, I have sat at my desk in what I think is probably now an empty building and had a good, long cry. Mostly out of frustration. Partly out of fear because this has now come to define next semester in my head, which already felt over-whelming. I guess this past half hour or so has reminded me how vulnerable this existence feels - beyond the obvious issues with leaving a secure workplace where I felt some sense of competence, in order to start something so completely different. The vulnerability is also to do with the countdown timer ticking away in the background. And with the constant feeling of needing to achieve when I don't have a grasp of the parameters of 'success'. The vulnerability is the potential for any seemingly small thing to become hugely emotionally significant against that backdrop.
So. Hmm. Sad to be ending in this place because it's currently masking the rest of the semester, where there must have been some sorts of successes (so, so difficult to quantify success when doing a PhD - that's another challenge). Disappointing because it feels like I haven't now done the semester justice somehow. I was going to work on my coursework on the way down south this weekend but maybe i'll try and work out what has been good and successful this semester in the absence of functional R code!
But at the moment, it has to be ok to just sit in this place of feeling sad and dissatisfied. Because to pretend anything otherwise wouldn't be to capture the full, very full, experience of current life...
Oh and here's the obligatory graph... 66 days in! Yikes.
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 requires you to programme code and I have really, really struggled with this aspect. It's been like learning a new language (stats) in a new language (R - the software). I actually got to the point earlier this week where I felt I was making a tiny bit of progress and I had really hoped to finish much of it by the end of today. But then it broke, in a really big way that I can't fix and I now can't even use it to run the basic stuff (such is the way with code when it breaks). This is deeply frustrating.
So rather than ending well today, I have sat at my desk in what I think is probably now an empty building and had a good, long cry. Mostly out of frustration. Partly out of fear because this has now come to define next semester in my head, which already felt over-whelming. I guess this past half hour or so has reminded me how vulnerable this existence feels - beyond the obvious issues with leaving a secure workplace where I felt some sense of competence, in order to start something so completely different. The vulnerability is also to do with the countdown timer ticking away in the background. And with the constant feeling of needing to achieve when I don't have a grasp of the parameters of 'success'. The vulnerability is the potential for any seemingly small thing to become hugely emotionally significant against that backdrop.
So. Hmm. Sad to be ending in this place because it's currently masking the rest of the semester, where there must have been some sorts of successes (so, so difficult to quantify success when doing a PhD - that's another challenge). Disappointing because it feels like I haven't now done the semester justice somehow. I was going to work on my coursework on the way down south this weekend but maybe i'll try and work out what has been good and successful this semester in the absence of functional R code!
But at the moment, it has to be ok to just sit in this place of feeling sad and dissatisfied. Because to pretend anything otherwise wouldn't be to capture the full, very full, experience of current life...
Oh and here's the obligatory graph... 66 days in! Yikes.
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