Despite having successfully navigated a BA and MA, I was not entirely prepared for life as a PhD student. With little information or guidance readily available before I began, I was unaware of some of the fundamental differences between the PhD and earlier programmes of study. This meant enduring a difficult period of adjustment in the first few months of my first year and facing new, unexpected challenges throughout the three years thereafter.
In a bid to ease the transition and overall experience for new or prospective PhD students, I have provided an overview of my three-year journey below. This should hopefully shed some light on what exactly a PhD entails and provide some key principles and lessons that (I believe) can be generally applied to a PhD in English Literature and perhaps beyond. Of course, experiences will vary depending on individual and social circumstances. As a full-time, university funded student, for example, my academic approach and advice is likely to differ from a part-time and/or self-funded student who is not afforded the same luxury of time and finance to focus fully on the thesis alone. Similarly, my sense of isolation during the first year of study (discussed later) may have been more pronounced than other students, as I was one of the few people of colour working within the department. I say this to say that what follows should not be considered the definitive word on the PhD experience and I make no such claims!
It should also be pointed out that whilst I have found it useful to think of my time in terms of first year, second year and third year, I do not want to put too much emphasis on chronology. It is quite likely that two students will face the same challenges and reach certain key stages of the PhD at different times. It is my hope that you will be able to extract the main features, challenges and principles of the PhD and apply it to your own particular situation.
First Year
In short:
- Allow yourself time to transition and figure out your day-to-day
- Get creative and experimenting with different study strategies, source material and ideas – don’t restrict yourself
- Read, Read and Read some more
- Write if and when you can
- Build a community to combat isolation
I
Having taken a year out after my MA, I couldn’t wait to get started with the PhD. I was excited to read, reflect on and write about my chosen topic for at least three uninterrupted years and, after discussing initial ideas in the first meeting with my supervisor, sat down at my desk raring to go. It was then, when I opened up Word and faced its unforgiving blank white screen that the question suddenly hit me: How do you actually go about doing the PhD? All I seemed to have directing me was a vague deadline three years in the future. What did the day-to-day of a PhD look like? I had no idea.
By the end of my BA I had developed a successful strategy for approaching essays: I would dedicate two weeks to reading and research, two weeks to playing with ideas / structuring my argument and two weeks to writing. I was able to apply this template to my MA as well, doubling up to one month reading/research, one month ideas/structure and one month writing. But the PhD? One year uninterrupted reading and researching? One year of playing with ideas/structure? What did that mean for my day-to-day? Stretching my tried and tested study strategy to the fit the parameters of the PhD seemed to render it shapeless and void. It offered no real sense of focus or direction on how I was supposed to govern my time.
Establishing the day-to-day of a PhD is the first major challenge students tend to face as they transition to a new way of working. The first thing to say is that this a process that takes time. Give yourself that time. Please. There is such a strong desire (perhaps pressure is a better word) to start producing top level work from the very beginning of the PhD. If you are able to do this, then great. However, it is perfectly okay (and quite typical) to use the early stages of your PhD to *simply* get your bearings and figure out your most effective way of working. This means experimenting with different study strategies, playing with various new ideas and engaging with a multitude of people and other stimuli. This – inevitably – means going down a lot of dead ends and enduring a lot of false starts. That’s okay. It is better to know this and accept it as part of the process than fight it. In fact, it can be considered a great opportunity. You never know where such creativity and experimentation might take you.
Something I really would recommend to anyone during this time is: read, read, read. Read widely; read anything that intrigues or excites you, even it seems to only tangentially relate to your thesis. Your thesis idea is going to change anyway and you will be surprised by what triggers a critical idea or provides a perfect quote. There will come a time when you want to be more selective about what you engage with. But the beginning stage of your PhD is not that time. Immerse yourself in what you love and have some fun.
I would also suggest writing if and when you can. There is no immediate pressure to produce long, fully formed paragraphs. But briefly reflecting on what you’ve read, recording initial thoughts and ideas, and/or producing close readings of literary texts will serve you well when that times comes. It will mean you will have built up some momentum (and consolidated some ideas) before having to produce a substantial piece of writing for the confirmation review; making it a much less daunting task.
II
The other major challenge I faced during first year was dealing with isolation. As an English Literature student, I was used to minimal contact hours with other students but the PhD was something else. Other than a few formal seminars the university put together, there were hardly any opportunities to mix with like-minded people at similar stages of the programme. Having studied at the same university for BA and MA I was in a better position that most. I knew a couple of people that had stayed on to do a PhD like me, but I was still troubled by the idea of going the next three years without much social interaction. I prefer to study at home and it could be argued that this had something to do with my sense of isolation. However, speaking to others and mindful of recent statistics regarding mental health and PhD students, I would say it is a problem that transcends particular study spaces.
I would advise, as a matter of priority, actively searching for or building a community to become part of during the first year. This is sometimes easier said than done, particularly (I would say) for PhD students of colour. One of the reasons I avoided my department building was because of my sense of alienation from the predominately white students and academics that worked there. Fortunately, after dragging myself to a contemporary reading group, I met another student of colour (one year ahead) who would turn out to be an important mentor for years to come. Led by her, I started to attend conferences, discussion groups and workshops which focused on issues facing students of colour and were, as a consequence, almost exclusively attended by people of colour. The level of warmth, vulnerability, joy and solidarity I discovered in these spaces were completely new to me and nothing like what I had come to expect from academic events. At times it was overwhelming. But mostly it was incredibly invigorating and intensely thought-provoking. They were the highlights of my year and became essential to my personal, professional and political development. After continuing to meet with and talk to these same people over the years, I have become part of a special network which consists of the next wave of talent entering, or about to enter, academia. It is really worth spending time trying to find or cultivate this kind of community. It will likely prove invaluable to your wellbeing and growth.
III
The major requirement for the first year is to produce a large body of writing for the confirmation review. This is billed as a mock-viva but is really a very informal conversation which is held to make sure you are on the right track for second year. At the time, I was actually pretty disappointed with the casualness of the meeting. I had worked hard on getting my chapter in good shape, as well as formulating an up-to-date literature review and timetable. In retrospect, the time taken was not wasted. Taking the confirmation review seriously meant I had a solid first chapter by the end of first year, as well as a list of texts to read so I could hit the ground running in second year.
Second Year
In short:
- Bring together your initial ideas, reading and bits of writing and turning them into more formal chapters
- Work out the structure of your thesis / the amount and order of chapters
- Possibly negotiate lost motivation by indulging your interests
For me, the second year was about consolidating all the ideas and bits of reading and writing I had been working on in first year and turning them into chapters. It was also about establishing the number of chapters I wanted in my thesis and deciding the order they would go in. In effect, it was about solidifying the structure and content of my thesis.
However, the PhD does not happen in a vacuum. Your personal, professional and even political life is always impacting on it. This can be a positive. The way in which my political development has manifested in and changed my thesis over the last three years is (for me) one of the most interesting things about it and something I reflect on within the thesis itself. However, these external factors can be destabilising as well. At the beginning of second year, my Uncle died and I lost all motivation for work.
Where once I would regularly be sat at my desk for 9am, now I was struggling to get out of bed before midday. After finally making it to my laptop and staring blankly at an open word document for thirty minutes or so, I would then roll back into bed and watch Netflix for the rest of the evening. This sudden lethargy and loss of motivation was completely new to me and I had no idea how to combat it.
Grief completely shatters the time scale and structure of a PhD and any study strategies used to navigate it. It is not bound by time and has no interest in deadlines. There are those who can speak with much more authority on the failings of universities to account for the grief and depression experienced by PhD students, as well as to the culture of guilt and shame that makes taking and then honouring a leave of absence a much more difficult endeavour than it initially appears. I do not feel equipped to give advice about to deal with grief during the PhD. It feels like something that happened to me and then, at some point, suddenly subsided enough to allow me to continue working.
I do want to address the loss of motivation though. Whether through grief or some other means, I would say that losing motivation for your thesis is an almost inevitable part of the PhD process. Know this, try to accept it when it happens and make moves to get yourself out of it when you can. There is no quick fix -it took me weeks to even make an attempt to address my lost motivation – but what helped me in retrospect was eventually putting my initial plan of action aside, forgetting about my time schedule and simply indulging my interests. I stopped trying to read secondary sources and gave up writing altogether. Instead, I spent my days reading whatever fiction took my fancy and watching lots of Hip Hop interviews on YouTube. This was basically an attempt to jolt myself into action by sparking an interest or an exciting idea. After a while, it started to work. I began to sit at my desk more regularly again. Although I did not produce any writing that would make it anywhere near my final thesis, I close read scenes from Get Out and the album cover for Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly. I found it fun and enjoyed reflecting on these pieces of art. Eventually, after about three months off, I returned to my thesis.
Truthfully, my sense of lost time motivated me for the second part of the year and I did end up producing the formalised chapters as planned. I don’t think that is the lesson here, though. For me, the takeaway is that you cannot anticipate or account for everything that is going to happen to you during the PhD. Instead, try and accept any loss of motivation or changed state, take whatever time off you need and then take small measures to ensure you get back on track. “Slowly slowly” as my Nani would say.
Third Year
In short:
- Sharpen focus of each chapter and overall thesis, settling on a clear line of argument or angle
- Refine chapters, tightening links between them and including references where appropriate
- Write introduction (including clear and concise overview/justification of thesis and methodological approach, a comprehensive literature review, summary of historical, social and political context if relevant and definition of key terms and concepts)
- Approach external and internal supervisors for Viva
- Review references, formatting thesis and checking typos
- Submit thesis
I finally figured out what my thesis was about at the beginning of third year. This is not as strange as it may seem. Working through all your ideas and material takes time and it can be a while before everything clicks into place. It is easier said than done but try to be patient. It will come. And when it does you will approach your thesis with a new clarity that allows you to work more swiftly and incisively. This is what happened to me anyway. Once I understood that my thesis was about the relationship between, race, higher education and architectural objects (not just space) in literary texts, I was able to sharpen the focus of each chapter fairly systematically. As a result, the first eight or nine months of my third year passed without much incident. Once I finally got my head round the introduction – something I struggled with for months – and produced a solid second draft, I was in a position to approach external and internal supervisors for the Viva assessment and establish a preliminary submission date.
This is when I experienced by second major loss of motivation, though for very different reasons than the first. Having relentlessly re-read and refined my chapters for months, I was simply done with the PhD. I didn’t want to work on it anymore. The changes I was making didn’t seem that important and I didn’t feel as if my work was significantly improved for having made them. Speaking to my supervisor and some other PhD students who had passed their Viva, this actually seems to be a significant stage in the process.
You could work on your thesis forever and still find something else to include or amend, but when you start to feel like there is little overall value being added to project, it is perhaps a sign you are ready to submit. Letting go can be hard and it was a real moment when I printed my thesis pages and had them bound. But I was ready and once I properly processed the intense final weekend of last-minute edits and touch-ups (always risky, often inadvisable but difficult to resist) I was relieved for it to finally be over. After three years of research, it was time to put my findings into action and start making some real, material changes.
*Conferences, teaching and publications
If completing a PhD in three or four years (full time) was not enough to think about, there is an undeniable pressure to attend, speak at and put on conferences, as well as teach and publish papers during this time as well. Similar to most students, I was eager to tick off all these boxes because I felt it would give me the best chance of being employed once the PhD was over. Now that I’m at the end of the process, I realise that nothing is guaranteed. I know people who did all of the above (and plenty more besides) and some have landed jobs whilst others haven’t. Similarly, I know people who did nothing more than *just* their PhD and landed a job fairly soon after graduating. I say this to say: do what you feel is right for your personal development and the preservation of your mental wellbeing. Nothing more. The luxury of being university funded meant that I was able to balance teaching, attending and putting on conferences, as well as finishing up my thesis. However, I couldn’t find time to publish. Maybe this will hamper my prospects of employment but it is impossible to know. Universities need to do much more to alleviate the pressure PhD students feel to accomplish everything during the three years of the programme, as is shown by recent statistics on mental health. It is their responsibility and they must be held to account. In the meantime, and as I have tried to reiterate throughout this piece, build community, take time out when you need to and prioritise your mental wellbeing whenever you can.
AMasing Literature 