I feel under a certain amount of obligation to do some kind of New Year's post, either looking back on 2016 (may it rest in miserable peace) or on resolutions and plans for 2017. The problem is I don't have any resolutions per-se, and any retrospective of 2016 would mostly be a repeat of the kind of things I'm writing about anyway travel-wise, or just the phrase "my PhD is Hell" written over and over again. So I've opted to cheat, and just write something I've been meaning to talk about for a while, sort of in the vein of that latter option above. Far be it from me to advise people not to do a PhD. Instead maybe this will act more as a warning of what to expect from the point of view of somebody mentally-broken. 1. There's No StructureOne of the first things you'll be told if and when you seek out a counsellor (and which mine certainly mentioned) is having a structured routine to follow. I'm not exactly sure why, but apparently having this in place can really alleviate stress, depression, anxiety... all that good stuff. And yet... as much as doing a PhD felt very much like a job (desk, get paid, drink too much coffee etc.), I had no fixed hours, and no plan. Usually a one hour supervisor meeting once a week was the only certainty, and even then it wasn't always at the same time. So my day ended up being a sporadic random mess:
Some people out there with self-discipline may be able to stick to a routine, but I don't think I met anyone that did particularly well. A PhD will quietly put down any dreams of timetabling with a bolt gun to the head. 2. You're Definitely Not The Smartest Person In The RoomAt the risk of sounding like an elitist flat-white sipping douchebag, people that do PhDs tend to be the ones that did degrees (usually Masters), and did pretty well at them. You've got to not only achieve a 2.1 or 1st class grade, you've got to have the confidence to sell your soul to academia for at least three years. Terrifying stuff. Well doing a PhD pretty much completes the cycle (begun fresh out of school) of being surrounded by a progressively smarter group of people with qualifications better than you. Nothing like it quite undermines your own self-worth and self-confidence so efficiently and so completely in a way almost designed to bring on bouts of the blackest despair. Coz yeh: your 1st class MSc (hons) is nice and all, but THAT guy over there is a professor and has three PhDs, and a nobel prize, you failure. 3. Expectations Are EnormousIt kind of goes without saying (although as above, you do often forget that becoming a doctor of something is a big deal outside of Unis) but there's a ton of work that goes into a PhD and with it, an enormous amount of expectations. One of the reasons I kept going through the bleakest spells was that I knew so many people expected me to finish and walk away Doctor of Something To Do With Computers. It's another reason so many people put off the decision to leave, if that's the right thing for them. Heck maybe it would've been the right thing for me. I mean I had to flee the country once mine was finished. 4. The Criticism Is EndlessBecause everyone loves graphs, here's a graph to help illustrate this point: From your very first attempt at putting pen to paper you become use to an absolute torrent of criticism and corrections, rained all over your words like unwelcome dog turds in a park. The red pen... so much red pen... I've seen things man... It's not that the criticism itself is bad or invalid: I'm sure it made my work much better than it would've been. But one thing my counsellor pointed out to me early in my involvement with her is I crave... need some kind of positive feedback to reinforce the idea that I'm not wasting my life utterly. There's very little of that to be found in academia. It's an endless cycle of writing and re-writing until it's finally not-awful enough to submit to a journal/conference or whatever. Then you get to feel a tiny little lift of "I did a thing" before plunging right back into a morass of your own liquified self-doubt. As usual I'm not really giving any kind of concrete opinion on PhDs, dirty awful fence-sitter that I am. That said I'd have loved even more warning about what I was getting into before my four year stint began. This all goes towards that feeling of relief I experienced when it was all over, rather than delight that I'd passed.
And hey I got out alive, but I've known plenty of people who dropped out because they felt their mental health was just being too badly damaged to go on. That's definitely a sensible thing to do. If I was even more of a keyboard-warrior I'd go on about how Universities need to make postgraduate life less awful for the mentally afflicted but for now I'll leave that to the likes of the Student Union, assuming they're not too busy trying fix Palestine, overthrow the government, and spend eighty thousand pounds on a change of font on their posters.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Author28 year old computer scientist/physicist with major depressive disorder, a need to write, and a deep-rooted mistrust of beetroot. Categories
All
Archives
February 2018
|