Academic Life II

My supervisors have declared that it is time for me to write! I've sort of been avoiding this moment for a long time, but under the direction of my supervisors my thinking is starting to become more clear and I'm almost feeling ready to put pen to paper, as it were.

So what am I going to write? Well, for the time being I'm just going to write and not worry about the structure of it. I was trying to explain this to one of my colleagues yesterday and our conversation went a bit like this:

"You're starting to write your lit review?"
"No, I'm just writing, it's not structured."
"Oh, so it's the start of your proposal?"
"No, it's just writing."
"So you're writing an essay?"
"No...there's no form to it, I'm just writing."

I can see why he was confused. What I start to write now may become part of my lit review, or my proposal, or an essay for something else, or it might not become anything other than where my thinking is at in that moment.

Writing a thesis is a bit like trying to hold running water still in your hands; it's very fluid, things are constantly changing and shifting, even if they appear to stay the same. The type of research I'm doing is not about proving "X" to be true or false. It's much more messy than that. The messiness doesn't sit well with some people, but I quite enjoy it. I like that I'll be able to produce a piece of research that will be able to grown and move with the times. At least, my hope is that I'll produce a piece of research that will remain relevant and interesting for a long time to come. Making that a reality is rather tricky.

There's this rhetoric that you hear a lot in academia: doing a PhD is a very isolating experience. The way I hear it discussed, a course work PhD is less isolating than a research PhD because you are directly engaging with others in your field. Since ARCSHS is a research centre, they have taken special care to make sure us postgrads don't get lost in the research. We have fortnightly seminars and fortnightly reading groups (which means that we meet once a week under the facilitation of the pedagogically inclined). I really enjoy these meetings, and ARCSHS is an amazingly welcoming and collegial place, but I don't buy into this rhetoric about course work being less isolating than research.

I think that certain environments do open themselves up to the possibility of isolation, and I am glad for all the support that is available for me here. But I think that the feeling of isolation is one that, as a student, you end up bringing on yourself. It's easy to get caught up in your own insecurities and to forget that everyone else is going through the same process. I recently realized that I had been cutting myself off because of certain changes in my thinking that have, in some ways, made me feel like I'm starting from scratch again.

Like most postgrads, when I started out 6 months ago I had this big, vague idea floating around in my head and no idea where to start. So I read all sorts of different things on all sorts of different topics, sometimes moving closer to where I wanted to go, sometimes moving further away. I have had moments of absolute clarity about what it is I want to do and how I am going to do it, and they have usually been followed, shortly thereafter, by complete panic because there's some new part of the puzzle to fit in and I don't know how to make it all work together. It's a lot like being on a roller coaster.

Ultimately, I have realized that I'm not starting from scratch again. I've gained a lot of insight over the past 6 months and can talk with slightly more authority about what it is that I'm doing. I have absolute trust in my supervisors to guide me through, and as I look back over some of the things they've suggested to me in our past meetings, I can see that they've seen a line of reasoning in my thinking that I hadn't clarified for myself yet. They've given me the space to figure it out for myself, but have also given me the guidance needed to get there.

So now I'm pushing through and breaking out of my little bubble of isolation to share my ideas with others and learn from their insights. In fact, I've spent a good part of this week in meetings with a number of my peers, bouncing ideas back and forth, and have a couple more meetings lined up for next week. I'm learning that there's no benefit to keeping everything locked up inside of me, and that there's so much to gain from opening up to those around me.

The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, the leaves are budding, and I am writing!