Posted on by mamothena

Reflections from the liminal stage

I am typing this sitting among a pile of boxes and rubbish, as I prepare to move to another house. Life is changing yet again, and I have to find time to keep doing the important things – such as, meeting my deadline for this blog. Try moving in the middle of the week and still have to coordinate getting the kids to school, making sure their uniform is ironed and lunch made. This morning I had mini panic attack thinking I packed my youngest’s school bag in with one of the sealed boxes. It’s crazy!

I am hoping that someday soon I can have a house of my own that I will never need to move away from. We all dream of this stable future devoid of inconveniences. It is perhaps how we assume that things will be, once we finish our PhDs. But I have a sneaky suspicion that maybe things won’t change after all. Maybe it will even get worse, considering how stressed-out academics are always saying they are? Being on the doorstep of change, as I am, is anxiety inducing. Not a student and not yet a scholar/academic. This is what Abram and Ibrahim (2012) say about the liminal stage that is PhD candidacy, ““The PhD journey, like foreign travel, involves the exploration of unknown territories and encounters with unfamiliar cultures. The experience is as much emotional as cognitive, and aspects of the journey may be exhilarating, frightening, puzzling, stimulating, exhausting or tedious.” I find that this description fits being a parent to little kids as well. And I am doing both at the moment. Wouldn’t it be nice to try and figure out only one critical thing at a time? 🙂

I am at the end of my third year. Thank God that there haven’t been any catastrophic events with my PhD studies so far. I’ve had challenges, but none of the horror stories you sometimes read about on the internet. In the coming year I have to be dynamic and pragmatic, as things haven’t always turned out as planned. (Both in my personal and academic life.) And because I have to start looking towards the future, that means I have to spare time to build my skills and look for possible employment. No more selfishly dedicating all of my time to my studies, and the occasional conference or supervision of Masters’ students.

I’m just a little bit stressed! How will I balance analysis, writing up, and engaging in work opportunities? I am looking beyond the exhilaration of the past three years, when I gained new skills, learned new methodologies, articulated brand new concepts. I am leveraging the sense of growth I feel to weather the frightening experiences, such as financial insecurities (with a family to feed!). I also use that sense of growth to weather the fatigue of doing nothing but study in the past three years. The exhaustion that comes with having to run the last mile. I do feel that there is something exciting on the horizon but I know that it will probably be more difficult before it gets easy. Hopefully I have laid a good foundation in the past three years.

My PhD experience has been the quintessential rite of passage, where “the individual [is] neither one thing nor another, but betwixt and between. …In managing the peaks and troughs of research, many students battle with moments of fear, inferiority, darkness and invisibility. They not only deal with emotional challenges, stressful situations, confusion, lack of moral, theoretical and methodological support, but they also juggle with too many responsibilities, identity crises and demands, either from their families, their institutions or their sponsors.” But there are many good days. Lots of achievements and milestones on the way. Right now I am feeling hopeful and calm regarding my PhD, and I wish I could wrap this feeling up for some of the tougher days. Of course if I come out the other end feeling as I feel now, I will 100% recommend a PhD to all my friends. 😉

Posted on by mamothena

No matter your PhD needs, PhD Twitter has you covered…

In keeping with the spirit of being a millennial…I’m going talk about PhD Twitter and how great it is 🙂 . Before I did my PhD I hated Twitter. I found it too random, for lack of a better word. And not even lists and carefully curated content made a difference. I would login once and forget to come back for another six months. Until I started my PhD…

It started off with following the organizations I like, and then I got into PhD Twitter hashtags. #PhDchat #PhDlife #PhDadvice, #PhD… you name it. The information was still random, but now I felt connected to it. I was entertained, encouraged, and sometimes even enlightened. You cannot go 2 tweets without something that brings an emotional response out of you. And that’s why the platform is so addictive. Follow with care!

PhD Twitter can encourage you just as much as it can freak you out. Often people share horror stories of their experiences, or their disillusion with the PhD and academia…and you will wonder why you logged in. Here are some of my favourite (and not so favourite) things to engage with on PhD Twitter:

  1. Practical advice

This is a checklist on dealing with supervision. The best part for me is the comment from the PhD student, who balances this neat checklist with a little dose of reality. Some advice out there will miss the nuances of your situation, or your motivations at the time. As one of the responses state, sometimes your desperation to get into a program makes it hard to make sure your supervisor and project meet some criteria.

When you feel you can do the research and the supervisor seems nice enough, you do it.  We settle for the acceptance letter, and plan to solve all other issues later.  For better or worse. But it is good to always have this kind of advice around. PhD consultants abound on Twitter. There’s a checklist for everything.  And we don’t mind… we are begging to graduate and we are not choosers.

  1. Solidarity

Sometimes it takes only a few words to express it all, when others have had that same experience. And that is one of the most comforting feelings for any human — more so the PhD student. This person expressed a challenge without getting into detail, and was able to get support and sympathy from other PhD students. With every little word of encouragement, retweet, and heart, she felt a little better.

Even old acquaintances reached out to suggest a little coffee break…

…you can tell our PhD student hasn’t been all that reachable on the phone.

  1. Much. Relate.

Sometimes you stand in solidarity with others because you know you might need it someday, or you know how it feels to need those words of encouragement. But sometimes someone’s challenge seems like an exact replica of yours. And a comic strip captures everything that you go through or feel. When someone out there tweets about something this real, we can’t help but testify.  We say things like “I feel so attacked right now” (this is a good thing), “stop talking about my life”, and like this person, “behold, the gospel”.

  1. The dark side…

Sometimes someone will give you a little dose of reality regarding the PhD journey – the low paying academic jobs awaiting you, the poor job prospects overall, how overqualified you are for most positions, and how unsuitable you are for industry. When this advice comes from a well-rounded source it is palatable – perhaps a current academic trying to find their way in the milieu, someone who quit but found something valuable to do (“industry”, their own passions etc.).  Anybody who is not all doom and gloom.  But then there are pages like this:

Is not having any more PhD students the solution to all of challenges facing academia and society? With pages like these you don’t even do an example tweet. Just do a quick scroll through the timeline and if you are a PhD student, tell me if you aren’t scared. And discouraged. Or at least mildly concerned.

  1. PhD secrets. How many secrets can one field have?

PhD secrets are like PhD advice 2.0. They aren’t regular advice; they are things Big Academia is hiding from you! Sometimes they are educational; sometimes they are to the tune of number 4 above. These secrets are multifaceted. Some hide in plain sight…

Some are really, really magical hacks you would otherwise have not uncovered…

Who knew changing the name of a file you have been working on forever could give you a new lease on life? Changing your perspective on something changes how you deal with it for sure. Sometimes we make things harder for ourselves by thinking they are more complex than they really are. And little mental hacks like these are the little miraculous things that we didn’t even know could unlock our creativity and keep us going.

  1. Big ideas on the PhD in the 21st century…

Through PhD Twitter you get access to all of the latest ideas on how universities can reinvent the program and stay valuable to society.  Through these ideas, we as students can also see where our careers are headed. We know that change is inevitable, and graduate programs will have to continually evolve to fit better into their contexts. This means negotiating our own place in it, thinking about the meaning of what we do, and because we are the custodians of the future PhD …maybe even think ahead on the best way to advance science and the PhD in the future.

These are just six of the multitude of things you encounter during a brief session of PhD Twitter. Sometimes I get tired of the self-obsession of the platform. But sometimes it’s the only thing that can keep me going. A little bit of hope goes a long way. And virtual hugs sometimes work.  PhD twitter is great. Anyone, big or small, can have a say in things. Get advice. Feel connected to a bigger picture. All at the tap of an app…