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

Reckoning with the “Ph” in the PhD.

Lately, I have been captured by the idea of putting the philosophy back into the PhD. Not a bad kind of capture 😉 (South Africans will understand). I was doing data exploration for my work and just hit a wall. I could not move forward for the life of me. I couldn’t ask interesting questions. And I thought I was having another dip in inspiration.

Needless to say, I was frustrated. Because with a funded PhD things are time-bound. You want to do as much as you can before your funding runs out. And three years is not a long time to get a whole lot done. I’m in my third year! So you can understand that I am in a slow brewing panic mode. I won’t force myself to rush and finish everything this year… but I want to at least glimpse the peak of the PhD mountain by December. I must keep moving upwards. BUT.

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Source: Caffeinated Confidence

I decided to work on something else, to come back to the analysis later. Dololo.

I started dabbling in some light reading to distract myself from my woes. By “light reading” I mean stuff related to my field, but not tied immediately to my research. And as I read I started thinking more and more about what I was really doing. And the more I thought, the more inspired I became for my analysis work. Yes, one can brainstorm with supervisors and peers but most of the time these people deal with output you’ve already produced, with thoughts you’ve already had. And where do these thoughts come from if you don’t find inspiration on your own? The quiet, BROAD reading is what inspires creativity and reignites that curiosity.

I realize now that since my proposal/protocol was accepted, my reading has been tied to a goal – a methodology to fulfil a specific objective, and the literature (mainly research articles) associated with that. In structured programs it might be easier to achieve a mix of practice and philosophy.  But, with a PhD-by-research only it is easy to get away with this sort of thing: Doing only the focused, practical readings needed to get the research done. And we convince ourselves we don’t have the time to spend on “frivolous” thoughts and reading. But I am glad I got stuck, because I was forced to go back and relearn some basics, and do some inspirational, foundational reading. The time I am spending just reading may not have a concrete output tied to it, but it is well spent. The output will be much better analysis I hope; and more interesting and useful interpretation of data.  I am doing the reading and the data exploration concurrently, but this time not charging at full speed towards analysis and writing. I spare a little time each day for some reading that has nothing to do with what I am doing but is philosophical enough to make me think deeper about the meaning of my work. It is a constant reminder that I am part of a bigger picture and that there is more than one way of looking at things.

So, if you are a PhD student like me and analysis/any stage is a drag, I recommend it. It really helps you become unstuck. I will take longer in this phase but at least I no longer wake up dreading the work ahead. I have regained my sense of what I am doing. It is like opening a window to let the fresh air in. Up until then, I didn’t realize how stale the room was.

The pure intellectual pursuit of things is an important part of being a scientist. The other half is the daily grind of applying experimentation and making observations. Besides the experimentation and observations, we must learn how to think about those things. But it is not easy to put a timeline on the thinking part. How do you decide how long to think about something before you can create meaning out of it? It is much easier to slot in time for seminars, workshops, paper writing and submission, data collection and analysis etc. Once you do this you realize the 3 years of a PhD goes quickly. And that’s how long most of us have anyway, given that scholarships don’t go on forever. There a few blogs/articles out there about what putting philosophy back in PhD means, including this blog.

If we keep asking the questions, we will forever stay connected to the core of being a scientist. Running experiments is the doing part. We need both.

 

Let me end this with this stolen quote: “The key part of science isn’t in finding good answers, but in asking good questions”.