It's a marathon, not a sprint

On the day of the London Marathon, it's an opportune time to reflect on the nature of doing research. As a young researcher getting to grips with the finer detail of ontology and epistemology and all that jazz, i'm never quite sure where all this is heading, but i've always loved learning and i've got loads of questions that i want to know the answers to (although i know it's not that simple), but i don't know how i might go about asking them. Now a runner, looking forward to their next race, would go about the 'answering' of that particular question by setting themselves a goal, preparing for it by putting time aside to train and probably mix and match their preparation methods to give them a decent range of experiences and aptitudes for the big day. You have goals, you have a time in mind in which you want to finish, you practise and that helps you work out how good you might be and therefore what you might be able to achieve, or at least it tells you what you need to do to improve and so on.

Now doesn't that sound somewhat similar to doing research? So what might my goals be? Well, i can't think about the end yet because i have no idea what it looks like, but i can break it down, focus on short or medium term goals and then push on from there. Whereas doing a BA or an MA might be equivalent to a sprint or a middle distance, the PhD is definitely a marathon of sorts. But the goal of this marathon of mine stretches beyond the PhD itself - it is to become a better, more rounded academic and as far as i can articulate what that means it is about becoming a good lecturer, one who creates an enjoyable and interesting learning environment for students and also a good researcher, one who wants to push forward the boundaries of his own understanding to help him with his teaching and help his students learn productively and deeply.

And somewhere along that journey there is "getting the PhD" - perhaps that's the equivalent of realising you've got to start incorporating speed or track work into your marathon training if you're really going to become any good, if you're really going to be able to push on at 20, 21 miles when the burn sets in and you hit the dreaded wall - but it is not the 'final' end point, it's just another step on the way. So perhaps this PhD is simply my first marathon and like any good runner knows, you've got to deal with what's in front of you first before you can dream about how good you might one day be.

What Stevie Smith secretly knew about doing a PhD

A bit more on the title of this blog. Whilst Stevie Smith's poem talks precisely of 'not waving, but drowning' my experience so far of doing a PhD is 'both waving and drowning'.

First to the Waving. I've found myself defining me as a person in relation to this PhD. To every question of 'how are things going', i answer 'you know...alright, but...' followed by something about being busy with my teaching etc workload and then saying 'and of course i've decided to take the plunge / i must be mad / what possessed me to do this THING.' Of course, that alludes to the second part, Drowning, but in reality, when you start to define yourself by your PhD - as a badge of honour, as a symbol that you have joined that club somewhere between easyish-academic-life and person-with-academic-credentials, as a way of telling everyone about your new found way of life, you realise, and i have realised, that you are in fact waving to everyone...pssst, i'm doing research as part of my ... / i'm presenting a seminar next week on my ... / i'm trying to put some time aside for my ... Yes it defines me. Well, actually, it owns me.

Secondly, to Drowning. This is perhaps a little more obvious. You find this entry shelved between Naive Optimism and Downright Pessimism - the cliched rollercoaster of emotion, of not having enough time, of not carving out enough time, of having to do other things like your job in that time, of constantly feeling guilty that you haven't read or written or written notes on your reading, of being behind .... oh my god ... i'm X behind (where X currently equals a few months according to my scientific staring at the pile of reading).

Now call me neurotic, but i think this is quite normal; the problem is, i don't know what is normal in the context of a PhD. Despite reading several books (notably Phillips & Pugh, 2000 and Rugg & Petre, 2004) and talking to lots of former fudders (PhD-ers), i am no closer to reconciling 'doctoral studies' and 'normality.' Let's just hope i don't end up like the poem...

Let me explain...

So, hello...(in an interested, rather than a Leslie Phillips way), thanks for popping by. Today begins another new experiment for me, blogging about my management PhD (mostly). I'm not sure i'm going to be very good at this. For example, i joined twitter in Nov 08 and then tweeted thrice for the first couple of years, before rediscovering it and now find it a most wonderful place for all things work- and PhD-related. I'm on facebook, but i find it a bit dull and almost always forget to have my go at Scrabble, although it's quite good for organising stuff, but i don't like posting status updates because why on earth do people want to know what i'm up to? So what i'm saying is this might all end in disaster....

...BUT, on the other hand, i am hoping this is a place where i can tell you a little about my PhD and my experience of doing a PhD (without boring the pants off you with the minutiae) so that you can support me. When i moved from being an NHS manager to being an academic four years ago, a good friend of mine told me the biggest challenge was learning to work much more independently than ever before and getting used to being 'isolated'. Well, having started a PhD all i can say is, you think being an academic is isolating, try this! So i'm going to try and capture some of that for you.

In the meantime, there are many more brilliant places to find out about the experience of doing a PhD and you can find them via the links to the right. Oh, and finally, if you hadn't guessed it by now, the title of this blog is inspired by one of my favourite poems by Stevie Smith - just about sums up how i feel about the PhD experience. Bye for now