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...