PhD survival guide
Tuesday September 18, 2007
The Guardian
It’s not just undergraduates who could do with advice, says Patrick Tomlin
Ordinarily, when you have a regular column in a newspaper, they get someone else to fill in for you while you’re away. I don’t know if this is a solution that leaves anybody particularly satisfied. The readers are given an inferior product (because, presumably, if the stand-in columnist were as good as the regular columnist, they’d be the regular columnist), while the understudy is reminded that they’re only deemed interesting or funny enough to be allowed to share their thoughts with the readership when someone else isn’t there.
And the regular columnist is left sweating alone in an internet cafe in some far-flung part of the globe, obsessively refreshing the newspaper’s webpage to see whether their substitute has crafted such a beautiful piece of commentary that a mob will form, march on the paper’s offices carrying said stand-in on their shoulders, and demand that they be given the slot.
There are, however, no such travails for the Education Guardian columnist. Provided you go away in August, as I did, they don’t replace you. There was no devastatingly witty and brilliantly insightful graduate student waiting in the wings to pen an inspired column that carried, as a rather sad afterthought, the postscript “Patrick Tomlin is away”.
Education Guardian in August doesn’t have space for the random musings of graduate students, because it is focused entirely on the dual mission of getting everybody under 30 into some university course or other, through reams and reams of clearing listings (prompting a new game in my household – the search for the most bizarre combination of subjects forming a single degree programme) and providing those who get a place with advice on how to survive once there (this year’s top tip being “don’t live entirely on junk food”).
I would like to condemn this as stating the bleeding obvious, but as someone who ate Mars ice-cream bars for breakfast as an undergraduate, I realise that I am not really in a position to criticise.
With all this help being offered to those trotting off to university for the first time, I thought it was a shame that no such advice and reassurance was being offered to those about to re-enter the education system on the long road to doctorship.
So here is my “PhD survival guide”, the five essential things any new doctoral student needs to know:
1. Adopt the correct attitude towards undergraduates. This is a complicated mixture of pity, disdain, condescension, benevolent indulgence and complete indifference. Don’t try to be like them, in any way. Don’t attempt to talk to them about the new Arctic Killers or Snow Monkeys song. The main point is that, at all times, you should mask your seething envy of their youth, freedom, good looks and future options.
2. Make an effort to get to know the non-academic staff and existing doctoral students on your programme. They’re the ones who know how things really work in the department.
3. Presumably, having got on to a PhD programme, you’re pretty bright. Now, come on, don’t be bashful, you are. But you have to get used to the fact that the other people around you now are likely to be as clever as, if not – gasp – cleverer than you. This realisation hit me about four weeks into term, during a seminar fairly closely related to my topic. Non-specialists who appeared to be about 12 were asking insightful and important questions. My sole contribution was to clarify whether something in the handout was a typo. It wasn’t. Get over it. Get used to being a small fish and realise that being around so many other people interested in the same stuff as you, and at the same level, is a fantastic resource.
4. If you’re moving somewhere where you don’t know anyone, try to make friends with people other than those in your department. Never-ending talk about your area and thesis will drive you insane.
5. Try to treat the PhD as a job. Hopefully, that way you will get plenty done without letting your research pervade every aspect and minute of your life. There’s no employer peeking over your shoulder or tapping a watch when you come in late, but you must develop an internal boss. If you struggle to do this, acquire a partner who can make a morning cup of tea both a gesture of love and a veiled threat. My steaming brew always seems to be saying to me: “I love you. Oh, and I’m getting up to go to work now, and I very strongly suggest you do the same.”
Patrick Tomlin is researching a doctorate in political theory at Oxford University
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,2171141,00.html
