Last week I met up for coffee (well, hot chocolate - if I liked coffee my life would be A LOT easier and my stomach probably less rotted from sugar-free Red Bull) with one of my PhD colleagues. The conversation turned to how we hate the question ‘how’s the PhD going?’ and how the answer is always along the lines if ‘urgh, alright, I suppose’. We all know PhDs are really hard, and they wouldn’t be worth very much if anyone could do one. But there is this culture that, even if it’s going amazingly, you have to tone it down. You can’t look like you’re having too much fun (unless you’re trying to sell the PhD at an open evening). It’s like you’re somehow ‘letting the team down’ if things are going reasonably well. There are really hard times and, being of a realistic (some say pessimistic) nature, I often find it hard to be positive about the PhD myself. So, this post, I’m deliberately going to write about the parts of my PhD that are going quite well at the moment, actually. I’m not saying everyone is having an objectively nice time, of course - just finding things in my experience that I sometimes lose sight of!
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