August is the busy month. I’m mostly on my own at work. There are advantages; I get the printer to myself and there’s no queue for the kettle.
I’m solo commuting. Playing the same cd over and over, loving the early morning colours of the corn fields and finally discovering leaving at 7.00 pm does guarantee an easy run home!
If you don’t read the detail of the OoO emails ……I’m away…. in Madagascar ….sooooooo sorry…..back next month……..it’s ok. I’ve had the first meeting with my new supervisor. It went well. I have enough data. Maybe too much but that’s ok because in the PhD quadrant I’ve seamlessly segued into the third section; lit review and data collection behind, looking at data analysis and writing up. Wow! This is beginning to take shape.
Is it darta or date-a? Is this the castle and bath debate?
There’s been some reassuring pieces in the Guardian’s Academics Anonymous. I liked the one on older Phd study in particular the comments. Thank you strangers 🙂 Your reassurance towards late life postgraduate education was very comforting for this middle of the quoted age range academic.
- I got my PhD at the age of 52
- I completed my DPhil at the age of 57,
- I got my PhD two weeks before I was 66
- I met a man who was in his mid-80s and doing a PhD…
From here I slid into neighbouring pieces – like you do – click click….. another year older… I was drawn to a piece titled How to stay sane through a PhD: get survival tips from fellow students, but it was a bit depressing.
‘From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t matter much what discipline you belong to or which university you go to when it comes to developing chronic unhappiness.’
My PhD journey has not been easy but not chronically unhappy either.
‘We have to start by being honest with each other and ourselves, admit when we are struggling and then seek help.’
So it’s no coincidence the initial caps of this Anonymous Academic series are AA? My name is Sue and I’m doing a PhD…
It’s interesting how the URL for this piece calls it mental-health rather than survival tips http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/mar/20/phd-research-mental-health-tips I guess I’m lucky. My mental health is ok. Or as well as it can be – all things considering – and I think it’s one of the advantages of being er, um…. a little older. Hopefully, with age you learn how to deal with the less pleasant aspects of being. My Phd is a new learning experience but it’s also reinforcing what I always suspected about how knowledge is constructed and known, I just didn’t have the theoretical lens for expressing it. For me, this is a privileged position and I’m sure I couldn’t have appreciated any earlier in my life.
Moving onto data analysis will be interesting. Hello Hello NVivo, we’re going to get to know each other very well. In the meantime its back to the piste of epistemology, ontology and conceptualising the hundreds of thousands of what I love best – words!
“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing you can do is keep your mind young.” Mark Twain