It is not quite the norm, I know, to go away (from what is considered one’s home or permanent residence) in the last month or so of the PhD. I had managed to pull off something similar back in August 2016, when I was finishing my Master’s, heading back to Singapore to attend my brother’s wedding a week before our dissertations were due. Naturally, I had planned to finish the dissertation well before the deadline, and was in fact, not maniacally trying to write a Master’s dissertation while attending a wedding. Similarly, at this point in time, I am still actually a little over a month away from the day my funding ends (which is the latest by which I am allowing myself to submit, though hopefully earlier), and well over four months away from the ‘hard’ deadline by which I have to submit a PhD thesis, and decided to go to Nepal for a month or so (in part to follow up on the research I had done there last year, to share some early findings, though that is not quite at that stage at the moment, but mostly because that’s where my partner is currently). Given as well that I am, happily enough for me, able to use the papers I have published/prepared as chapters in the thesis as is, without further edits, there is really not too much for me to do apart from write the introduction and discussion chapter.
“8 pages for introduction, done in 4 days, and 6 pages of discussion, done in 3 days, that’s it, just one week”, said my supervisor. That’s the minimum apparently, that my supervisor had seen in a PhD thesis that was successfully defended. Unfortunately, despite 3.5 years of PhD training, I am still clearly not at the writing speed/standard of my supervisor, given that I have spent the last 4 days writing my introduction and have produced some 12 pages of text that is no where near coherent/comprehensible. It is truly quite difficult to wake up everyday and know that all I have to do is write — no more messing about with figures, trying to tweak colour palettes or font sizes in R, no data to clean and process, no code to write, no attending of training sessions — just writing of academic prose. It is obvious to me now, if it wasn’t already before, that writing is not really my passion. I do like writing these blog posts as documentation of my experiences and thoughts, and thanks to my premium secondary/post-secondary schooling and undergraduate education, am able to write adequately well enough to express my thoughts. But having to just sit and write a thesis? It does seem like the major accomplishment of having done a PhD is not in the preceding years of hard work but being able to, at the very end, write a thesis.
Having written three papers from my PhD research (during which much moaning and whining and expressions of quitting were made, though only heard by my unfortunate partner), one would think that writing the beginning and the end of the thesis really wouldn’t be too difficult. The only thing I have learned is to just make sure I write something, even if it is not coherent, and to motivate myself through little rewards, though I seem to be leaning into over-rewarding myself at the moment.
Griping aside, I am nonetheless still managing to write a little everyday, though I cannot say at this point that I am enjoying the process. But the end is indeed near, and I suppose metaphorically I am sprinting towards the end line by means of words on pages. How strange is it, that when one stereotypically depicts a PhD holder (or pursuer), they are shown wearing lab coats holding variously coloured liquid in flasks, or standing in front of a lecture hall/some field site, or perhaps browsing through (old-looking leather-bound) books in a picturesque library, yet at the end of the day the one and only thing that all PhD candidates are judged by is our writing of a thesis. I suppose that would be the way to kill the joy out of most aspiring academics: ‘Do you love learning and studying about XYZ? Well I hope you also enjoy writing because that is what academia is’.
P.S. This post is written half in jest; I don’t mind writing, really, I just wish I could write more quickly and more coherently and that I had the memory to recall every relevant reference and statistic. But I am just a normal human after all.
Jocelyne Shimin Sze 