States of Mind

The idea of this blog originally was to try and capture some of the experience of undertaking part-time doctoral study. I knew it would be a long and arduous journey and that there would be ups and downs. I actually wasn't prepared for how big those ups and downs have been so far, but I have also noticed that I seem to oscillate between different 'states' of feeling as I work.

In no particular order, they are:

• Feeling overwhelmed by the absolute enormity of the substantive topic. Each reading I undertake generates a dozen more so that the literature I want to read grows exponentially. I can never 'know' enough.
• Feeling self-doubt, which turns into a kind of paralysis at the thought that I am contributing nothing at all. That my little 'project' (the word I tend to opt for in my head when I'm in this particular state) is tiny and pointless.
• Feeling frustrated, because I wish I'd done things differently. A feeling of, if only I'd known 'then' what I know now. But of course, that is the point of doing this, precisely because I didn't 'know then'. 
• Feeling 'mixed up', unable to clearly separates elements of the substantive topic in my mind; confusing ideas with each other continuously. This tends to be in relation particularly to big areas like reading for pleasure versus reading for study, or different aspects of reading comprehension. They are too big to mix up, but I do. Regularly.
• Feeling spurred on by tiny little moments of epiphany, often where I wake up in the morning and have to very quickly make some notes about a thought or an idea that I have had. (Presumably at a sub-conscious level, whilst sleeping.)

During the first two, I try to overcome them by maintaining some kind of routine, by plodding on with a straightforward task. Is there any such thing? Reading and making notes from a single article, or a limited target: 300 words, say. The third one is the most avenue because whilst I can acknowledge this, I can't do anything more about it in relation to the data already collected. The final one is best, that goes without saying; because then I become really ignited by the whole thing. Sometimes it morphs into the second one though, where I write down that exciting thought and then realise that it, too, is a nothing, or is just 'stating the bleedin' obvious'.

This summer, though, I have invested quite a lot of time in creating my room of one's own. Time which I perhaps should have spent on the research itself. My hands have often been paint-splattered rather than ink-splattered. However, it is now nearing completion, awaiting electricity on Tuesday and some internal painting.

I have named what my long-suffering husband calls 'the PhD hut' Little Acorns. So, look out academic world...I'm sure that this was the only thing holding me back.

A Room of One's Own

This is where the mighty tome will be written.

It looks unpromising at the moment and I'm certainly not going to do it on that bench.

No; this is the spot where my garden study is to be built. Component parts are arriving on Tuesday and so we need to clear the area and lay concrete over the next couple of days.

So, a break from the study for some manual labour, but some that will enhance the study, eventually!

The Sisyphean Routine of Summer

Supervisor, commend me for I have worked. It is four months since my last post. And how I have worked. The time between posts a measure, really, of the 'grind' that I now feel.

Two summers ago I skipped through my summer reading list, confident that each tome was contributing clearly to my knowledge and understanding of my substantive topic. I look back fondly at an early post like Summer Holiday Versus Term Time, and whilst I clearly felt overwhelmed as term began, there was so much fun in those first forays into the literature. Today I wade through the ever-increasing pile, knowing in my heart of hearts that I can never read or do enough to complete this Sisyphean task because the pile grows more quickly than I can deal with it. (Would people just stop researching and publishing stuff so that I can keep up?!) Reading also seems to take longer than it did because I need to join everything up; whereas in the beginning it was all fresh and new and exciting and differentiated in its own right.

There have, of course, been some breakthroughs; a few more of those milestones (I remember the first, vividly) which are so important in keeping going:

• I successfully completed the requirements for the second year and will move into my third year of doctoral study.
• I completed the Introduction to Qualitative Methods course and an essay on a 'research method'. I have called this the 'study group research interview'. It shares some characteristics with a focus group interview, but it is also very different in lots of ways.
• I participated in the first five of the study group research interviews and have transcribed four fifths of the recordings.
• I have begun (very tentatively) coding.
• I found a book which has unified lots of my reading. I wish I'd read it near the start, but it wasn't published then. Still - happy days.
• I was (fortuitously) invited to review another journal paper which has helped me to consolidate all sorts of theoretical ideas in relation to the classroom.

So, I have my first sets of data. I have a date with 'NVivo'. And I have some of the feelings associated with a first date: the nerves, the great expectations, the overwhelming inadequacy, the restlessness...
But coupled with this is the mundane of the routine, the drudgery, the predictability of a marriage - in for the long haul.

My routine for the summer amounts to between five and ten minutes of transcription daily (which is still taking me up to an hour) followed by at least one hour of reading, note-making and reflection and a crossing of something else from the 'to do' list. So it amounts to about two hours per day, but probably equates to fifteen or so hours a week. It should be more, but there are these small things called children that require entertaining over the summer. Even so, that is more than double my term-time work-rate. There are four and a half more weeks of the summer holidays remaining, so another sixty hours or so to go. It is strange to think that when I go back to school I shall be sixty hours further ahead.