Dear readers,
Like many of my former colleagues in the
corridors of power, I am the author of an as-yet-unfinished PhD thesis. Indeed,
Westminster is awash with possessors of arcane knowledge; my first boss had
written a doctorate on the mediaeval bridges of England, while another
colleague was an expert on early modern French erotica. I had my viva a month
before I started work, and was passed subject to corrections. Fine, I thought,
I’ll easily tend to those minor amendments in the evenings and at weekends.
Eleven years later, here we are…
I have written of the pitfalls of New Year
resolutions, but, flouting the spirit of “Physician, heal thyself”, I have
resolved to finish the corrections and resubmit the thesis this year. In the
dying days of December, I dared to open the files on my laptop for the first
time in years, and was pleasantly surprised (more relieved than anything else,
actually) to find that it was readable and didn’t make me squirm with
embarrassment. It also contained chunks of knowledge I had completely forgotten
having. A good friend of mine has a similarly unfinished magnum opus, and I
have suggested a pact that we conclude 2017 with an expensive bottle of whisky,
having finished our respective doctorates.
There are several motivations behind my
perhaps-rash resolution. In a mechanistic and utilitarian sense, in the interim
period until I win the EuroMillions, it would be beneficial from a career
standpoint to have the magical title of Doctor (and you can bet it’s going on
credit cards, driving licence, passport, anywhere). In a psychological sense,
it would be satisfying to tie up a loose end and finish a long-dormant project,
perhaps proving something to my supervisor who must have torn his hair out.
Importantly, though, it would also entitle me to sport a gown of a shade
formally, I believe, described as spectrum blue (and there won’t be any of this
graduating in absentia shit for me,
you can rest assured). I am very fond of my master’s gown, though I hardly get
to wear it these days – there was a time when it got an outing at least once a
week – and the hue of the lining of my senior hood is a pleasing saffron yellow
colour, but the electric blue number is a definite step up. (The real prize,
though very rarely awarded, is the DLitt: a gown of saffron yellow lined with
ivory silk, with a hood to match. I have once seen one of these worn and it was
swoontastic.)
Being a PhD student is a strange business
(though is a grain of truth, if I may adapt the old aphorism, to the notion that
if you can remember my postgraduacy then you weren’t really there). Oddly
enough, because the opposite is much more often true, I was a much more social
creature as a postgraduate than I had been as an undergraduate. It took me a
long time to find my feet properly at university and I was already a Master
when I really began to flourish. I think my supervisor, and very probably most
of my fellow researchers, regarded my extra-curricular activities as deeply infra dig, and, given that most of them
are now fully-fledged academics and I am not, who is to say they were wrong?
All I can say is, I had a whale of a time.
It is, however, as I say, a rum do. Doctoral
students can be very solitary souls, as they “deep dive” into a subject that
even their supervisors may only be glancingly familiar with, and it is easy to
exist in one’s own hermetically sealed silo. My faculty tried to overcome this
by having fortnightly seminars, strictly on a three-line whip, at which
students would present papers on some aspect of their research and,
essentially, explain it to their fellows. As well as bringing hermit crabs out
of their shells, this was good experience for aspiring lecturers (as
postgraduates we were allowed, encouraged and sometimes required to supervise
seminars but were not generally let loose on lecture halls). Even with this
discipline, I was left somewhat out on a limb, as an historian of Catholic
England studying at an institute famous for its Protestant historiography.
Some of my colleagues – and I know it’s a
cliché but it happens to be true, the Germans were particularly prominent in
this regard – were sufficiently organized and disciplined to treat their
studies almost as an office job. They would turn up at the institute at 9.00
am, work till 5.00 pm or 6.00 pm, then go home. I am sure this was, for them,
enormously productive; if you think of the man hours (person hours!) you put in
like that over three or four years, they really add up, and suddenly
researching and writing 100,000 words doesn’t seem like such a Herculean
effort. I wasn’t like that. Partly, I am very much an owl rather than a lark,
so early mornings, except when I was teaching, were Not My Thing, especially if
the night before had been a heavy one (and there were many of those). I would protest,
though, I hope not too much, that it was not merely a matter of fecklessness
and libertinism. I did for a while have an office (a shared room, I hasten to
add) next to my supervisor’s, but I found it an unconducive place to work. My
room-mates, while perfectly pleasant, liked the radio on, and I didn’t like the
presence of other people. I found them distracting and I felt self-conscious.
(Ironic, this, as I now write best in pubs, albeit quiet ones.) I also bridled
at the lurking presence of my supervisor next door. It was like having an
invigilator stand right behind you all the way through an exam.
Eventually, we reached a compromise. I
vacated the much sought-after desk in the department and would work in the
library or at home (I had a succession of very comfortable flats, for rents
which nowadays seem absurdly cheap), and would call in at regular intervals to
update my supervisor on my progress or submit chunks of written work. In fact,
though, the bulk of the writing was done after I had moved south of the Forth
to Edinburgh, at our large kitchen table which I could cover with paper and
where I could have a couple of glasses of wine to aid the creative process. (If
I have any advice to give to aspiring researchers, it is that Riesling is a very
good drafting wine. Don’t ask me why, it just is.)
Along with my studies, I pursued a more
active social life than a lot of my fellow postgraduates, and was described in
the student newspaper as “an old-fashioned hack”. My level of electoral success
in student politics can be judged by the fact that I was elected unopposed as
postgraduate representative on the University Senate by 52 votes; 26 people
voted to re-open nominations. Still, a win is a win, and it was my only
campus-wide victory. Three times I was thwarted in my ambition to become
President of the Debating Society, and yes, if you want to know, I’m still
bitter. (The first two were fair defeats; the third was a stab in the back, by
a German who had obviously learned the meaning of Dolchstoßlegende.)
Should I have been a more sober and sensible
individual? Perhaps. Had I done so I might now be a PhD of some standing and
reputation, instead of somebody creeping back to the fringes of academe in
early middle age. But I enjoyed it. Goodness me, I enjoyed it. In my
postgraduate years I made some lifelong friends, the sort of friends you don’t
always see very often but with whom you can pick up the thread of companionship
within seconds of meeting again. I learned something about teaching, too. My
greatest lesson was that you can cope with any number of indifferent students
who are just there to tick off the module credits, and even the odd complete
duffer, if there are one or two students who are visibly engaged and enthused
in the subject. They make all the difference. It was particularly true of the
period I was teaching; not all of the students had studied any early modern
history – what do you mean, there aren’t any Nazis? – and so bringing them to
some understanding of and empathy with the subject was enormously satisfying.
I do think that postgraduate students can
miss out of the more social aspects of university life. It’s particularly true
if, unlike me, you move universities to study for your PhD. There is an
efficiency in treating it like a job, but it’s a cold and rather bland
efficiency, at least to my mind. Moreover, postgraduates, being that little bit
older and, it is to be hoped, worldly-wise, have a lot to offer the student
community. I was a loyal and active member of my university’s debating society,
and on the rare occasions that postgraduates could be induced to attend and
participate, they usually had interesting things to say. This was doubly true
of those who had been out in what I gather is called the real world and had
come back to university life later in life.
Of course, it’s all about striking a balance,
and I’m sure I didn’t always get it right (see above). It must also depend on
what sort of university you attend. For me, the university dominated the town
and everybody lived on top of each other. Had I been in London or another big
city, my experience might have been very different. It would have been
different again had I been at a more modern campus university.
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