Over on Twitter, Nadine Muller has started an insightful discussion on #phdadvice, which is now being collated at The New Academic. The premise is simple: "What #phdadvice do you wish someone had given you earlier, before you had to find out for yourself?" The community of PhDs, postdocs and lecturers have been sharing tips in 140 characters - and it inspired me to reflect back on the Postgraduate Diary I kept on this blog when I was doing my PhD work (was it really three years ago?).

At risk of sounding like Baz Luhrman, if I could offer only one piece of advice, this would be it: don't let your PhD get in the way of your education. A PhD will get you...a PhD. It's all the things that you do around it that will establish you in a career, particularly in academia but no doubt elsewhere as well.

To demonstrate the basis for this advice, I am going to be shamelessly self-promotional (something which, advice to self, I'm usually rubbish at doing). I am at present and for the foreseeable future something of a portfolio postdoc. I have a number of different jobs and roles that collectively add up to (more than) full time employment. I teach at two universities, including two-thirds time at the Open University. I am currently working on a fixed-term project for Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study, preparing a report. I am writing a textbook for a distance learning university in Singapore. I am developing an impact blog, outreach podcasts and social media in Durham's English Department. I occasionally run workshops to encourage A-level students to blog as a way of enhancing their CVs.

I can trace the genesis of virtually all of these things to work I did extraneously to my PhD. Most obviously, for example, I did a lot of teaching alongside my research, which got me into the Open University. The research institute asked me to write their reports, because I had been a co-founding editor of their postgraduate journal. My work on the impact blog has emerged from the fact that I woke up one day during my PhD years and decided we were not doing enough to promote the rich array of literary events in the region - I volunteered to produce a monthly email newsletter, and now get paid for doing this, and for my other online work. I helped out on the developing website, Graduate Junction, and built up my online skills there as well as on this blog.

On the research side of things, too, my PhD - which was on postmodern fiction and cybernetics - has dropped into an incidental role in my post-PhD career (though my plans for the Summer include redeveloping a monograph proposal based upon it). Midway through my PhD, a conference came up on the legacies of Darwinism. Very tentatively, I put in a proposal to present a paper on Darwinian computer games - something which had nothing to do with my thesis, and certainly little to do with books. It was accepted, and subsequently published as a book chapter. The next year, I set off for a BSLS conference and gave a speculative and rough-hewn paper on Fredric Jameson and Grand Theft Auto. This too will shortly (if belatedly) be published as a journal article. I came into the PhD as a literature scholar, and I left with a literature PhD. But pure literature is not going to be the field that occupies me for the next five years, due to the things I explored outside the PhD. Most of my future research plans involve reading computer games in a literary kind of way, to put it simply.

Which brings me to one corollary bit of advice: enjoy it. Never again, other than as a PhD student, will you have time, freedom and opportunity to explore things that do not seem to have a direct relevance to your field of research. The sheer amount of time that you will have to read and write freely can be bewildering - and a lot of #phdadvice rightly surrounds time management. But this is a glorious chance to romp for three years in the open fields of research. It is a time - ah, time! - that you will lose and never rediscover, once the rat race of professional academia begins.

Labels: PhD, University Life

Just a quick note to highlight a new Facebook campaign group that has been set up, to share horror stories of PhD students being asked to teach or do other work for free. In the wake of financial pressures, and with a ready surplus of PhD students, some universities are increasingly asking their graduate students to teach tutorials, deliver lectures, and even convene and run entire courses without any payment (or with nominal payment below minimum wage). Universities get away with this by the same branding tactics employed by large corporations which run "internship" programs, claiming that such work is "training" and a necessary route to ultimately paid employment.

Casual contracts have been a blight on the sector for a number of years, and the UCU has a long-running campaign to stamp these out. However, the emergence of this grass-roots Facebook group seems to suggest that the problem is growing rather than being resolved.

As with internships which have received such a bad press in recent months, no PhD student should be asked to work for free, doing the job that lecturers would be paid to do. Even to get to a PhD stage, graduates will have at least a first degree and probably a masters qualification as well. They are highly skilled if junior academics, and deserve to be remunerated accordingly. One suspects that undergraduates paying £9000 a year would be less than pleased to find out that their teachers were being asked to mark work or plan and deliver lessons for nothing. It is in the universities own interests that this practice is stamped out as quickly as possible.

Labels: PhD, UCU, University Life

A couple of days ago, somebody forwarded me a link to a new career's website for Arts and Humanities PhD graduates, called Beyond the PhD. The site seems quite useful, offering advice and experiences from recent graduates, who have gone on to careers inside and beyond academia. Unlike many other careers websites, this is actually targeted at, and relevant to, this particular audience.

Seeing the website reminded me of my own experiences a couple of years ago, back when I was in the middle of my PhD research. I am a socialist and utilitarian at heart, which means I find it necessary to justify taking public money by explaining what benefit the society which distributes those funds gets out of it. Given that I was lucky enough to be fully funded throughout my studies, I was always conscious of the need to put something back into the public domain, as I explained in a series of posts labelled "The Idea of a University."

It was out of one of these posts that the issue of the "value" of an English PhD arose. Picking up facts and figures from various reports circulating at the time, I worked this post into an essay, which I presented as a seminar paper in my department. However, since I am now at the end of my PhD studies, I thought it appropriate to revisit this piece and put it up on The Pequod. Since some of the employment figures may be slightly out of date (especially given the current recession) it is not an authoritative case study, but will hopefully be of interest to some readers, particularly those currently undertaking PhDs in the Arts and Humanities, and wondering for themselves whether and why their studies are worthwhile.

The essay can be found here: The Value of an English PhD.

Labels: English Literature, PhD, the idea of a university

A friend of mine, a PhD student, commented recently on his frustration that his parents still ask him when he intends to get a real job. I know exactly how he feels. I have spent the last three years trying to convince my parents that, surely, starting writing at 9.00 and finishing writing at 5.00 or thereabouts is what they mean by "real work." I know from my gap year in this supposedly more concrete reality of paid work that office life often involves chatting, discussion, making phone calls and filling in paperwork mindlessly; and at the end of the day, office life ends the moment you kick back your desk chair, to begin your leisure time, usually using the money you have earned to pay for it. Surely it is the world of normal work that is the more unreal, requiring you to inhabit a split personality, acting and existing differently depending on whether you are before your family or your boss. I suspect that what parents everywhere mean by the "real" world is that within which there is some sort of oversight, chains of responsibility tying you to times and tasks that you must do, lest you get the sack.

But what could be stranger, less real, than this artificial system in which work and life are kept apart from each other by the glass of 9.00 and 5.00, and in which you may be responsible to managers who (apparently) do less useful work than yourself? By contrast, PhD life becomes your total reality: the mind you occupy whilst doing your PhD is, to a large extent, the only one you have. PhD life is solipsistic and demands total concentration; there are few opportunities to do mindless things like paperwork or phone calls, because by definition a PhD is the use of the mind and the application of the pen or keyboard, not casual chat or filling in time sheets. You eat, sleep and breathe your thesis. The PhD is with you when you shower. It creeps into your consciousness just when you are drifting off to sleep. And it waits at the end of the bed to welcome you with the crack of dawn. So the call to all parents everywhere has to be: "get real." Doing a PhD is probably the hardest work anyone can do, because it is so self-driven and so intimate to the cells of brain and body whilst doing it.

But there comes a stage towards the end of their PhD when most researchers find that the PhD finds a way to press itself even into those precious cracks of time still, wistfully, called "time off." Most significantly, of course, is the need to complete by a certain deadline. But there is also the fact that after three years, funding will dry up (if you have been lucky enough to have some in the first place), and researchers will need to start looking for temporary jobs and long-term futures, those entities that allegedly belong to the parental "real" world.

Now at this stage in may career, I realise how naive I was ever to believe that a PhD was "hard" work. For at this point I find myself holding down six different jobs or positions, some of them paid and some of them voluntary. In addition to trying to polish off the last few footnotes and dropped apostrophes of my thesis, I have been allocated to teach across five different modules. I asked for this amount of teaching back in the glorious days at the start of summer, when I naively imagined I would have finished researching by September. Now, though, I am essentially trying to do all the reading and lectures for an undergraduate degree, whilst adding the PhD on top of that. In addition, I've got a larger than normal pastoral tutor group in my college, have started a job in the library three evenings a week, and am working as publicity officer for my department. In an unpaid capacity, I'm editor of a journal, volunteering for our local literature festival, and moonlighting for Graduate Junction.

These days, I seem to jump from one thing to the next, like an errant fly alighting on one subject only for a moment, before something else calls. I am living and working minute by minute, squeezing in research in the odd half hour between ending library shifts and the bus back home, reading the poems I will teach the next day on that same vibrating vehicle, or doing teaching admin and photocopying first thing in the morning, before my email inbox comes alive. I am stressed and tired. But in an unexpected way, I also feel peculiarly satisfied with my work to a degree that I have not been over the previous three years of doing pure research. Now, for the first time since my year out in the "real world" of an office job, I start to tick things off on a daily basis. Tasks get done, and the list of things still to do gets smaller (at least until another head of the email hydra glowers from my refreshed inbox). With a PhD being as it is, you never feel quite finished, and at the end of the day, no matter how superficially productive, you never feel quite as if you have worked enough or to a sufficient standard. Now, though, I find myself to be a doer, a finisher. People task me with jobs, I work through them, and move on to something else. So it is this sort of experience that outsiders or parents probably mean by the "real," the mentality of the production line and the in-tray out-tray with which they are familiar. So what, I wonder, could be better or more real, more productive and more satisfying, than finally completing my bloody PhD?

Labels: PhD, Postgraduate Diary

I like to think that I am a fairly well-organised person. I try to be punctual for meetings; I take a dull pleasure in establishing arcane filing systems for my emails; I synchronise my online calendar with my phone to ensure I never miss an important appointment or birthday. I hope that something of this aspect of my personality shows in my prose, as I also delight in correcting every last stop and comma, and perversely enjoy conforming to the rigours of MLA style.

But, as is evidenced by the scores of poets and writers institutionalised in literary history, writing is a schizophrenic activity. The impulsive Byron can produce some of the most perfectly contrived metrics in English verse; conversely, the scrupulous yours truly finds his writing refuses to stay trim. One morning I awake bursting with inspiration; the next, mind and page are a literal blank. Sleepless nights and restless dreams give rise to expansive Xanadu's of prose; hours of attention in the library yield nothing. Reconciling my writing personality with my more fastidious one has been a challenge for me, in my PhD years, as the months since Christmas (and since my distant previous entry in my Postgraduate Diary) have evidenced sharply.

Over the vacation, I attended a workshop on planning for completion. This explored the practical timetable of submitting titles choosing examiners and getting the thesis printed and bound, and also the intellectual planning required for writing up, honing abstracts and proof reading. Duly, after the workshop, I poured procrastination into the coloured bars of an Excel project planner.

I would devote March to the four conference papers I was giving that month; April and June would be focused on writing the Introduction and Conclusion chapters; three months at the end would be set aside for proof reading; and the three months between Christmas and March would provide ample time for me to write a brief chapter on The Matrix, the final part of my thesis's body.

But over the months since Christmas, that brief chapter became greedy. It swallowed contextual thinking on philosophy and religious allegory; gulped down postmodernism; fatted itself on phenomenology; and then it demanded more. More on the history of Artificial Intelligences in cinema. More on postmodern simulacra. More on representations of Cartesian deceiving demons in fiction.

By March - when I had to break off to write my conference papers - that simple, final chapter had become a confabulatory hydra, chattering about Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and about disincarnate intelligences in early science fiction, and about androids in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and about replicants in Ridley Scott's adaptation of the former, Blade Runner, and about how these different texts (the first two from 1968, the latter from 1982) illustrated the move to postmodern grounds for science fiction which The Matrix then occupies, and about how postmodernism has been conceptualised by Frederic Jameson as the product of late capitalist logic. By April, when I had beaten it into a shape suitable for showing to my supervisor, the beast was 30 000 words long, and I had not even started on The Matrix.

My carefully laid plans thus became horribly corrupted. But - and here is the thing that is both frustrating and thrilling about writing and research - the mutant that unexpectedly now constitutes a third of my 100 000 word limit has made the overall project far stronger. The fact that I was not able to predict I would cover this ground from the outset implies that I have inadvertently uncovered cultural connections and currents that will, because so unexpected, probably lend my research some originality. And, on reflection, it only took three months to write; that is to say, a third of my word count took one twelfth of my three years. Why, writing must be almost becoming easy.

Nevertheless, it is only with hindsight that I can be so positive. The last few months have been a dark and agonising period in my research career. Things now, though, are looking up. When I finally got around to it, the chapter on The Matrix only took three weeks to write, probably because the time away made me realise just how redundant many of my notes were, and to construct an argument based on just a couple of premises. The body of my thesis, though punctuated with "xxx" that mark gaps I have to fill, is now generally complete. I can even afford to take five days off, on a camping trip which I delight in planning to the last detail...except the weather.

Labels: PhD, Postgraduate Diary

Listening to Martha Kearney's excellent mini-series The Idea of a University, I hear the steady tread of modernising and economically-minded feet marching towards my ivory tower. Her series covers the rise of the polytechnic universities following Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology" speech in 1963, in which he warned that the new sciences promised to leave behind those industries with outdated practices and methods. With their musty jackets, academics in traditional universities might have provided one example of the latter, and the polytechnics were the antidote to their staid culture, with their emphasis on vocational courses that could deliver cutting-edge teaching and research and disseminate it into industry through students who would go directly into relevant, and often local, workplaces.

"Relevance" is a dread word for me. A year in to my research, and I have come up with the vital 50-word answer when, at parties, I am asked what my thesis is about. The idea of my stock response is that it be simple enough to be understood without patronising, and elevated enough so that the person to whom I am speaking is not tempted to engage in a long dialogue about it. I socialise to escape research, not to discuss it. But the question I dislike most, and one to which I do not have a definitive answer, is: "Why is my research relevant?"

Last year, my university paid me £15,000 to study, and for the coming two years the AHRC are going to donate some £30,000 to me in the form of living allowances and tuition fees. In some ways, the provision of this money answers the question, or at least redirects it: if my research wasn't relevant, then the higher bodies in education would not have sent down their nuggets of gold from the heavens. Nevertheless, higher education can be accused (and it has been in The Idea of a University) of being a self-fulfilling loop, in which traditional university scholarship is felt to be worthwhile because the people at the top in government, themselves products of that system, feel it to have been of value to them. I have to bear in mind, therefore, that ultimately the money that pays for my research (and my beer and petrol and cameras) comes from outside this loop, from the taxpayer, and the question of value asked by the typical taxpayer I meet at my parties is one I have a responsibility to answer.

The word "value" has a double-meaning. In the first sense, which the OED gives as "That amount of some commodity, medium of exchange, etc., which is considered to be an equivalent for something else," the value of my PhD is not too difficult to estimate. With just 4% of PhDs in Arts and Humanities unemployed after completing their thesis, I will be more likely to obtain a skilled role as part of the UK workforce than I would have been had I joined the ranks of my peers who left as BAs, many of whom are still either unemployed (around 7%) or doing menial work behind bars and in garden centres. In the findings of the document "What do PhDs Do?" commissioned by the UK Grad programme, "In a modern knowledge-based economy, highly educated and skilled people - knowledge workers - are in great demand. PhD graduates are, arguably, the most highly skilled and educated people in our society." According to some figures, salaries reflect this, with PhDs earning up to a third more than those with only first degrees. So, over the course of the next fifty years in employment, I can expect to repay the investment made in me several times over.

Nevertheless, in the immediate term of the coming few years, it is the second meaning of the word "value" - "The relative status of a thing, or the estimate in which it is held, according to its real or supposed worth, usefulness, or importance" - to which I need to respond. Harold Wilson may have wanted universities to drive the UK economy forward through the white heat of technology, and there is no doubt that in the science sector the universities have been powerhouses of research and development. I heard a talk the other day from a former university lecturer whose spin-off company developing imaging crystals is now worth some £15 million, with contracts from the European Space Agency and potential worldwide markets opening in airport security systems. This, from a relatively small initial investment, as the university already had the infrastructure in place to pursue new lines of interest with ease: an international research community, the freedom to innovate, laboratories and, yes, a pool of eager doctoral students able to contribute their skills much more cheaply than could similar workers in industry.

But the "white heat" quite literally generated in the chemistry labs is hardly something I experience at my desk. In the words of a famous Punch cartoon, "Sometimes I sits and thinks, and then again I just sits" in, on good days, a smoulder of good ideas and words. In Education and the University: A Sketch for an English School, F.R. Leavis may have placed the English department at the centre of university life, but his heyday is long gone. When asked by Kearney about the changes in higher education that have taken place over the last thirty years, Mary Warnock, in her considered tones, lamented the passing of the idea that one could do research simply for the joyful sake of it. She did not, however, say why this ever was a valid argument, and the idea of ars gratia artis (art for the sake of art) no longer satisfies even me; it certainly, therefore, would not be expected to satisfy most taxpayers or Blairite politicians. If Warnock - one of our most respected philosophers - failed to come up with a response, I cannot be expected to do so either, at least not in the brief space of this blog. For the time being, I will have to satisfy my party interrogators with the financial statements of my "value" to UK Plc. Answering the other part of the "value" issue is something I must, however, work on.

Labels: AHRC, PhD, Postgraduate Diary, the idea of a university