Sinister Resistance

My attitude to this whole PhD business has calmed down a lot lately, despite the rapidly-ticking clock that’s now deafening me as it counts down to the final deadline I can submit a thesis. I’m yet to come to a conclusion as to whether this is a Good Thing or not.

I think I’ve just reached the point with my research that it’s just over, now, and that there’s not much more I can do with it (or time to do it in) except to just “finish it off” and hope that it’s good enough. I certainly don’t have time to go re-doing a lot of my work if it isn’t good enough, so in that respect, I’ve reached some sort of ‘epiphany’ that it doesn’t really matter anymore; the decision has essentially already been made as to whether I get this damned PhD or not, I just need to ride the train and see where it ends up. All I can do now is just continue with the work I’m still finishing off, continue with the thesis-writing I’m still in the process of, and make sure I keep turning up each day and picking away at it all. It’s too late to do anything major [not least because I’m also working part-time as a Senior Research Assistant on two EU space debris projects: ACCORD (Alignment of Capability and Capacity for Objective of Reducing Debris) and ReVuS (Reducing the Vulnerability of Space Systems)] so even if my work is all wrong, or just not ‘novel’ enough, then there’s not much I can do about it anymore.

I’ve also relaxed my position towards what my four years of research will get me in the end – in the beginning, it felt like  attaining a PhD was the be-all and end-all, and that if I didn’t achieve that, then I’d be some sort of ‘failure’; from both the point of view of my department/supervisor, but on a personal level as well. At around the 18-month stage, I successfully transferred from the original MPhil/PhD course everyone is registered on to begin with, and was stuck on the final PhD course: so, I’d like to think that, if my work isn’t quite enough to get me a doctorate, I will at least be awarded an MPhil for it. Depending on who you talk to in academia, getting an MPhil is either a legitimate qualification, or just a massive, neon sign saying “Hey, so I wasn’t good enough to get a PhD!” Previously, I was considerably worried that I’d end up with just an MPhil (or worse, nothing) and that I’d be considered a ‘failure’, particularly since so many of my RockSoc friends have successfully survived the PhD process and come out the other side. Such a result would be an acceptance that I’m not “clever enough,” or somehow less good than everyone else who tried and succeeded.

In the final years of my undergraduate degree, I’d kind of ended up feeling a little bit disappointed by my efforts on my individual and group projects (3rd and 4th years, respectively), and had built up a mental reputation of being someone who tries very hard at their research, but ultimately ends up with very little. Of course, when starting a PhD, everyone dreams that their research will change the world, or at least lead to some new way of thinking or solution to a problem; naturally, this rarely ever happens and it’s all about making an incremental step forward in your field, even if it’s just a minute step forward in a very specialised area. Have I managed that with my PhD work so far? Well, I kind of have ( I tried some new stuff, and some old stuff in a new way) and kind of haven’t (the stuff I did didn’t really work, and there are a bunch of problems with the theoretical basis of it all), so it’s very ambiguous. My thesis won’t be my greatest achievement ever, but I’ve kind of reached a plateau where (I think) I can finish it up in its current state without undertaking a major amount of new work. I think.

So, everything’s been kind of going okay recently until, today, I received a reviewer’s (uh, review) of my submitted journal paper and it was… not so good. This was a paper I submitted to an open-access journal around 5/6 months ago, and after receiving one critical but largely positive comment early on, there has no other review discussion since. The most recent comment, from an anonymous reviewer is, however, fairly critical and calls into question most of the results I’ve presented in the paper. I know that, technically, no criticism is bad criticism as it will strengthen the final product, but it’s still not easy to take negativity when it’s thrown quite liberally at your own endeavours. I’m yet to fully process the review (I only skim-read it, and need to sleep on it before I can start to think properly about what it means), but it’s not exactly what I want to hear. It’s amazing how quickly confidence can get knocked; particularly in academia, where your importance to your institution, or scientific field, is based almost purely on your ability to string together publications and gives rise to the “publish or perish” mantra.

So, what does this mean for me? Well, by and large, I think I’ve worked out that I don’t want to stay in academia after my current time is up; not in a direct-research role, anyway. I’ve got thoughts about what I want to do when I finish, and a lot of them revolve around teaching, or expanding on the outreach/public engagement activities I currently participate in. I’ve no idea whether this is a sustainable career, or indeed whether the ‘ideal’ job exists, but it’s worth a shot. With that in mind, then, perhaps I’ve reached the conclusion that it doesn’t matter whether I have a PhD or an MPhil; whether I’ve got journal publications under my belt or not. These things largely only matter in academia; so, who cares? Certainly,  the trauma of ‘doing’ a PhD is worth more than the letters after your name or the ‘published’ status anyway, so if I’ve already reached that conclusion, then I’ve got nothing to lose.

‘Dr.’ or no ‘Dr.’, by October I will have gone through the PhD process and be all the stronger for it: most people in my situation would have given up long ago, so if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s Carrying On In The Face Of Vastly Superior Adversity. In fact, maybe that should be the tagline for my CV:

Simon George.
Good at facial hair, making a mean cup of tea and bloody well not giving up.

And if that doesn’t make me a shoo-in for any job placement ever, then there’s something very wrong with this World. Something very wrong, indeed.

[Zinar7]

Okay, as we’ve just enter a new year, I thought that it was time for an update on my ride on this crazy PhD Research Train. What’s changed? Well, a few things, but not a great deal.

Around the end of October, I started doing some additional, part-time post-doctoral research work to help pay the bills now that my PhD funding has come to an end. Thankfully, it’s completely unrelated to my PhD work, which means it’s actually pretty interesting and a nice distraction from the thesis slog. The work is more temporal though, meaning that the post-doc stuff has weeks where lots of work needs to be done and 100% of my time is spent on it; and others, like now, where there’s not much to do at the moment and I’m focussing pretty much entirely on my thesis. This blog was always focussed on the PhD struggle, so I’m not going to talk too much about my other research commitments, but stick to my thesis work. t’s probably not a huge surprise to say that I’ve lost almost all my motivation and interest for finishing my PhD – this comes despite the fact that the sooner I can finish, the sooner I can work on something else; somehow, I’m finding it hard to muster even the motivation to just “GET IT DONE”), and can find infinite amount of other things that I’d rather spend my time on. This has been made doubly hard, since I technically already have the job (the post-doc position) that I needed a PhD for in the first place, so it’s not like I need that Certificate of Graduation for a job interview or anything.

So what’s going on? The past few months have been super frustrating, as some significant problems were been identified with my scientific technique and have led to me kind of not being sure whether what I’m doing is right, wrong or whatever. I’ve had doubts about my results for a while, but have largely put these to the back of my mind because the scientific models are complex and the theory is very confusing: recently, though, I’ve had to really tackle the mathematics and it’s left me completely baffled. It’s time like this that I wish that my project/thesis was on something that somewhere here (i.e. my university) knows about, because no-one aside from me really does and neither are there a bunch of resources (aside from those I’ve collected) that I can draw on if I’m in a bind. My work is quite distant from my supervisor’s field, and so he’s not really able to help with any of the technical details, use of models or analysis of results except in a vague quantitative way. My PhD always started from a position of isolation, as my main remit was to do some exploratory research into a dark region that no-one’s really looked into before, and essentially been given a flashlight and told: “right, go and find something interesting, and bring it back here when you’re done.”

It’s a matter of slight pride that, with everything I’ve done, I’ve done off my own bat: except some gentle comments from others, I’ve gotten where I have purely because of my own work. All the way, I’ve largely driven myself in the direction that I have, and have been given limited guidance on what exactly I should be looking at. From a research point of view, maybe that reflects well on me in that I’ve managed to be pretty much autonomous for the last 3 years, and developed things of my own accord; on the other side, though, this means that I’ve had to search everywhere for the ‘right’ way to do, hitting many dead ends along the way and absorbing considerable frustration. Of the work I have done with my results, I’m pulling together ideas and concepts from a number of fields and trying to make them compatible, but in a way that I’m not really an expert in any one of them and there are considerable problems in integrating the scientific model in the way that I have. I’m woefully aware of the meaninglessness of my results (or what results I’ve actually managed to get) and am not entirely convinced that my efforts are truly at the sort of standard to which they hand out doctorates. Maybe I’m overestimating how ‘good’ or ‘novel’ the final thesis needs to be, but I’ve got super-mega worries that what I have so far is painfully below the mark.

Over the whole of my PhD research, I kind of feel like I’ve squandered my time and expertise. I feel like if I’d have focussed on the right things, I could be somewhere good with my research, but that in reality, all I’ve managed to do is find problems everywhere with what I’m doing and flaws in the models/techniques that I’m using. Sure, this might be valid ‘research’ in finding out the wrong way to go about science/a PhD/[insert relevant title here] and technically no science is ‘useless’ science (unless someone already proved it), but it’s no match for actually doing something positive with your work. I kind of feel like the only positive thing that will have come out of my PhD is that someone, somewhere might read my thesis and not have to go through the same three years of frustration and errors and wrong directions that I did. I’m currently trying to formulate a title and general approach (the story, say) that my thesis will describe, and it’s a brain-breaking task. My work feels just like a smattering of ideas that people elsewhere already came up with, but thrown together in a way that things haven’t quite been looked at in this form before, or with these methods. Maybe my thesis can be called: ‘A Bunch of Science Thrown Together with Blunderbuss Accuracy‘ or ‘How Not to do a PhD (and 101 Other Useful Tips for Going Completely Crazy Before You’re Thirty)‘, and that’ll summarise things quite well.

Yes, yes, I know I’m being pessimistic. I know that I just need to Yvan Muller the PhD, and get the bloody thing down. Maybe it won’t be the best piece of research ever, but maybe I can fill it with enough pretty pictures or flattering writing that the examiners will overlook the significant lack of content and ‘pass’ me, largely out of pity. We can but hope.

[Zinar7]