If I were to do my PhD again… (Part 2: The things I ended up doing but wish I’d done sooner)

In Part 1 of this post, I looked at the things I didn’t do during my PhD but that I wish I had. In this post, I’ll be telling you about some of the things I did do but that took me a while to figure out. Hopefully, this means that you can implement anything that appeals earlier than I did (but, hey, better late than never, right?).

1. Be strategic about professional opportunities

In Part 1, I talked about how effectively trying to build two separate CVs – one for a career in academia, one for a non-academic career – was hard. The way I did it was to be very strategic with the professional opportunities I pursued and took on. I was mindful about developing new skills and being able to point to specific activities I had undertaken or experiences I had with a view to using these things in job applications.

Once I had enough teaching experience to prove to a prospective employer that I wasn’t a liability in the classroom, I didn’t take up more tutoring work. I made an exception when it came to the offer to convene courses – but that represented a new skill I didn’t have that would add value to my CV. Once I had experience developing online learning content (and a couple of tangible examples I could point to in job applications), it made more sense to pursue different kinds of roles to fill out my experience.

When deciding which roles to apply for and take on during your PhD, think about what you haven’t had experience in doing yet that will make you more competitive for your next job. Get teaching experience, for sure, because it’s a brilliant transferable skill. But also try to draft an ethics approval, be involved in a grant application, use different methods from the one(s) you use in your research, collaborate with other scholars, undertake policy work if the opportunity arises… Evaluate possible employment opportunities with broadening your CV in mind because whether you decide to stay in academic or go elsewhere, this experience can only be a good thing.

2. Make peace with the messiness of the thinking-writing-editing process

I say that I made peace with the messiness of the thinking-writing-editing process during the PhD, but that’s a big lie. I’m still hoping to stumble upon a thinking-comes-before-writing-comes-before-editing magic spell. Until I find one, I’m resigned to the reality that they aren’t actually discrete activities: I think through writing; I go back and forth between writing and editing; editing helps hone my thinking because it lets me see new links. (On that note, I love what Eliza Garnsey said in her the (academic) writer blog post on the iterative process of research.)

I was horrified to find out at my first PhD meeting that I wouldn’t be spending the first year just mooching around and reading; that I was going to have to write words ­– quite a lot of them – from the get-go. But, of course, it was a perfect lesson in how the mash-up of thinking-writing-editing works in practice, and now when I’m starting a new research project, I am okay with having bits of writing that are in italics (I tell my brain that these are ‘just for now’ words so I can trick it into getting words on the page), comments to myself in the margin saying ‘this isn’t working’, and in-text citations to research that I hope exists somewhere (‘see, for example, xx and xx’).

3. Lean into serendipity and trust the hunches

As I’ve written about elsewhere, serendipity can be your friend in research if you’re open to it. I could never have picked the direction that my research ended up going in. Some of the most original (and interesting) parts of my research came about as a result of asking ‘what if I try this?’ or ‘I wonder what would happen if…?’ or picking up a book that seemed entirely unrelated but ended up being the missing piece of the puzzle.

I found that this was particularly the case when I tried to write a chapter over and over, and it just wasn’t working. In the serendipity blog, I talked about the frustration that was my methods chapter. It was (or should have been) a perfectly straightforward overview of discourse analysis. And yet, for whatever reason, it just didn’t work; it didn’t fit, it didn’t read right. It was all wrong. And, as disheartening as starting again was, it ended up being the right thing for the research. I wish that I’d known sooner to trust that, while writing can be challenging, if you keep trying and it doesn’t feel right, and the words just won’t come, maybe listen to that hunch. It might not be a you-thing ­– it might be that your research has other plans for itself.

4. Give your brain the chance to mull over a writing problem (aka make soup)

I don’t particularly like soup, but gosh, did I make a lot of the stuff during my PhD. It was the perfect productive but mindless activity (I hadn’t yet discovered knitting) – if I got stuck when writing, all the vegetable chopping and stirring and blending let my brain quietly mull over the problem without the frustration and angst of trying to make the words come. Same thing with taking a shower or going for a walk. If you can make space for thinking about your research without pushing your brain to think hard about it and just let it simmer away, you might find that the writing problem solves itself. (Even if it doesn’t, at least you’ve made dinner, had a shower, or gone for a walk.)

5. Get a person/squad/pen pal asap

Thanks to my work as a Research Assistant while doing my PhD, I had a desk in a tiny shared office on campus. In the last eighteen months or so of my dissertation, there were four of us in there, and the three others became (and remain) dear friends. What worked perfectly about us was that we were all at slightly different stages of our dissertations, and we were all in the social sciences but doing very different research projects – meaning that there was no competition, only support and camaraderie.

This was vastly different from the first year of my PhD where I was pretty isolated, and so I speak from experience when I say finding my people was game-changing. We complained together, strategised, celebrated wins, did writing sprints ­– and the best part was, they got it. They got the slog of writing, the sting of critical feedback, the anxiety of looming deadlines, the juggle of work and life and PhD… because they were living it too.

You don’t need to share an office with someone to make this work: your person or squad or pen pal might be on the other side of the world, and you Zoom once a week or fortnight to catch up or keep in touch via WhatsApp. But doing a PhD alone? It’s tough and not much fun. So whether it's someone in your cohort or someone you met at a conference and liked, it’s well worth building that relationship.