5 Problems only PhD Students will Understand

All PhD students run into problems from time to time – tough chapter drafts, tricky supervisions, awkward conference questions. It’s all part of the ebb and flow of doctoral research.

This isn’t about those problems though. This is about the little problems. The day to day problems. The ones no one else understands.

It’s the reason you’ve stopped going to neighbourhood barbeques, haven’t been seen at an extended family get-together in years and have recently taken to cutting your own hair.

As everyone knows, these sorts of encounter flow along on a gentle wave of polite small-talk, a crucial component of which is the time-honoured ice-breaker: ‘so, what do you do?’

For most people, it’s easy. They say: ‘I’m a criminal lawyer’ or ‘I’m a primary school teacher’ or ‘I’m the person who’s cutting your hair, you idiot.’

People reply in kind with ‘oh, that must be interesting’ or ‘you must really like children’ or ‘I think you’ve just sliced the top of my ear off.’

The conversation proceeds logically to the next stage, which is usually about where people are planning to go on holiday this year.

Not for PhD students though.

It doesn’t matter what your subject area is: no successful social ice-breaker involves replies like ‘I explore the political ramifications surrounding the representation of badgers in seventeenth-century poetry’ or ‘I’m working out how to make tiny invisible particles move around a tiny invisible box without touching the sides’.

And the holiday question won’t save you. You haven’t been on holiday for years.

In the ‘real world’, very little happens on a Wednesday. It’s the non-descript day in the middle of the week, far enough from the last weekend to have forgotten it and not really close enough to the next for it to be worth getting excited.

In academia, the reverse is true. For it was decreed, long ago, by men with beards (probably) that academic timetables would leave Wednesday afternoons free of teaching… and full of everything else.

That really interesting research seminar you wanted to go to? The one with the free wine and nibbles? It’s on Wednesday afternoon.

That important supervision you’ve been trying to arrange for weeks? Your supervisor is free on Wednesday afternoon.

That meeting about the conference you’re organising next month? How about Wednesday afternoon?

That undergraduate module you’re teaching? There’s no timetable on a Wednesday afternoon, but the essay’s due next week and everyone has questions. Can you arrange an office hour, maybe on Wednesday afternoon?

And it’s still days until the weekend.

PhD students don’t have anything against undergraduates. Undergraduates are great. They’re young, enthusiastic and they’re about the only people on campus who think you’re a genius.

They also remind you of those carefree days, years ago when you too could go to the pub between seminars and eat nothing but noodles and crisps. Instead of going to the library between supervisions and eating nothing but noodles and crisps.

But, when you do get a chance to go to the pub… you don’t want to be surrounded by undergraduates.

For you, the pub is a place of quiet reflection. An oasis of calm in which to sip gin and tonic and contemplate Proust.

It’s a lot harder to calmly sip gin and tonic and contemplate Proust when surrounded by excited undergraduates drinking discounted lager. Particularly when one of them recognises you and thinks ‘Hey, isn’t that my seminar tutor from last semester. . . the one who gave me a terrible mark for my essay on Proust?’

You’ve worked hard all week.

You wrote half a chapter, sorted your teaching and checked in with your supervisor. You somehow managed to be in about six different places on Wednesday afternoon and you left the pub nice and early on Friday (it was full of undergraduates).

Now it’s Sunday.

You’re taking a break on Sunday. You’ve earned a break on Sunday. You’re going to relax all day, guilt free.

You might take a walk. Or go see a film. You might even go shopping. Yes, shopping! You haven’t been shopping in ages. Brilliant. You need some new clothes. Something suitable for that paper you’re giving next week. Maybe you can go see a film afterwards. Yes! You’re a genius. First a coffee. Kettle’s boiling. . . may as well check your phone.

You load up Facebook and the first thing you see is a fellow PhD student updating their status from behind a pile of books in the university library.

You sigh and reach for your chapter plan. Maybe there'll be time for shopping next Wednesday afternoon. . .

Interdisciplinarity, as they say, is the future.

Or at least it was until Public Engagement was the future.

Now they’re probably both the future – after all, members of the public are part of a different academic discipline to you, aren’t they? One with more money. And less noodles.

In any case, interdisciplinary conferences are very much part of the academic present. Sometimes, they’re a very interesting part of the academic present, too.

That’s most of the time.

But there are those other interdisciplinary conferences. The ones that feel a little like they were thrown together using an academic fridge poetry kit, with parallel sessions featuring confused criminologists and baffled crime fiction specialists, or plenary sessions involving eminent political scientists chaired by embarrassed… science scientists.

These are the conferences that call for you to adopt your best academic poker face as you struggle to think of a response to well-meaning posters and presentations.

You study eighteenth-century history. Hume was an eighteenth-century philosopher. That presentation on Hume’s critique of free will… had some pretty nice slides! You’re a life scientist. Physics is a science. That poster on a sub-atomic particle you’ve never heard of is. . . very well designed!