The first flush of enthusiasm of doing a PhD and being able to tell the world that I’m a proper researcher seem to be wearing off a little. The realisation is starting to dawn that this is going to a slow marathon and that I need to work out how to pace myself.
I’m not sure how and why this is happening. It may be connected with that until now, I’ve been able to set concrete goals and have something focused to work on. The first phase started on PhD induction day at the beginning of October and last until the research methods course early in December. Then after the course I had to prepare my coursework and spent time over Christmas and the New Year working on the first draft, ready for submission at the end of next month (February). I’m meeting with my supervisor early next month when we will review the draft. I think I know where to edit it (mostly around the research aims and objectives and the research questions). So I hope that it won’t take more than a couple of days to make the final edits after that.
So in the interim, I’m working through my reading pile and finding that the more I read, the more topics and issues to explore that seem to pop up (and the less that I know). At this stage it is hard to narrow down the scope of the potential area that I want to research, to find the clues that will give me the ‘aha!’ moment that I suspect that I’m secretly waiting for; to find a theory or model that I can apply to the topic that I’m interested in. All the bright ideas that I had early on and even until recently seem to have eased off for nowup, and I can’t seem to see the wood for the trees.
I look and gasp at PhDers a year or more ahead of me who seem to have got to grips with and grasped all this philosophical stuff and know whether they are a constructivist, postmodernist or are they are using ethnography, narrative discourse or action research. They seem so cleverer than me and I'm hesitating to tread my toes in the philosophical sea. I feel a bad case of impostor syndrome coming on.
Although I’m sort of waving my hand in the air, saying that I want to have written a first draft of my literature review by December 2012, I’m struggling to set interim goals, to identify the steps that will take me from now to then. And this isn’t like me. I’m usually one for being able to work out what I need to do and by when. So it is frustrating to find myself feeling like this.
I’m lucky in that I have a couple of PhD buddies and #PhDchat on Twitter is also fantastic. I love being a PhDer and I'm relishing the opportunity to focus on and explore my own interests and find out about them. And I realise that what I’m thinking is all part of the process, the ups and downs of doing a PhD. In the meantime I plod on in the nitty gritty of the next article(s), waiting for inspiration. (And working out how I'm going to come up with an outline for my literature review, going through my notes and working how and where I can slot them in, to give me a start).
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