phd preparation diaries: how do you actually prepare for a phd?

the stuff I thought I'd have to do and the stuff I actually have to do, going on walks, going into the house of leaves, fresh spinach

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I’ve stopped counting how many issues of the PhD preparation diaries I’ve written now because the passing of time frightens me. But it’s coming up on four months since I had the idea and we’ve covered a lot of topics, and we’ve got a lot of topics still to cover. It turns out alchemising yourself into a PhD student covers a lot of ground and we’ve been everywhere from reading trackers to body image to travel to despair and back again. We’ve done a lot of detail on the word ‘PhD’ — everything it means to me, all my dreams for it, how I fit it into my life and timetable. We’ve done a decent amount of work on ‘diaries’ — I’ve kept reading diaries and morning diaries, traced and retraced my schedule and all the places a part time PhD fits in my crowded google calendar. But what about the word ‘preparation’?

That was meant to be the easiest word of the three and it’s become the hardest. I’m not sure what preparing to do a PhD means. I’m not sure what the work of a PhD is going to be and it’s hard to make a to do list to get ready for something I can’t picture. I know what I’ll have written at the end of it and I know who I am now. I don’t know how one turns into the other. When I switch to part time hours this autumn and have a glorious whole workday free to be ‘on campus’ and ‘really doing’ my ‘actual PhD’, I don’t know what those days will look like.

So in this issue of the PhD preparation diaries, I want to talk about how I’m approaching the actual preparing part of the PhD preparation diaries. I have no idea if any of what I’m doing is right. I have no idea if this is advice. Let’s try and work that out together.

I have a real urge to work out what other people are doing, or what other people have done, and try to make their experiences useful to me. A research degree in the humanities is an essentially lonely endeavor and I’ll build a community around me through any means I can grab at, in any format.

I know a lot of people who have done or are doing PhDs. I value talking to them about their experiences, and what they have to say to me is neither completely relevant nor completely irrelevant. Taking lessons from their experiences means turning my head sideways and unfocusing my eyes a bit. If you’re reading this series to relate it back to your own life then I really hope it’s worth doing, and I hope turning your head sideways and unfocusing your eyes makes it fit.

The doctoral-degree-holder I know best is my friend Rose. We did our BAs together so she’s as situated as anyone possibly could be in where I’m coming from, what foundations I’m working on in everything I know, and what my expectations and habits for study are. She did a DPhil in medieval literature too so you’d hope her experiences would be good and useful. And they’re not not useful — but Oxford is a foreign country, they do things differently there. Rose’s stories are indivisible from their Oxford context and I’m not studying in Oxford. Her project was tightly focused on one tradition and one time and place, whereas I’ll be roving in interdisciplinary dream visions across centuries and methodologies. She studied full time in a college where she lived and ate and spent all her time. I’m studying part time in London, spending one day and the evenings on campus.

Many of my other friends exist somewhere nearer to me or further away across the same spectrum — I’ve got a good friend studying at the same institution as me, with the same supervisor, a year ahead of me, but full time, and looking closely at one text and lots of manuscript studies. If she has a compulsory palaeography class will I have a compulsory palaeography class? Should I start going back over the palaeography books I didn’t really read at undergrad? My project doesn’t have much to do with palaeography — at present. I can add it. Should I add it? My friend Marie did the same masters as me and is now finishing up a PhD around working a job in my same industry, at a different university. My friend Claire is starting a funded history PhD in my same cohort in a project involving my university. She might have some good tips actually, but we’re starting in the same year so she doesn’t have any advice for me yet.

My friend Jeff is a postdoc in climate physics. He’s a really kind person and he doesn’t at all buy into the ‘humanities students are all misguided child morons’ narrative (which I think is less common among real life scientists than internet weirdos would have us believe). He’s offered to help read future funding applications of mine and help any way he can. It’s really kind of him and I probably will take him up on his offer. But it’s hard to receive tips from a climate physicist when I don’t actually know what climate physics is, and I don’t think he knows what ecocriticam medievalism is.

I ask a lot of people what advice they think I should take, the advice they wish they’d had when they started. Often, that advice is, ‘Don’t do it, get out while you can’. Which I’m not gonna take. Then we get into the specifics of their degrees and how and when they did it. I listen and thank them, the same way many of you listen and thank me, and in my heart I say ‘kinda’.

And then there’s all the people I don’t know. If there’s one thing the internet is good for, it’s encountering the thoughts and experiences of thousands of randos who I’d never have known were alive if it weren’t for social media. It’s wonderful, and it’s a wonderful learning tool for going into a PhD. My only issue is that the assembled grad school masses on the internet are mainly US-Americans and I have no idea how far their experiences are applicable to me, or applicable a little to me, or complete red herrings. They seem to drink a lot of matcha and have more compulsory teaching hours than British doctoral students, study for longer, do more pilates, have exams.

I wouldn’t be on social media as many hours a week as I am if I didn’t love watching americans with more money than me live their everyday lives. I love this content and the algorithm feeds it to me because I always watch and like it. The programmes we’re studying on don’t match up at all, though, and I’m not even sure how far the underlying aims and skills are the same. That’s not a comparison of quality — I just think the US and UK education systems are structured around such different aims and practices all the way up from primary school through university. We all come out of a terminal degree in literature very clever but I’m not sure how far any of our nuts-and-bolts day-to-day advice benefits each other.

There are only a handful of people in the UK posting about graduate degrees in the humanities in any detail. I’ve watched every scrap of content ever posted by all of them. But you can only learn so much from a face on a screen. Research degrees in the humanities are some of the most idiosyncratic and case-by-case customisable things you can do. If I follow the every move of an early modernist in Scotland, all I’m learning about is the every move of an early modernist in Scotland.

So how do I actually try to prepare?

My actual real-life supervisor’s advice was to relax and go on holiday. I’ve taken that advice and I am currently on holiday. I get told to relax a lot, and I don’t like doing it, but I’m trying. I’m only doing a little bit of PhD-relevant work on holiday. Just a bit per day. Not lots, I promise.

The actual preparation I’m doing takes two forms. Neither of them feel like quite enough, but they’re also the only things I can think of that I back to genuinely come in handy later. The version of me that I’m trying to serve well with this preparation doesn’t exist yet, and she also knows a lot of things I don’t know. It would be easy to spend a lot of money and keep myself desperately busy this year and then my PhD-studying self would look back and ask what I was doing with myself and all that time.

I want to start this autumn feeling prepared but I don’t want to overfill a year of my life with busywork just so I can feel like I’m doing something.

In terms of actual academic preparation, I’m trying to read books and papers that give me interesting methodology thoughts. My project combines and interweaves literary methodologies in ways that are, at their best, innovative but are also, at their worst, just a person ranting wildly about all the little polaroids and bits of string on their wall. So I’m trying to read books by Real Academics and competent writers who put turn texts from different centuries inside out and put them on top of each other. I’m not too bothered at this time about them being on the texts I’m studying, or even particularly about the Middle Ages. I’m just trying to understand how that juxtaposition works and how to come out the other side of it sounding like a person who knows what they’re talking about.

Medievalism, the art/science of finding the Middle Ages in non-medieval texts and working out what they’re doing with them, has been done delicately and gracefully by a lot of really cool people. I’m trying to practice using those muscles without worrying too much about reading things I can literally cite in my literal actual chapters. I’ve been reading a lot recently about House of Leaves and its many strange and corrupted Dante quotes. I’ve been reading about Picnic at Hanging Rock pressed up against The Turn of the Screw and how gothic texts from different centuries and continents can try to have a conversation about landscape. I’m enjoying the freedom of doing critical reading without the requirement of it building towards anything in an exact sort of way.

And the other part of my preparation is pretty much health-related. Some advice I’ve received that I’ve really taken in and thought about in detail is that any PhD, but particularly a part time PhD, is an endurance race the likes of which I’ve never done before. Treating it as a purely mental, big-brain challenge would be misguided, I reckon.

A couple of weeks ago when I was writing about academia and body image (read it, it’s good) in this series, I said something that resonated with a bunch of people about how narratives around academia are often guilty of treating it like a space where the body doesn’t exist at all. You just try really, really, really hard to be really, really, really clever. You skip meals and let your muscles cramp and your back hunch while you read and at the end, you get to be really, really, really clever, and your body doesn’t matter. This is all doubly true for women.

Reflecting on that piece and responding to the many cool, fascinating, emotional comments on it, I thought about how much more important my ‘physical preparations’ started to look compared to my mental preparations. In a lot of ways, having done a masters in this topic is enough, it’s clearly enough. I could do nothing academic at all between now and October an turn up as a more than respectable grad student.

Are my body and my routines and beliefs about my body and looking after myself up to scratch, though?

Does preparing to do something difficult, exhausting and long actually require me to ask much deeper and more difficult questions, about how much sleep I get, whether I get proper breakfasts, how I reward and punish myself, how I stand or sit or work on my posture, how I think about nourishing myself. I’m hoping that doing something so big, difficult and meaningful to me can be a prompt to finally take care of myself more.

I’m twenty nine and I can feel my body expressing its exhaustion with the way I’ve treated it, all this time, all the time I was trying to be too clever to need it or allow it to need anything from me. I don’t think me and my meat vehicle can actually scale this five-year mountain together unless we reach a better equilibrium and find a way to work with each other.

I never want to use this platform to list unhealthy things I’ve done for/with/to myself. I think there’s plenty of that on the internet and I bet you can imagine, or collage together from every article you’ve ever read about a woman who hates her body. Suffice it to say I’ve done both ends of types of behaviour. When I realise one extreme is hurting me I rocket to the other one, because it’s easier to be intensely restrictive or abdicate all control than it is to work out how to actually treat myself kindly, slowly, with commitment and understanding, and then do that forever.

The work of reading fun little horror papers on JSTOR and highlighting the Dante-esque bits of House of Leaves is easy. The work of trying to get into the habit of loving myself, practically and meaningfully, enough to eat a real breakfast or go on a run after work is hard.

When I started this series I imagined it would all be about big beautiful brain work coming out of my big beautiful brain. I started this substack account, specifically, with no pictures or avatars of me so that I could be as far as it’s possible to be from a person with a body. Then I discovered my body was actually the part of me that needed me most, and the clicking about on JSTOR and wandering through bookshops was just a nice way to spend some time.

I think the PhD is finally the thing I love enough to sort my shit out. That’s an emotional thing to say and I really hope it’s true. My biggest wish for my PhD era, and for my thirties which start alarmingly soon, is for my body and I to reach a truce. I’ve said that a lot of times before but now I’m facing up to the idea I’ll do worse in the very expensive and difficult thing I want more than anything in the world if I don’t manage this.

So how am I preparing for a PhD? Not the way I thought I was going to. I’m going on walks. I’m putting multipacks of oaty cacao bar things in my locker at work so I always have something with nutrients in to eat if I’ve run out the door without breakfast. I’m buying spinach in small bags and still finding it all goes curly before I’ve managed to eat it. I’m tracking how much sleep I get and hoping to get more sleep, though I’m not very good at that. It’s not what I thought I’d be doing but I think it’s what I need.