After seven years, I finally handed in my PhD thesis a few weeks ago which feels like an achievement but I can’t let that feeling sit for very long because I still have the oral examination (VIVA) to come. So, here I am, trying very hard to keep my knowledge at the forefront of my mind and not let it wander off into Game of Thrones territory, so that I will be prepared for this final hurdle.
Part-time PhD is a difficult journey just as full-time PhD is but there are challenges related to the protracted length of part-time study, such as: keeping motivated, maintaining the contemporary nature of your research and the literature underpinning it and most of all, balancing your job with such a demanding programme of study. I have struggled with each of these elements throughout the seven years and have found my own solutions and strategies to keep going. These are some of the issues I want to blog about today.
Motivation can be difficult, a seven year degree sounds ridiculous on the one hand, but what has saved my skin has been the passion I have for my subject. I am children’s and neonatal nurse and I specialised in palliative and bereavement care in clinical practice. The study for my PhD has been in this context and so my desire to further my own knowledge, make a unique contribution to the evidence and a wish to represent the lived experiences of families going through the worst that life can throw at them, kept me focused. My biggest tip for anyone thinking of embarking on a PhD is to research and study something you care about so that when the writing makes you feel suffocated, repeatedly, as it will, your passion will help you rise to the surface and breathe. Stay connected to your subject, users, students, the public involved in your subject and you will always keep hold of the ‘why you are doing this’.
A lot can change in a subject context in seven years, especially in healthcare and even more so in a newer speciality such as neonatal palliative care. If you undertake a full-time PhD, the odds are that in the 3-4 years of study, your writing will be contemporaneous but it is quite different if you are studying for longer. My subject is in a fast-moving world with pharmacological, technical and medical developments changing care all the time. What I found was that my literature review, undertaken at the beginning of the seven years was rather out of date by the time I was getting ready to submit. I knew this was the case because I had stayed connected to the neonatal and palliative care world but this did mean a lot of leg work to update my literature review. It is an expected update for part-time PhD but I think I underestimated how much work was required. You can help yourself by having alerts set up for journals that publish your kind of research, attend conferences that keep you up to date and if possible be involved in networks that take you to the front line. All these strategies helped me keep up with what was going on in my subject.
The biggest challenge for part-time PhD normally comes in the form of the other ‘thing’ that you are doing with your time and for most of us in this boat, it is a job. I’ve been a full-time lecturer with PhD ‘on the side’, ‘a hobby’, ‘constant guilt trip’ and ‘the other member of my family’. It is so important to have an employer that is invested in your study, normally there is significant gain for them. If your employer isn’t able to or doesn’t want to deliver on the investment it needs for you to succeed, make a change. As a wife and mother, I needed an understanding and supportive family and I am lucky to have had this through seven years of ups and downs. If you have dependants and commitments, you are going to need their support but be as honest as you can about the time frame, the deadlines and when they will be and that Christmases will probably include PhD.
On top of all of this, to be successful at the long journey (I know, I’ve not made it yet, still the issue of that pesky VIVA) you need resilience. Resilience is needed to stay the course in literal terms, but also to get the most out of constructive criticism and to cope with the long road of ethical approvals and transcription (if applicable) and writing up. Resilience is also needed to fend off extended family enquiries at year 5 Christmas get-togethers where you are repeatedly asked ‘are you still doing that thing?’ Resilience in PhD is a building project, you may have some natural resilience but the ups and downs, the occasional knocks, all build towards you being more resilient. Use those negative experiences to make you stronger and good luck!
For the love of catharsis 