Hitting the Wall

I think I've hit the metaphorical wall.

I keep questioning it, thinking this is surely far to early in my PhD career to be experiencing such things, but they're there nonetheless. And to clarify, I'm not freaking out, I'm not upset, worried or anxious, I'm not angry or stressed. I'm just... tired.

I know I still love my research. I'm still glad to be doing a PhD - research is still what I want to do for the rest of my life! I just seem to be unwillingly experiencing some apathy right now. (Though, I wonder if by definition, if it's unwilling can it really be apathy?)

There are lots of possible explanations for it I suppose. And, like when you hit that wall whilst doing a marathon, you just have to keep going, that's what I'm going to do. Just keep going. Of course - what else would I do?

It is uncomfortable though. I don't like feeling this way about my research. The struggle and inward battle to get out of bed in the morning, to get the extra reading done, to finish that damn coding. Yes, I am a high achiever and do expect a lot from myself, but with simple goals like "get out of bed and go to uni" and "do two hours of coding today" I don't feel I'm being unrealistic.

Anyone else out there experience this? How did you get through it?

Disseminating your research.... to teenagers

Twice this week, I've given talks about my research. I've explained a little bit about what a PhD is, before going into my research specifically and why and how I do it. I used lots of pictures, a bit of humour and a video about basketball. This talk wasn't really to prospective university students though, or even undergraduates.

It was to teenagers.

I should add, that I only found out the day before my first presentation that I'd be giving this talk. I was up until 2am making up my presentation and figuring out what on earth to say that would interest 13-15 year olds.

Thankfully, doing a PhD about the Psychology of Magic did help a bit - I could talk about Derren Brown and Dynamo and just magic in general. Even then though, they were the definition of a tough audience. I'd been expecting it but still.... I was tempted to throw some tumbleweed into the crowd for dramatic effect.

Let's just say conferences - or even any presentation where the audience is there by choice - will be a breeze after that.

However, I have to say, I enjoyed it and want to give more of these talks in the future. It was always my aim that in academia, I also wanted to teach. I'm viewing this as practice. I'd maybe like to pitch at a bit of a higher level - colleges or existing students for example - but I do want to keep doing it. After all, it can't get worse. (Trust me).

Oh, and by the by, you really should check out that video.

Life + PhD = Winning

Although I've touched on this before, some of you may be unaware that I intended to begin life after my degree as a Clinical Psychologist. It was my motivating factor for pushing me to get the grades I needed for a First, to sign up for extra volunteering (that I could have really done without at times) and to just be generally annoying in badgering everyone I could think of for experience.

I'd contemplated a PhD, but didn't think I had the academic capability, the creativeness or the drive for research. So I thought, "Clinical, that's for me", right up until I got my first post as an Assistant Psychologist. That was awful, and I hated it!

Thankfully, I still had links to one of the lecturers at my university from when we'd considered submitting a proposal, so we worked really hard on shaping that up and here I am. (You can read more about the application process in one of my previous posts on the topic).

For me, I feel like I really dodged a bullet. Although my PhD can be stressful and unco-operative at times, I love it. I have never been happier, more motivated or more content. In some ways, this is because I tend to thrive on stress (but not all the time!) but also because I am content in knowing this is what I want to do. I'm not concerned that I've made a mistake.

So, for all it's difficulties, I remind myself what could have been, and how lucky I am to be doing something I love so much, and I conclude that this is as close to winning as I can get, in a non-Charlie Sheen sense. I've hit the elusive target some people aim for throughout their lives - to do what they love.

Collaboration

I was going to put a relevant picture into this post, but couldn't find any that weren't unbearably cheesy. So I gave you a picture of my favourite team instead.

Collaborating on research, especially within your PhD, can be a tricky thing. Given that your PhD is designed to help you find your research-feet, so to speak, it can be hard to feel you've anything valuable to contribute, or that you've the authority to speak up if you disagree with something.

I thought I'd talk about this subject today because I've recently entered into a collaboration - my next study will be run with myself and my supervisor, and another psychologist from Brunel.

For me, this is really exciting. The Psychology (or Science) of Magic is a small-but-growing field and I am lucky enough to be working with two of Britain's prominent psychologists within it. As I don't do magic myself, it is great to have a psychologist who is also a magician on the team. Already, he has been able to provide insights into various methods that will work better than others, and has been invaluable in helping with some of the key points of the design.

So my experience of collaboration is a really positive one. For me, it's meant my study's quality is improved tenfold, I have a better understanding of what results we should see (and why we should see them) and now an opportunity to visit that lab as well.

However, I think collaboration can be a scary prospect for PhD students. For the reasons I've mentioned above, but also because I think there is sometimes a fear for losing the ownership of our work. Although we've all done undergraduate dissertations, the PhD is the first time you have a large body of work that is yours.

We adjust to the student-supervisor relationship, with a general acceptance of their name on anything we publish. That's par for the course, and not unexpected. From discussions with other students though, sometimes adding another one or two people to the mix can incite feelings of panic, or intellectual insecurity. Is that work suddenly becoming less ours, and more theirs?

These are tricky things to deal with, and not something that I think can go away. But, if you have the chance to collaborate on a project during your PhD - especially if it's something that (a) you can use in your thesis or (b) might result in a lab visit - you should go for it. Negative feelings are scary, but often turn out to be unfounded. The positives you receive in return far outweigh the discomfort.

I am maybe just used to asking silly questions, but I have been nothing but excited about this collaboration. I'm getting to work with someone who's work I really admire, and a whole load of other benefits besides.

But what are your views of collaboration? Have you had any positive/negative experiences of it?

There's organisation... then there's organisation.

This is one of my desk drawers. I'm showing you this, because it reveals a little (well... maybe a lot) about the neat-freak I am. I have an obsession with organising all my stuff. In fact, a lot of people who know me would probably call me "organised". For example, in that picture, there are coloured pencils in one tray, coloured pens and highlighters in another, Sharpies in the pencil case - which is a Wall-e pencil case by the way, because I'm cool, a to-do list notebook, post-its, paperclips and so on.

That picture is pretty indicative of what the rest of my desk drawers, my desk, my filing cabinet and my shelves are like. Organised, right?

Well, yes and no.

I do like to think this is organised in a sense. Almost everything I need, I have - and that's including some spare money, hair bands, chewing gum and a travel-sized toothbrush and toothpaste. I am the personification of the appearance of organisation. The reality is that all these things are super tidy and super organised because I tend to have problems organising the big stuff.

My workload - as you might have read - has been a bit all over the place recently, because I was keeping up the mentality of "Do one thing until it's finished and nothing else". This is how I eat my tea. It's not really how I should do my work. It resulted in coding burn out and complete frustration (and some tears, but that is probably more about me than about the coding...) It worked for me in my undergrad because time-frames I worked within were shorter. Assignments had a three week turnaround at most, but I'd tend to do each one in no longer than a week. My dissertation was the longest project I worked on, but even that was separated into food-group chunks. All the data collection, then all the analysis, then all the writing.

I have rapidly come to realise, now that I have more than just reading to do, that this method doesn't work for a PhD. I can practically hear some of you sitting there saying "Duh!" but this is a pretty radical thought for me.

To that end, I'm trying to make some changes in my working habits. I've got a to-do list for each week, and a daily schedule that allows time for reading/writing, coding and marking. I need to tackle a little bit of everything at a time. Mixing all these different tasks makes me feel a little uncomfortable, but I think that's more the remnants of my bad habits' death throes than anything else.

What do you do to be organised? Are you really organised?

Thesis Monitoring Committee

Last week, I met with my thesis monitoring committee, or TMC. Until I asked my supervisor the week beforehand what it was, I didn't really know.

Essentially, TMCs (at my university anyway) have a pastoral role. Their aim is to make sure you are coping with your workload, that you are getting enough time from your supervisor and whether there is anything going on in your life outside university that might cause you some problems. You meet twice per academic year, to ensure everyone's kept in the loop but also to give you fairly regular opportunities to raise anything if you wish to do so.

Discovering this was a relief. Until I spoke to my supervisor a week beforehand, I thought they were part of the assessment that decides whether you get to continue past the first year of your PhD. That, it turns out, is a whole other ketlle of fish to worry about. But anyway.

I found my TMC helpful, if for nothing else than to see what it was like! The postgraduate co-ordinator was there, as well as my second supervisor, and it turns out it's nothing to be scared of after all. They gave me some useful pointers for what I could do next to help boost things like my employability, which is always good to know. They felt my own plans for improving my productivity were pretty good as is.

On that note, this week is being spent coding, so I'll wait and see if I have anything to tell you on Thursday. I'm also sufferring under a nasty chest infection, so I'm trying to be productive as I can whilst resting as much as possible too, if that's not an oxymoron!