What is Something You Wish You Could Have Told Yourself at the Beginning of Your PhD?
Anything that has to do with going back in time now makes me think of that Ayo Edebiri clip when someone on an award show carpet asked what she would say to her younger self and she’s goes
“I would say nothing to her, obviously just because of the rules of time travel. I’ve never been visited by myself in the future and so I think if that happened to me, I would not make the decisions, you understand, it’s like, it’s Tenet logic.”
So that’s immediately where my brain went when I read this 😅
But after sitting with it in a more serious way, I come back to something I often comment back to people on Threads when they ask for PhD advice and that is:
Write everything down in more detail than you think you’ll need.
What do I mean by this?
Direct quote, author(s), year, journal - maybe even the entire citation.
Making a connection in a paper, or just in your own head, of something you think you’ll never forget because it feels so obvious and beautiful (or obvious and frustrating), write it down. The connection, the source, the why or how. Breadcrumb your process for yourself.
Supervisor gave you a great phrasing of something you’re having a hard time explaining, ask for a minute to write that down before moving on in the conversation.
Had a thought while on a walk for an engaging paper title or presentation title? In the notes app it goes.
Enough examples?
I think something I underestimated was how many different directions I was going to be pulled during the PhD.
Because even though you’re there to do the research, write up your projects for publications or present your preliminary work, you’re also asked to volunteer for your department’s events, hold positions in university associations, to do side projects, to participate in other people’s research, to do public facing impact work, to give a keynote, etc. And that’s just the things that could be directly related to your university life or PhD work.
There’s also your family, friends, partner, and/or community members that you keep up with. There’s your hobbies or the side hustle you’re interested in starting to give yourself a creative outlet. Maybe there’s another job you have unrelated to your research. Maybe you’re also an avid nonfiction reader so you’re getting more information (related or unrelated) than your brain can handle or you’re a lover of fiction that sweeps you so far away from your work you feel dazed the next day logging into your workspace.
Whatever it is, your brain is experiencing a lot of information, it’s making connections, it’s learning how to communicate knowledge, it’s in a critical mode that may feel unfamiliar, it’s building a narrative for your work. It’s T I R E D.
To be honest, really truly my memory capacity has changed since my PhD. That’s why I think this is the most important thing I could say to myself at the beginning.
My memory was easily the worst I had ever experienced it to be during my dissertation writing year.
I would go back to notes I took in meetings months ago - not bothering to have written down who was presenting or what the presentation was called because obviously I was going to remember that - and not be able to contextualize much of anything I wrote down in bullet points or small phrases of interest. I would then have to spend time digging through emails or my calendar to get a better sense for what was happening.
I would open a draft of a chapter from a couple weeks prior where I wrote (cite) after a sentence with a claim I knew I got from someone else and gave myself no clues as to if that was a claim I read in a book from the library or if it was typed up in my Notion or if it’s an article I annotated in Goodnotes. No year, author, or even direct quote. Just vibes of an idea I knew I had read.
I would leave myself comments on the end of the paragraph I felt lost to complete with things like “in X book” as though that was of any help at all when they weren’t ones I had flagged through with the colorful tabs (something I started way too late) and would have to spend time in the index or flipping through table of contents for chapters that I am guessing I meant.
All to say, you end up knowing A LOT by the time it’s thesis write up time but it doesn’t mean you’ll remember it all in the detail you want or an any way that is helpful for citation. So then you end up spending more time re-reading or digging through records in other places for context clues or having to abandon the source because you can’t find what you thought you remembered.
I think the impact of this, of the not documenting things in a clear way with as much information as possible, was that my self talk wasn’t always as kind as it could have been. It’s something I didn’t let last long, the unkind self talk, but sometimes I was just being harsh or degrading to myself in small doses when I’d come across some snippet of information but not the entire thing when I was frustrated or tired or stuck with my writing.
It’s something that absolutely could have been avoided if past me gave future me more information more consistently. And so it’s advice I will encourage you to heed: write everything down in more detail that you think you need because you may in fact need it.
And the better relationship that stressed out, tired, brain-fried you can have with past you with all the excitement and good ideas and time on their hands who was certain you’d know exactly what they meant with this small piece of info, the better the end of the PhD experience will be.
I am wishing you all the energy, support, and rest as you embark on the marathon that is completing a PhD.
Til next Sunday,
Dr. Sydney Conroy
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