{"id":2637,"date":"2019-05-20T11:33:14","date_gmt":"2019-05-20T11:33:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/phd-life-or-roller-coaster-ride\/"},"modified":"2025-01-15T06:35:16","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T06:35:16","slug":"phd-life-or-roller-coaster-ride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/phd-life-or-roller-coaster-ride","title":{"rendered":"PhD life or roller coaster ride?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was going to wait until the end of my first working week of PhD life before posting again, but it feels like so much has happened in such a short space of time\u2026 though at the same time, feeling like I have achieved pretty much nothing.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

On Monday, I was a little lost\u2026 it was weird to have my own time \u2013 be not just allowed, but expected to do my own thing. I\u2019ve been asking a lot of questions of the people in the office \u2013 everyone else has been there at least three months and so, gets the process and has good advice. There\u2019s one other person who started at the same time as me, but as he proposed his project and knows everyone, I feel like he\u2019s way ahead of me, so I kind of feel like I\u2019m the only one floundering.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I had a meeting with my supervisor yesterday (oh my god, was that only yesterday?!) morning and came out of it feeling pretty good. I felt more grounded, like I knew a bit more about what she expected of me and I thought I had a good idea of where to go from there. I\u2019m on a bit of a high; love a good plan with a bit of direction.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

As with any PhD student at the beginning of their time, it\u2019s all about the reading. So, I start figuring out my referencing software \u2013 in the end I chose to use EndNote because that is the software the university supports and so I can get help if\/whenever I need it. I\u2019ve even signed up for their introductory course to get to grips with the software! [Side note \u2013 apologies, I never wrote a blog about the different referencing software \u2013 I got a few responses from my Twitter call but not loads and if I\u2019m being totally honest, I got a bit side-tracked with actually starting the PhD and then there was a recommended one… the one that a PhD student in my office recommended if you were happy to do it alone is Zotero.]<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Anyway, I was feeling super organised getting on with my reading and starting to make notes and referencing, and towards the end of my day, I get to this paper and it just seems to counter everything I\u2019d already read on the subject. So the panic sets in \u2013 what am I doing? I thought I had a plan? I come up with contradicting questions and I don\u2019t even know the answers but they seem to point to the fact that my question was wrong!<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

As it turns out (according to those further along in their PhD), that\u2019s what\u2019s meant to happen. You\u2019re meant to come up with a plan, read some stuff, change the plan, learn new things, change the plan, come up with more questions, change the plan etc., until you find the right question. It\u2019s just so weird to me that the right thing is to come up with a load of questions that, as yet, you haven\u2019t answered. That is a productive day at the beginning of your PhD. I\u2019m so used to solutions being the indicator of a successful day. So I go home a bit happier than I was.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I go in the morning with a plan: I\u2019m going to delve deeper into the references, I\u2019m going to find out why the results of this one particular paper are different to the others that I have read. Turns out, my brain had turned to mush by the afternoon and the paper wasn\u2019t actually saying what I thought it was saying in the first place! So I\u2019m back on a high with a bit more of a plan.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spoken to a physio who works in the hospital, a military physio, and I\u2019m just keeping on reading to try and find out exactly what it is I want to do and work out a plan of how I\u2019m going to do it!<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve just taken a small interlude in my writing of this post to speak to a friend who\u2019s about a year into her PhD in an area similar to mine, and she thinks that all this is perfectly normal too. I was running my ideas by her before I present them to my supervisor. My biggest challenge today was working out what\u2019s \u201cenough\u201d to be a PhD project and not just a side project. I\u2019m getting there, slowly but surely\u2026 I think?!<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve gathered from my first few days as a PhD student, and I think it\u2019s coming across in this blog post too, is that there has been a lot of up and down and going in circles. But hey, that\u2019s PhD life, right?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Shruti Turner (<\/i>@ShrutiTurner<\/i><\/a>) is a PhD Researcher at Imperial College London. This story was published on January 18, 2018, on Shruti\u2019s blog, <\/i>Shruti\u2019s PhD<\/i><\/a> (available <\/i>here<\/i><\/a>), and has been republished here with her permission.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was going to wait until the end of my first working week of PhD life before posting again, but it feels like so much has happened in such a short space of time\u2026 though at the same time, feeling like I have achieved pretty much nothing. On Monday, I was a little lost\u2026 it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1450,"featured_media":33313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2414],"tags":[2666,2454],"new_categories":[],"new_tags":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-2637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiring-researcher-stories","tag-phd-life","tag-researcher-stories"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPhD life or roller coaster ride?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Shruti Turner is a PhD Researcher at Imperial College London. 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