I know I am late posting this log. Last week was my studentship funding body’s induction week. It was lovely to finally get welcomed to PhD life and to have some exposure to all kinds of intellectual excitement and enthusiasm. We even managed to do a bit of socialising, in the new, strangely distanced way that things are getting done in these days of pandemic. Zoom breakout rooms – I wonder if anyone will look back on those with nostalgia. I’m a bit of an introvert anyway, and I’m not sure yet whether I find online socialising less draining than in person socialising. Still, I met some people, and may get involved in some things, we will see how that goes. On the other hand, for a part-time student, induction weeks do cut into one’s time. This week, I clocked up:
- 15.5 hours of induction week Zoom conferencing,
- 4.5 hours of required classwork,
- 6.5 hours of research, all of which took place before 9.00 in the morning.
What I realise from this is that although the non-research activities fit almost perfectly into my allotment of time, I really wanted to do some research as well and had to force it in. I also realised how very, very hard it is for me to put in more than 20 hours a week. I congratulate myself again on choosing to do a PhD part-time. I very much benefited from the online format of the conference, because I didn’t have to find what would surely amount to over two hours of travel time a day as well. But when this week rolled around, I took yesterday off to spend time with my family and spent a lot of today catching up on necessary admin. I’m going to spend a lot of the rest of the week chasing required work. I’m not sure it should feel like this. Maybe I’m getting all the required stuff out of the way this year, the better to invest in research next year? Even so, I decided to throttle back on some opportunities which I see full-time students (very reasonably) flinging themselves into headlong.
Aside from that, I was keeping track of my chaotic or stressful v. normal weeks. I’m afraid last week didn’t open well for our family, yet again. I’m old enough not to be surprised – reality is ‘curdled’ and random things, good or bad, tend to come in clumps. It was really nice to have the induction conference partly as a distractor. Still, that makes 11 weeks. And this week, we have an US election and a new national lockdown to contend with.