PhD Log

There is just no way to balance reading, writing, data wrangling and miscellaneous other academic activities in a 20-hour week, but I keep lurching onward, making unbalanced progress. So, for instance, I have a database schema (above, left) that probably isn’t the one I want ultimately but it’s very easy to load the data in […]

One of the more obvious impacts of the pandemic in academia is the way it’s cuts students and researchers off from the physical resources and methods which are usually pretty much its raison d’être. I mean things like archives, libraries, labs and fieldwork. In a way, I find it reassuring that we miss these. They

I skipped a week of blogging, which is a shame. Then I wrote this and didn’t get round to uploading it. It’s not so much that I did no work, but that I did too much. So I’m taking the rest of the year off PhD-logging to try to get my head together. I made

I spent most of this week’s PhD time allocation in my funding body’s student conference. Basically, I spent two full days on Zoom. It was an interesting experience, though as usual when something takes a big block of my time, it’s left me with reading withdrawal symptoms. I wish I could think of something more

Darn! I skipped a week of blogging for the first time. I don’t suppose it will be the last. It’s not so much that I did no work, but that I did too much. I made a leap forward with the network graphing, although it was a frustrating process. I was feeling that I had

This was the week I became conscious of the fact that I was enjoying doing a PhD. It was also the week I realised that I can’t just chase around like a lunatic doing stuff. I need to read and write as well. It happened like this: on Monday, I settled down in a corner

I think I will have to start keeping daily notes on what is going on with my PhD-ing, because by the end of each week, it feels like an era has passed. This week that may very well be true. On the ‘secular’ side, I took Monday off to accompany my adult daughter to London

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

At this point, I feel like I’ve got some kind of horrible experiment going on in the background to test the proportion of ‘normal’ weeks to chaotic weeks in my life as a PhD student. My last ‘normal’ week was about half-way through August, 10 weeks ago. I started this week with good intentions and

For some reason, this is the week that the powers that be had set aside for us to consider the deeper questions of life such as ‘What is history?’ and ‘Why do we do it?’ Personally, I like to take a little more than a week for this kind of reflection. I had planned to