Hoping hoping

Tomorrow I am meeting with my manager to discuss my application to reduce my working hours (so that I can have a day a week to write my thesis, before I entirely forget what it’s all about). So any prayers, candles, good thoughts and vibes, etc much appreciated, thanks all.

[Tues 9th pm. Thanks everyone. Here's an update: meeting was cancelled, am hoping to have it tomorrow instead. Sigh]

Nonsensical

So I have to write a summary of a conference paper to include in an application for financial support to enable me to attend the conference to present said paper. The conference is not till the end of July. We all know that this means the paper will not be written till mid-July at the earliest. The summary has to be written tonight.

Logically (I think HD’s influence is starting to show) a summary of a non-existent paper would be pretty short. Somehow I don’t think that is quite what the funders are looking for, however. Sigh.

In other news, my supervisor has said some very nice things about the chapter I submitted (at the last minute, unsurprisingly) just before we went on holiday, and which had stressed me out because I’d felt my revisions were so superficial. Though apparently there are still lots of very long sentences in it. As if I’d do a thing like that.

Guilt

Today I went into uni rather than work (this has been planned for a while, using up some annual leave). I had a good chat with a fellow PhD writer-upper, who reminded me (this was a rehash of a regular conversation we had, but I’d not seen her for a few months) how the PhD process seems to be as infused with guilt as any religion. However much work you do, you’re convinced you haven’t done enough. However much work you do, everyone else seems to have done more. However interesting and original your research is, it’s contrived and unoriginal compared with everyone else. “Good enough” is never good enough. No wonder it’s stressful.

In other, utterly unrelated news, after only a few days off the chocolate and alcohol I have so many zits I look horrific! If you see someone driving round Glasgow tomorrow with a paper bag over their head, you’ll know who it is.

Holidays

I haven’t blogged for a couple of weeks as last week (as many of my usual handful of readers are already aware) we were on holiday in Venice for the week. I took about 400 pictures which will take a while to get sorted and online (not all of them!), ate too much, walked all over the place (Venice being that kind of a place), read more than usual, relaxed, enjoyed spending an entire week with HD (that was the best bit!), chilled, usual holiday stuff really. Now I’m back I’m trying not to think about going to w*rk tomorrow morning, and that I have to mark OU essays in the next couple of days and submit another chapter revision as well (the chapter should be OK, it’s the methodology chapter which was my favourite to write – it was very therapeutic as a lot of it was All About Me ). I have just spent the last hour and a half sorting out a problem with my OU students who are doing some online group-work (which I have to say is on the whole infinitely preferable to the real-life equivalent!) – nothing serious serious but awkward and couldn’t be left. So now my (admittedly red wine-related) headache is showing no signs of disappearing, so I think I might be off to bed in a minute. Photos and holiday musings (of which there are a fair few) will have to wait a few days, I think.

My poor neglected thesis

I haven’t written much about the student experience (after all, the main point of this blog) recently. There is a good reason for this.

(excuse me while I cower with guilt at the thought of my poor neglected thesis).

I had a long conversation (well, one-sided ramble if I’m honest) with HD today about how I feel my job is exhausting me to the point that the last thing in the world I want to do is my thesis (even though if I’m honest, really the last thing I want to do is actually my day job). I have set myself a few mini-targets to get me through being at work – end of this week we have a holiday (YAY), end of Feb I will have done enough hours to be able to reregister as a health visitor when my registration next comes up for renewal (not for over 2 years, but it’s good as a first short-term goal), mid-June the OU course finishes so I’ll have one less thing to take up my time away from the thesis, end of June I will have been in the job the same amount of time as my first health visiting job after I qualified so if I can stay longer it will be better for my CV, end of July I have a conference to attend so moving job before that would be too stressful, same sort of time I’m aiming to submit my thesis (eeeeeeeek) so likewise it’s silly to be jobhunting/changing before then. Of course if HD gets a permanent job somewhere else in the meantime then all this will be academic as I will have an excuse to leave earlier, but in the meantime giving myself these short-term goals will hopefully make life a bit more bearable.

It doesn’t change the fact though that I am spending far too little time on my thesis. I know I was a world champion procrastinator the 4 years I was at uni actually being paid to do the thing, but now I’m too tired to procrastinate.

Which is a shame as this evening I discovered an opportunity to procrastinate in a way that would actually look good on the academic side of my CV, but I don’t think I’m ever going to have the time. I might make a discreet enquiry (it involves blogging) but I probably need to be realistic and manage the plates I’m already juggling rather than taking on anything else.

Still here

… just being boring and unblogworthy.

I had supervision this evening after work; this is the first time I’ve been back to university since starting my job. It felt very strange being back, but was good to get some positive feedback on the chapter and to talk about something other than the colour/consistency/amount of nappy contents*.

What was encouraging was that my supervisors both felt that with the thesis as it is now – all the chapters except the Introduction and Conclusion in draft form – if my deadline was the end of the year they would be more or less happy for me to submit it, and would expect a tough viva and considerable corrections, but not a fail. What I’m doing instead (aiming to submit next summer) is revising and rerevising to make the viva a more positive experience and to ultimately have fewer corrections. So I felt good about that, although there is still a fair bit of work to do. We also started throwing a few names of potential examiners around – it’s starting to get a bit more real now!

In other news, last night at our least successful book group yet, 3 people (none of whom had read the book and at least one hadn’t started it) didn’t come, and of the 3 of us that did go, one had nearly finished (few pages to go), one (the one who is usually ultrakeen and reads the book and several others beside in the time it takes me to manage a few chapters) was only a quarter of the way through due to the book arriving late from amazon, and I had been so snowed under with marking essays and writing the chapter that I hadn’t even bought, never mind read the book. So we have decided to stick with the same book for the next time we meet, and hopefully more of us will have read it by then. I really like my book group, it’s full of unscary people who are human and not book obsessives. I’d find that sort of group a bit stressful. Ours is as much about eating cake and drinking tea as it is reading the book

* can you tell I’m loving the new job.

This week I shall mostly be …

* marking OU essays, and
* writing a thesis chapter, and
* working full time, while
* trying not to cough up any more of my lungs (a fine image for a professional health promoter, no?).

No wonder I’m knackered.

But, excitingly, today HD and I booked our first proper holiday since our honeymoon almost 2 years ago. We are off adventuring in February, I can’t wait!

Balance

I’m a week and a half into my new job, and I’m terrified about getting behind on my thesis. I’m not sure how to make more time for it – my concern is really that I can’t give it much quality time. Even though my hours at work are pretty good and I’m home at a reasonably early time, I’m finding I do need a bit of “vegging out time” in order to wind down and get any of the emotion from the day out of my system (and dealing with people in their raw, everyday lives is very emotional, I’d forgotten just how much). I had planned on coming home and doing an hour or so thesis work before cooking/eating, but I’m struggling a bit with that. Partly because of the need to veg out for a bit first, and partly because I’m being really really good at not eating between meals or snacking on junk while I’m at work, but this means that I come home really really hungry so I’m having to cook earlier than I had planned. And once I’ve eaten, the last thing I want to do is fire up the old brain cells. I’m not really sure how to balance these demands on my time and on my brain and on my emotions.

I’m also missing the intellectual stimulation of university. Today as I drove around I spotted the spire of the university’s main building in the distance, and felt a little twinge of, well, not sadness exactly, but just a feeling of missing out a bit. The distance has been good for me, it (along with my current job) has given me a lot of clarity about where I think I want to go with life and career (such as it is/will be – I’ll never be the ultra-ambitious type). But I feel like I’m losing my touch very quickly, and that’s a bit scary. I have a couple of small things to do (an abstract for a conference talk I’m giving next summer, and updating my biographical details for the book anthology I’ll hopefully be part of) as well as my current thesis chapter, and they both feel like the intellectual equivalent of climbing Mount Everest (especially the abstract – you’d think after all the talks I’ve given I’d be fine with writing a mere 200 words, but they’re nearly as hard to write as the full paper!). I think I’m going to give them a go now, and then dig out someone else’s thesis (in a sort-of-similar vein to mine) to remind myself what I’m aspiring to. (I know that last sentence has terrible grammar, but I’m tired).

Intellectual meme

The other day on her blog Tractor Girl outlined a panel presentation she was part of to new postgrad students, exploring the following issues, and invited other postgrads to think about the same things:

- What have been some of the most stressful parts of the process, and how have you dealt with them?
- How do you strike a balance between work and the rest of your life?
- What has made you most excited in your studies?
- How do you see theological work relating to the wider world?
- How do you see your own work as part of your calling?
- How has your own faith been part of your work?
- What advice would you give beginning students? What might you do differently if you could start again?

I’m just putting this up here to remind myself – I really want to do this as I think it will really do me good to think about these things, and interesting as I am currently at a point of being somewhat unenthusiastic about my PhD*, so I wonder if that would change my answers. I will come back to this in the next few days, once I’ve finished the current chapter of doom. For now though I’m going to bed (what a lightweight, it’s only just gone 9!).

* I love it and really believe in my research, I’m just finding the thesis quite a restricting and distinctly unsatisfying medium in which to communicate.

I did my first OU tutorial today, I think it went well! I was expecting 8 students, 5 came, but they were nice and chatty, and I think this is the first time in my life ever that I have planned stuff for a tutorial and had too much material rather than not enough! Anyway it’s a relief it’s done, and I don’t have another till January – last night I was really antsy and feeling a bit ill, but more tense than ill really, and I remember that it was exactly the same before every tutorial day for the last 4 years, I always used to feel sick the night before until they were over! Maybe I need to rethink my idea of going into academia, it’s no good if I feel sick every time I have to teach! But seriously, I did actually rather enjoy it, and I don’t think they thought I was a numpty so that’s always good (I’ve not read the feedback form yet though, I’ll save that for another day!).

HD is home for the weekend – am happy about that

I have a provisional start date for my new job of 2nd November, which I agreed with HR yesterday (I need to confirm it with my line manager next week, assuming she’s back from holiday). Unfortunately, I got home from the tutorial this afternoon and found I have been called for jury service from 16th Nov! I hope I don’t get a reputation at work for taking time off as soon as I start! Not the best timing, and I can’t say I’m brimming with enthusiasm at the prospect, but I guess if I do it I can at least get it out of the way.

As for my thesis chapter, and my various doomed attempts to get it finished when I say I will: I think this Dilbert cartoon pretty much sums up where I’m at with it (guess which one’s me?!).