Doctoral Delusion column: In Limbo

Original to be found here: http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/columns/0032746-doctoral-delusion-in-limbo.html 

This column is late. Last night I went to the pub to celebrate my friend’s MPhil thesis hand in, scarfed down my share of the 2-for-1 pizza, had 1 pint, and was then (embarrassingly) so tipsy when I came in that I fell asleep with my laptop on my face whilst trying to write this before the deadline. Not a great start. Welcome to postgrad life.

Summer is a pretty strange limbo time for grad students. Those on one year courses are frantically finishing theses and handing in; first year PhD students are preparing and being examined on their end of year reports; for those further on than that, it’s all a haze of fieldwork, data, and the hellish writing up of the final product.

I’m putting together my first year report and as such am spending all my working days stuck in a library. Imagine exam term but you’re all on your own and everyone else is having fun. I’ve decamped to the ground floor so I can’t see the sun and know how much lovely weather and excitement I’m missing. If I’m working in my room I draw the curtains and create my work cave – but that’s also because the window above my desk looks directly into the room across from me. 1960s college accommodation blocks always have such strong echoes of the Panopticon.

The thing is, people think being a grad student during the summer is all relaxing in empty colleges, paddling in the sun at Jesus Green Lido, and enjoying beautiful Cambridge with the minimal amount of stress.

People really couldn’t be more wrong if they tried. Summers for grad students are for conferences (for the lucky – Dominican Republic, for the unlucky – Glasgow and Hull), studying uninterrupted by the minutiae of term life, and preparing journal articles for autumn submission dates, whilst considering attaching a snowplough to the front of your bike just so you can get to Sainsbury’s through the tourists for some actual real food.

For me, it’s also a good long stretch to get in some fiction writing, catch up on blog posts and rack up some vaguely interesting reflective prose work. In one of my more foolish moments, I totted up the final number of words I’ll end up with by the start of Michaelmas on the current schedule, and it was around 175,000. Forgive me if I seem a little panicked by that, but it works out at around 3,000 words a day. That’s roughly two hastily written supervision essays, one carefully constructed portfolio essay or a chapter of a dissertation.

Before you even ask, of course the 600 words of this column are being totted up as part of today’s count. If I wasn’t previously, I’m now incredibly glad for the late night essay crisis training of my undergrad because I’m beginning to understand how important it is to always just get the words on the page. By the end of summer, the ‘invisible words’ – those written, then redrafted, edited or deleted – will double the final polished total.

It’s so inefficient I want to hit my head on my keyboard, but only if that produces more words. No wonder I’m drowning my woes in beer and pizza when I celebrate that someone else’s academic journey is over. Welcome to postgrad summer. It’s rubbish.