‘How
I finished my PhD … just 30 years after I began’
Feeling
in my bag for the ceramic turquoise hippo my mother gave me as a good-luck
charm when I was a teenager, I took a long, deep breath. It was almost 2pm on
12 January 2015, minutes away from an event I had been working towards for much
of my adult life. Like a finalist on The Apprentice approaching the last
challenge, there was a lot riding on my performance. Only this wasn’t reality
TV, this was my life. I was about to defend my PhD thesis in a viva. And my
journey to this point had taken longer than most. Just over 30 years.
This is still difficult for me to
explain. No interesting or successful career had diverted my energies; no
extraordinary life events, dramas or emergencies had forced me off the expected
path. In retrospect, I’d rather fallen into doing a PhD. Back in 1984, having
just completed my BA in social anthropology at Soas (School of Oriental and
African Studies), I had no clear career aspirations. But because I graduated
with a first, the university encouraged me to stay on for a doctorate. With
help from a tutor, I chose a research subject – women and work, a hot topic at
the time – and formulated a proposal. On the back of this, I was awarded
funding for three years. The anthropological approach places particular demands
on the researcher. Its core methodology, participant observation, requires not
so much adaptation to the local culture as immersion in it: living, acting and
experiencing everyday life among the community under study. For many, it is an
intensely personal experience. But on leaving the field, anthropologists are
expected instantly to switch back into academic mode, distance themselves from
their fieldwork, analyse it and write it up.
Re-entering academia and adjusting
to life back in London was harder than I expected. For the past year, I’d spent
almost every waking hour in the company of Minangkabau – an Indonesian people
known for their Islamic faith and matrilineal
traditions (where
descent and inheritance are traced along the female line). The tolerance,
generosity and genuine care they extended to me during my stay had been truly
humbling. Returning to the anonymity, individualism and materialism of urban
life was an unwelcome shock. I’d become so absorbed in the Minangkabau culture
and so emotionally attached to the people, I couldn’t – and didn’t want to –
detach myself from it, let alone write it up in a thesis. How could I do
justice to this life-changing experience through the narrow framework of
academic discourse? Under pressure to finish, I attempted writing my thesis in
an experimental, quasi-literary style, basing each chapter around the narrative
of a single Minangkabau woman. It was a disaster. My supervisor didn’t know
what to do with me.
‘I’d
become so absorbed in Minangkabau culture, I couldn’t – and didn’t want to –
detach from it, let alone write it up’
As the funding dried up, earning a living took
priority. I planned to find work in social research, but the unfinished
doctorate proved a stumbling block. I was either underqualified (no PhD), or
overqualified (having started a PhD). Taking any employment I could, I ended up
following my partner as his career took hold – Bedfordshire, Cambridge, London,
Oman, Bristol, Nottingham, Hampshire, Abu Dhabi, Hampshire again – raising a
family along the way.
The PhD, though pretty much abandoned, was not
forgotten. Its incompletion felt like a dark shadow of failure. It haunted me.
I held on to the idea I might return to it. Wherever we went, I dragged the
boxes of fieldnotes and files with me, my own emotional excess baggage.
Occasionally, I dipped my toes back in. While pregnant in Oman, I wrote as much
as possible from my fieldwork notes before motherhood subsumed my life. In
Nottingham, I caught up on theory in the library while my toddler was at
nursery. During summers home from Abu Dhabi I bought books and photocopied
articles to read while the children were at school. But it wasn’t until 2006
that a combination of events pushed me back on the path to completion.
Working as a freelance journalist, I wrote
a piece
for the Guardian on unfinished PhDs. Speaking to other
“non-completers” in the course of this opened up the wounds – the sense of
waste (all that work!); the guilt over invested others (the Minangkabau,
funding authority, university, family); the deep disappointment at not
finishing what I’d started. I needed to seek some resolution.
I began investigating alternative uses for my
data and indirect ways to insinuate myself back into academia. But there was
only ever one solution: to finish the thesis. By chance, I met some old
university friends the following January. Shocked by my non-completion and
adamant I should return, they pressed me to contact the university again. I
sent an email the next day and in October 2007, aged 45, found myself back in
the academic fold.
With a new supervisor, it looked promising. We
were optimistic, predicting submission within two or three years working on it
part-time. It took seven. Every stage seemed to take so long: the reading, more
than 20 years to catch up on; the writing, much slower than in my younger
years; the editing, rewriting, rethinking, further reading, amending. It was a
hard slog.
A year before the final deadline, it was all
pretty much done, but my supervisor decided to throw one more curveball. We
could use the remaining time, he said, to make it even better – just rewrite
the introduction and conclusion, split one chapter into two and rejig the
others. I was exhausted. I’d rather have bathed in a tub of acid than spend
another year on my thesis. But holing myself up in my bedroom, my
long-suffering family tiptoeing around me, I got it done: 10 days before the
deadline, 900 words under the limit.
At first, all went according to plan. A
literature review was conducted, a report written and approved, a research visa
received and 13 months’ fieldwork in Sumatra completed. That was the honeymoon
period. After coming home, the problems started.
Four months later, I was facing my
viva. My supervisor told me to smile, relax and enjoy the discussion, but
warned me the outcome was unpredictable: one student’s viva had taken a whole
day, another was told to rewrite her entire thesis, and some had even been sent
back to do more fieldwork.
Beset by self-doubt, I walked into
the viva room, ready to confront my fate. “Before we start,” said the external
examiner as I shakily sat down, “we’d like to tell you that you’ve passed, with
only minor typographical corrections.”
“This is huge”, said my supervisor
afterwards, clapping me on the back, “not just for you, but for me too. This
was a big challenge!” Yes, it really was.
The corrections took me little
more than a day and soon after, I received email confirmation of my award. But
it wasn’t until my graduation ceremony at the end of July, on shaking the hand
of the Soas president, Graça Machel, dressed in my doctoral robes of
gold and red, that I felt genuine pride. It was over.
Now all I have to do is finally
find a suitable career. At 53, that could prove the greatest challenge yet.
Source; http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/aug/18/finished-phd-30-years-after-began-doctorate
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