Dobby is a free PhD student

I am done!!!

Only made a hand full of posts before I submitted my thesis, really living up to my name.

Wild ride

Worth it, but not will not recommend.

A couple of things to prove my point:

• I had 4 hours of sleep in 3 days…….
• My ankle that was sprained in a run the week before got so swollen because I rarely left my seat
• I was convinced I saw flowers moving with the non-existant draft in that state of sleep deprivation, I had to record it with my phone to watching it the next day to settle my debate with Stuart
• Spend the last hour before deadline writing the overall abstract. Slowest writing speed in my life. The first 40 minutes was used to write the first sentence….
• Had no time to proofread my abstract. For the fun of it, asked Stuart to look for inevitable typos in there after submission. When he got to sentence 2, asked in a shaking voice"Is papulation a word?". I was so sleep-deprived I found it absolutely hilarious
• I also did not remember to put in PAGE NUMBERS in my final document (My thesis writing principle to deal with perfectionism was to get through the actual putting words on page and not do any editing or formatting during it, hence, the lack of time for basic formatting…)
• I kept checking my font from black to black, convinced they looked grey
• After submitting 2 minutes before deadline, got an anti-climatic email confirming it. No one nudged me to hand in, I felt like I could have delayed submission with no big consequences. But Hey, glad to be done.
• My two dearest friends suffered a ridiculous amount for me. After handing in my general introduction on 8 Feb and general discussion on 12 Feb (with a deadline of 22 Feb), I realized I wasn't going to get comments from my supervisor the Friday before. So I asked Alice (shout out to my devoted friend) and Stuart (long long suffering) to go over those chapters during the weekend. Alice spent like more than 6 hours and gave me more thorough comments than anyone could have hoped for. She even inserted jokes from time to time. I hope she had as much fun reading my thesis as I did reading here comment (N.O.S.E.P.O.K.E)

I'm not proud of my time management this time. But the thing with PhD writing is, the longer you spent to write, it's like digging a tunnel by yourself. You can easily get detached, lose sense of time and space, and forget what you are writing and why you are doing it. A bit surreal really. The meta-cognitive part is kind of lost during the process. A massive version of semantic desensitization (repeating the word ‘thesis’ 20 times and you will know what I mean).

I got asked a very good question after spreading the news of my freedom. Archie Sensei from my jujitsu club asked me if I was happy with it. After years of talking to myself in writing, in something probably 5 people will read, I feel I can only say I am glad it is done. A done thesis is better than a perfect thesis.

Stuart has been considering upping his degree from Masters to PhD at the end of last year. I claim full responsibility if he decided against it in the end. I think witnessing those days would traumatize anybody. And the funny bit is, I actually LIKE academic writing.

Naturally, with all that said, you'd think I'd swim out the sea of despair that is academia. I went and got myself a post-doctoral position in Scotland instead. So I guess I really learned my lesson eh…

If you are doing a PhD or are considering it, this is how NOT to do it, but you probably will do it similarly anyway. Or have other reasons to not enjoy it. But it is all part of the forging identity, after which you will have a shiny badge that says you loved research so much you spend 4 years doing unpaid work and trying out different anxiety/depression medications.

PhD

_n._Combination of nervous breakdown, uncontrollable crying, self-doubt, self-criticism, with just enough perks to keep you from quitting (or maybe not). Paradoxical existence between feeling incredibly smart and hopelessly stupid at the same time. Try it at your own discretion.