It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these. I’ve been busy tearing apart my thesis and slowly stitching it back together again, a process I thought would take a month but that bled into two and a half. Doing a phd, it turns out, is much harder than I thought.
I’m now sat at my desk with a printed draft of my thesis that I think is basically done. I’m planning to re-read it in a month or so (without looking at anything related to it before then) and make any last adjustments before submitting it.
I’m open, of course, to realising on that read through that I’m still a lot further than I think. Like climbing a mountain and thinking you’ve arrived at the summit, only for the clouds to part and to realise you’re actually just on a plateau.
Should you do a phd?
In the last few years I’ve had this conversation with between 10-15 people. Some of them have been with friends who wanted help applying for specific programmes, some have been with friends of friends who were put in touch, and some have been with complete strangers who found me via my departments’ website or who found me via my instagram or this newsletter. Now that I’m close to the end of this journey (I think? I hope?) I thought I would condense some of the content of these conversations in case it’s of interest to anyone who hasn’t reached out to me or who might just be starting to think about it.
Even if you’re not thinking of doing a phd, maybe there is something useful you can take from the journey I’m describing:
1) What is a phd?
This might seem like a basic question, but I think it’s worth starting right at the beginning1.
My first supervision of my phd my two supervisors gave me a very general reading list. In my application to the programme I had sketched out a plan to study suicide and serious mental illness in China2. They suggested reading some Foucault, some Arthur Kleinman, and some introductory texts in Medical Anthropology. They told me about a few journals I might like to look at, and that I should look up the work of Jie Yang and Li Zhang, two Chinese anthropologists who work on mental health. Then they set me on my way. It was the first week of October. We scheduled the next meeting for late December, just before term ended.
That was it.
At the next meeting we went through the broad outline of what I’d started to think about. More readings, another meeting some months in the future.
This is a phd.
I really struggled with how abstract this process was at the beginning (which I’ll go through in part2 of this series). A lot of my Phd has basically been reading. Taking notes of who those authors have been citing. Reading the cited works. Taking more notes. Then eventually writing things that my supervisors have corrected. There have been months in this process where I haven’t seen my supervisors. For the year and a bit I was in China, we skyped a few times. Then I came back to the UK and into a global pandemic. We switched to Microsoft Teams. For over 2 years of my phd I didn’t actually meet my supervisors in real life. It was only last month that I met them again in person. The way we interacted, for the most part, was in the margins of my essays. They would leave feedback, I’d go away and work on it, and resubmit things to them.
This isn’t a reflection on them. I am beyond grateful for their help. They have shaped the academic I am today in immeasurable ways. They’re also people. Both of them have small children. They both published books during the time they’ve been supervising me. They also supervise multiple people. They have both had their own personal setbacks while they’ve been supervising me. On top of this, one was the head of my department. I had a certain sense of what mentorship would be. I had to move past that. A phd is an exercise in learning how to learn. The supervisors are there to guide you, they are not there to lead you.
Learning what to take on board from your supervisors and what to leave in the margins is a big part of the journey. As is learning how to connect with a community of scholars beyond just your supervisors. Neither of my supervisors has direct expertise in mental health, so a big part of my journey has been reaching out to scholars in departments elsewhere in the world and creating a network of people invested in my work. I’ve gone to conferences, I’ve submitted to journals, I’ve participated in workshops. All of this has been to try and find more people who are further along the road that I am trying to travel, so they can point me in the right direction. No-one can walk the road for you though. That’s on you.
In the blissful liminal summer of 2020 (post lockdown 1, pre-lockdown 2 and 3) I was with some friends. One of them was doing a phd with me, the rest were not. Someone said to us, “I guess doing a phd must have really prepared you for all the stress of this year.” I remember finding that weird at the time. When I think of stress, I think of immediate stress–the kind I experience in my other life working in kitchens, or the kind of stress I imagine must exist in things with much higher stakes, like being a surgeon or working two minimum-wage jobs to make rent. But on reflection they were kind of right. We were just talking about two different kinds of stress.
Doing a phd has intimately prepared me for existential stress. I know exactly how to structure my time without anyone having to tell me what to do. I do not fear the blank page, a meeting-free day or an empty inbox. I learnt how to structure my time. I had to learn to find meaning and to work towards something where the deadline was years in the future. I could read in the wrong direction for months without knowing it. I just had to keep going, keep reading, keep writing. Slowly, over time, from nothing, came something.
It is also an incredibly lonely experience, especially in social sciences or the humanities where it is quite rare to find collaborative papers. There are few truly collaborative works in anthropology, as the ethnographic method is so much about the relationships the individual researcher makes with the community they study. Historians have their archives, but in most cases they are literally speaking to the dead. It’s a strange form of communion. Not only do you work alone much of the time, and all of the existential angst this can cause, but this also means you intimately own your successes and failures in a way that you don’t in other things. If you work in marketing and you don’t land a big campaign this year, maybe you can chalk it up to the graphic designer choosing the wrong colour scheme or the accountant getting the figures wrong. You can’t do that with a phd. It’s yours. Start to finish, this is the cross you chose to bear. Worse, this is the cross you nailed yourself to. The cross you yourself fashioned out of wood you sourced.
Should you do a phd?
Only if you are ok with no-one telling you what to do for years on end. Only if you are fine creating your own deadlines. Only if you are fine with knowing that if you stop your work tomorrow the only person who cares, really, is you. Only if something this open-ended actually appeals to you. Only if you are fine with owning it, in all its imperfection.
2) Phd as spiritual journey
I’m going to make a bold™ statement here. Because a phd is such an abstract pursuit it is the modern equivalent of a spiritual journey (albeit secular).
Think of it this way. There are bibles (foundational texts in any given field), there are the saints (key scholars who have produced those texts), the sinners (the dissenting voices that were proved wrong), you have your oracles (your supervisors), there are rituals (producing your thesis, sitting for your viva), there are tithes (writing for journals, ‘giving back’ to the academic community via peer review), you are part of a lineage (the branch of the discipline you end up contributing to), you bring people into the faith (you teach) etc etc.
Just like with any spiritual journey, you will have multiple crises of faith along the way. How you deal with those and keep marching onwards is the phd.
Essentially a phd is a faith-based system3. Prior to everything else––to choosing your topic, selecting your methodology, doing your research and way before you’ve written a single word––you have put your faith in the academic method. You have to believe that there is value in conducting research. That it is worth travelling far beyond intuition and the messy realm of affect to get at a sense of truth that exists somewhere in intellect. You have to subscribe to particular ways of constructing arguments, of creating ‘data,’ of making the extremely complex and intangible world legible.
This is not the only way to go through the world. It is actually a highly specific one that has somehow managed to wield extreme amounts of discursive power across society4. I’m very attracted to physical intelligence–the things that your hands know (as I wrote about here). There are plenty of forms of “expertise” in the world. There are also a lot of aspects of humanity, such as empathy, compassion and sensitivity, that sit awkwardly with the academic method. A study of compassion is (at least) one step removed from the actual bodily experience of feeling for the other. I say this as someone who does a lot of work on the anthropology of emotions, i.e. as someone who has managed to intellectualize and ossify that most mercurial of human experiences.
Should you do a Phd?
Only if you can subscribe to the broad tenants of this faith, and are willing to understand that this is just one way of being in the world. To go on this journey is not to say you have to check all of these other forms of life at the door (I still work in kitchens and go swimming as ways to put myself back in my body), but you do have to be willing to, for at least a few years, give yourself over to this strange devotion.
3) Phd as excuse
If you don’t subscribe to my metaphor of a phd as a secular version of a spiritual quest (your loss), then I would offer this instead. A Phd is an excuse to think deeply about something for 3-4 years (or 4-5 in my case). It is socially acceptable (if not socially beneficial) to tell people at a dinner party that you are doing a phd. In reality this is shorthand for saying that you spend lots of time in your own head, thinking idle thoughts, taking notes you’ll never refer back to, reading books tangentially related to your topic and generally letting your mind delight in all that the world offers. Whether or not other people realise this is kind of moot.
It’s a real poverty of the imagination that we don’t have more socially acceptable versions of this exact same thing. Perhaps we did, in a time when people could work part-time and still afford to live in a city like London or New York. But there are few other things I can think of (and if you know of them, please tell me!) that are as open-ended as a Phd, that provide as much room for ambient travel, and have such a singular deliverable at the end of it. How you arrive at your thesis, really, is up to you. I can’t think of anything else like it. Even if you wrote a non-fiction book, there would be significantly tighter deadlines, more expectations from invested stakeholders (your agent, your publisher etc) and less ability to really marinate in whatever it is you are doing.
I still can’t believe that I was given funding for the last four years to go on this particular journey. If I tried to explain the many missteps, back-slides, tangents and rabbit-holes I have gone through to get to my thesis as is, then this newsletter would be its own thesis5. More importantly, because it is what you make of it, it allows you to learn whatever lessons you feel are most important. In the four years of this project I also worked in kitchens. I fell in love more than once. These experiences have been as valuable teachers to me as any of the books I have read or thinkers I have engaged with.
This is the final point that I think is the most important one. I wish there were more ways (perhaps a universal basic income?) to allow people to go on open-ended journeys of the kind I have described here. It is a shame that academia is such an obvious route for so many people, because academia, as I have described, is but one way of knowing the world. There are many. It would be beautiful if there were the same opportunities to expand knowledge in fields that don’t have as obvious pathways and credentials as Phds. I wish there were equivalents for social workers, counsellors, dancers, artists and more. There are phds in all of these things, but again, that misses the point somewhat.
We all deserve to follow our passions where they may take us. To find our teachers and learn our lessons.
Should you do a Phd?
maybe.
But should you tear yourself apart for something you love? of course.
This answer is related to a Phd in social sciences or the humanities at a UK university (specifically, at Oxford, as this is what I know from personal experience). A lab based Phd is a completely different thing to what I describe here. Those are significantly more directed, function much more like a structured job (i.e. have set hours in the lab each week, and depending on project can be extremely full-on), and are less lonely. Phd’s in the USA are also completely different. In anthro they are at least 7 years long. This includes mandatory introductory courses, teaching, research assisting professors in the department, language training, fieldwork and then finally writing a thesis. Graduates from American Phd programmes are significantly better trained than those from the UK, which is why it is hard for UK phd grads to get jobs in equivalent institutions in the US (so even though I will graduate from Oxford, it’s unlikely I’d be even considered at an Ivy league or similar level uni in America for an entry level position, unless I had incredible publications already)
I ended up writing about psychological counselling, therapy and the ‘worried well’ so I travelled a long way from this plan. This is also a phd. What you think you’re studying going in, is not what you end up having studied by the time you finish.
Academia also functions like a cult; once you’re in its hard to get out. Once you’ve invested the time and effort (and potentially tens of thousands of pounds if you’re not funded) it’s hard to not at least try to apply for post-docs and keep going along the academic path. If you step off the path for a few years, you can’t apply for those jobs anymore. So you’re tied in. Like a cult. At oxford we even have a cultish uniform and arcane rites spoken in Latin. Full cult vibes all around. Try explaining how peer review works to a non-academic. Only a cult could convince people to do this much free labour.
It’s an extremely complex question beyond the scope of this essay to explain why. Some sketched thoughts; a) the enlightenment b) intellect is more easily measured than affect c) “meritocracy” d) credentialism
go on, just ask me how many times my relationship to Foucault has changed in the last 4 years