I’ve finished my first semester of grad school! What strikes me immediately is disbelief. I started my year unsure of whether this day would ever come, and now I’m 10% done with an entire PhD.
How done am I actually?
I mean, I say that. But this happened the other day:
Me: I can’t believe I’m done with 10% of my PhD.
Professor: I wouldn’t call it 10%. I know what percentage you’re actually done.
Me: What is it?
Professor: :)
Me: IS IT HIGHER OR LOWER?
Professor: :^)
It’s gotta be lower, and I’m fine with that. I suspect the degree will be top-heavy. And if I do the same amount of work I did nine more times, no way it adds up to a dissertation.
Just submit the thing
Of all things, I spent a lot of time stressing about submitting the perfect… IRB proposal. There will be multiple rounds of corrections no matter what. Lift one from a friend, find-and-replace the details, send it in after like 15 minutes of work. If your experimental procedure changes, you can submit amendments. Just submit the damn thing.
Rewriting
I knew how much I’d be writing. I didn’t know how much I’d be rewriting.
I did a lot of writing about very wrong ideas. For little weekly homeworks I learned to eyeball the assignment, wait till discussion section, and only start writing after I’d verified all my thoughts. But the longer the writing, the less feasible that becomes. I wrote a final paper for one class three separate times, because twice I realized my analysis was wrong. (And before both rewrites I was so confident I was done. Gah!)
I guess the alternative would be keeping everything in outline form, correcting the outline as needed, and then translating into full sentences at the last minute. The semester has made me much better at vomiting out prose. But I don’t know if the panic of hours-before-the-deadline writing is much better than the hours and hours of rewriting.
Reading is dangerous if you’re impulsive
My program emphasizes the importance of constant reading, and I tried to take that to heart at first. I dove head-first into a reference grammar. (To think I’d done all my gap years and gotten into grad school without a reference grammar.) I used my school login to finally read articles I’d been locked out of for years. A paper on the French subjunctive was the surprise hit, capturing my attention for weeks.
I had a lot of fun, but with more reading came more questions, and with more questions came more reading, and… As a result, I had a pretty unfocused semester. I spent a lot of time chasing a lot of rabbits down a lot of holes.
All the exploring left me with a better understanding of the shape of the puzzles I’m trying to solve. I came in with one idea and emerged with a loose roadmap of how to turn it into five years of research. But uncovering a lot of questions meant I didn’t get very far towards uncovering any solutions. I walked into the semester wanting to launch one experiment, and I’m not that much closer to launching it.
But the experiment design changed, many times, due to new information I found in those papers. So maybe there was value in spending all that time wandering. I’ve got mixed feelings, and I need to figure out how to keep reading while staying locked in.
Putting things aside
Uncovering all those questions was frustrating because solutions felt so attainable. If only I did this, and this, and this, I’d have an answer. (Like any of those hypothetical tasks would have been easy.) A lot of people told me to not juggle so many things at once, which, duh.
I’m taken back to a conversation I had when I was still deciding where to go. I asked, should my PhD be about this or that? The professor said, I think that’s a false dichotomy. (Which is a professor af thing to say.) He said, have you considered putting things aside till the time is right? I hadn’t. When you put it that way…
I’m a pretty impatient person, though. I can’t wait to start some of the things in my backlog. I have a lot of itches that need scratching.
Grades are different
Up until I finished undergrad, grading didn’t faze me. I had never been evaluated without a numerical score attached, and so a few percentage points off here and there were a fact of life. Then I went to industry, and there I got used to qualitative, thumbs-up / thumbs-down feedback. Now I’m back in grades land again, and boy is it different.
My advisor telling me this is wrong, go fix it? Cool! Thanks boss!
A professor telling me this is wrong, one point off? I AM UNWORTHY OF BEING IN YOUR PRESENCE.
It’s funny. I’ve been given feedback with my entire livelihood on the line. But going through that experience somehow made the fiddly little point deductions hit so much harder.
That’s right!
I’m often reminded of the old Sufi story that goes something like:
A: it’s this way.
Sufi: that’s right!
B: no, it’s that way.
Sufi: that’s right!
C: but they can’t both be right!
Sufi: that’s right!
A theme that came up no less than three distinct times was that disagreements in the syntax literature could just reflect variation on the ground. This excites me!
I forgot to have hobbies
Of all the classic pieces of advice, “don’t put your life on hold for the PhD” is the one I took the least. I looked forward to being back on a college campus for years, because where else will you find clubs of people with common interests. I saw so many flyers for cool things to do, and I ended up doing… precisely none of them.
In fairness, my class schedule was a mess, leaving only two days of the week I could get any work done. My schedule next semester is much lighter. I promise to use the extra time to live a little.