A friend of mine one of these days approached me and said “You should write about your doctoral experience, you have a healthy relationship with your PhD”.
I confess I was a bit surprised, I never thought of my doctoral experience as a healthy one, I find my PhD so frustrating sometimes. So I asked myself “Do I have a healthy relationship with it?”
She explained me a bit her perception, I understood what she meant and I realize that she might be right, in some aspects I do have a healthy relationship with my PhD.
The thing she felt the healthiest one was that I take vacations from it, so for the entire month of August I just forgot intentionally of its existence, and yes, I find it too a healthy thing to do.
She explained me that that’s not so frequent, she feels that many PhD students don’t give themselves that permission, so they never stop to breath and live life, they immerse themselves on their studies and postpone all other projects or interests they may have.
This can definitely be a problem, you don’t give yourself time and space to live your life and reenergize yourself, which probably contributes to a less productive work, and you possibly end up blaming yourself for not being “good enough”. Then, when you feel you’re not good enough, you probably take the worst option, to punish yourself and immerse even more on your studies, instead of taking a break to reenergize and change perspective.
Besides the importance of breaks now and then, one other thing I find crucial and tends to be difficult to achieve at least in a satisfying way, is the equilibrium between the need to be oriented and feel accompanied, and the capacity to be autonomous. Supervisors tend to have million things to do and are not able to give us all the orientation we need.
If we can’t find a way to feel satisfied and accompanied when our supervisors can’t give us all the orientation we need, we’ll end up feeling very lonely and disoriented, and the doctoral experience will be a very painful one. In my case, I bypassed it in two ways, first by studying something that I like and using methodologies that are fun and interesting to me, and second I invited colleagues to work with me as team raters and the data were discussed together. Even for more individual projects, it is always important to meet and discuss with colleagues or send an e-mail to a foreign expert who tends to be very quick and available, and again we come out of it reenergized and more productive.
Of course at some point there’s individual work to do, and here it is important that we have the capacity both to be autonomous and to get satisfaction out of it. This autonomy part is related not only to the capacity of working alone, but with the capacity of putting limits to ourselves and/or to our supervisors, when everybody gets too enthusiastic and wants to do everything or this one more thing in the little time available.
In the middle of all this, my PhD can still be very frustrating at times, but I’m happy my friend sees me as someone with a healthy relationship with it, it helped me see it with different eyes too, and to keep protecting me from the pain so frequently associated to a PhD expedition.
I confess I was a bit surprised, I never thought of my doctoral experience as a healthy one, I find my PhD so frustrating sometimes. So I asked myself “Do I have a healthy relationship with it?”
She explained me a bit her perception, I understood what she meant and I realize that she might be right, in some aspects I do have a healthy relationship with my PhD.
The thing she felt the healthiest one was that I take vacations from it, so for the entire month of August I just forgot intentionally of its existence, and yes, I find it too a healthy thing to do.
She explained me that that’s not so frequent, she feels that many PhD students don’t give themselves that permission, so they never stop to breath and live life, they immerse themselves on their studies and postpone all other projects or interests they may have.
This can definitely be a problem, you don’t give yourself time and space to live your life and reenergize yourself, which probably contributes to a less productive work, and you possibly end up blaming yourself for not being “good enough”. Then, when you feel you’re not good enough, you probably take the worst option, to punish yourself and immerse even more on your studies, instead of taking a break to reenergize and change perspective.
Besides the importance of breaks now and then, one other thing I find crucial and tends to be difficult to achieve at least in a satisfying way, is the equilibrium between the need to be oriented and feel accompanied, and the capacity to be autonomous. Supervisors tend to have million things to do and are not able to give us all the orientation we need.
If we can’t find a way to feel satisfied and accompanied when our supervisors can’t give us all the orientation we need, we’ll end up feeling very lonely and disoriented, and the doctoral experience will be a very painful one. In my case, I bypassed it in two ways, first by studying something that I like and using methodologies that are fun and interesting to me, and second I invited colleagues to work with me as team raters and the data were discussed together. Even for more individual projects, it is always important to meet and discuss with colleagues or send an e-mail to a foreign expert who tends to be very quick and available, and again we come out of it reenergized and more productive.
Of course at some point there’s individual work to do, and here it is important that we have the capacity both to be autonomous and to get satisfaction out of it. This autonomy part is related not only to the capacity of working alone, but with the capacity of putting limits to ourselves and/or to our supervisors, when everybody gets too enthusiastic and wants to do everything or this one more thing in the little time available.
In the middle of all this, my PhD can still be very frustrating at times, but I’m happy my friend sees me as someone with a healthy relationship with it, it helped me see it with different eyes too, and to keep protecting me from the pain so frequently associated to a PhD expedition.