Categories: phd
Tags: thesis
Date: 31 May 2008 14:00:12
In the comments to a small blog entry about my PhD a few days ago, where I made a throwaway remark along the lines of "Remind me why I'm doing this again", Lanark posed the question "well, why are you doing this?" Actually it's a good question, and it is good to remind myself of the answer every now and then. Just before I started the PhD (so I suspect you'll find it in July or August 2005 entries) I did a series of long posts about Life Thus Far and how I saw Life Thus Far leading me to the point I was at then - about to leave London and head up to the other end of the country to start this PhD. I won't regurgitate them here, but suffice to say that I saw the PhD as a culmination of all the things I'd done and learnt up to that point, and at the time I considered it a means of wrapping up what I'd done thus far in my life before moving on to The Next Thing (Whatever That Might Be). So, various career and academic choices over the years, plus vague and not-so-vague senses of calling related to a particular region of the world (always vague enough for me to not ever be able to elucidate exactly what it was all about, but always strong enough for me to know that I hadn't got that place out of my system yet and there was more for me to do) meant that I ended up where I am now.
Actually my thinking over the last nearly 3 years has changed quite a lot. The vague and not-so-vague calling-y type feelings are still around, but what has changed is that, following an exploration of what "vocation" might mean for me over several months last year with a very wise person who knows about That Sort Of Thing, I am more sure now that the PhD, rather than being a culmination of what I've done so far before putting it aside and moving on to The Next Thing (Whatever That Might Be), is actually an important step in its own right on the way to The Next Thing (Whatever That Might Be) (I think I'm going to shorten that to TNT(WTMB) from now on!). In other words (sorry to be so cryptic!) TNT(WTMB) is actually related to what I'm doing now. I'm still a bit hazy about it all, but have some ideas, and the best thing is that it means that the PhD no longer feels like this random thing I'm getting out of my system but I have much more of a feeling of moving on with some sort of sense of purpose. So that's why I'm doing it, although it's not the same reason I had for doing it when I started.
It was good to write that out. Hopefully my thesis will be much less cryptic and much more readable :D