Laura Cook is a first-year distance-learning PGR in the Department of Philosophy. She has found a podcast helpful as she has navigated the challenges of starting her programme, and here she explains why.
I entered my first year of doctoral study knowing a PhD would require my deep, sustained engagement, even if balanced with a full-time job. Therefore, in an attempt to feel well-prepared ahead of starting my studies, I subscribed to nearly every ‘How to do a PhD’ guide, YouTube channel, blog and podcast out there! Within a couple of weeks I had cast all the self-proclaimed PhD gurus aside: they either confused me or confirmed my looming imposter syndrome. Only one of the initial tools in my PhD toolbox survived the first few months of life as a PGR, the ‘PhD Life Raft Podcast’.
Many PhD resources focus on the process of reading, researching, and writing the PhD. The Life Raft tackles these areas but also the personal peaks and troughs we have to navigate in order to get a PhD over the finish line. Dr Emma Brodzinski’s PhD Life Raft Podcast is a great resource because it humanises doing a PhD covering a wide variety of topics both professional and personal. What I have found even more helpful than the podcast is the other offerings Emma has developed that are affordable (often free!), accessible and geared towards postgraduates in the UK system.
In January, I joined a ‘PhD Planathon’, five focused days in the company of other PhD scholars from around the world where we made plans, took personal action towards our PhD and were supplied with some great tools for self-management. This didn’t mean five days solid of workshops, rather it was an early morning Zoom call with a focus for the day and then activities you could dip in and out of as you found useful. I think it worked especially well for me as a distance student as it forced me to be accountable to others and to commit things to paper. It almost functioned as a ‘Shut up and Work’ week, but with advice, research planning resources and questions, and a specific focus to get us going. The PhD Life Raft offers other events like this throughout the year with different areas of focus, there is one coming up soon with a emphasis on shaking off perfectionism.
We are all more than our thesis or our research papers and, as a recent distance student residential week in Birmingham reminded me, we are all very different in the way we approach things. Before beginning my PhD I had assumed my development would quickly move on to building discipline-specific knowledge and that the ‘soft stuff’ of cultivating my work/study/life balance would fall into place. I am quickly learning this simply isn’t true! The PhD Life Raft certainly hasn’t solved all my problems, but I have found it useful so far as a source of wisdom from folks on the PGR journey, and perhaps others in the UoB PGR community might too.
UoB PGR Development 