Following on from yesterday’s post about being accepted to present at a conference in Lancashire, I woke up this morning to the news that I have not been accepted to present at a conference in New York – one that I really wanted to attend, for a number of reasons, the least of which was the opportunity to present my own research. I won’t be able to just attend as a non-presenter as I was relying upon university funding to pay for my flights, and they won’t pay if I’m not a participant. However, I would have loved to go. It looks like an amazing event organised by people researching some really cool stuff, and it’s in New York.

New York is a place that I romanticise the hell out of. They call it the city that never sleeps; Perth, on the other hand, is the city which is only slowly waking up for the very first time, and hasn’t quite worked out what to do yet. The past few years in this city has seen a burgeoning bar, restaurant, and event scene, and whilst this means that people from the city dubbed dullsville for as long as I can remember are finally coming around to the idea of Doing Cool Things, it’s not being executed terribly well in many cases.

I love Perth. It’s my home. It’s got the world’s most amazing beaches, and it’s sleepy enough to suit my contradictory desire to be a total homebody. But Perth, I love you, but you’re bringing me down. It’s a bummer not to be accepted but it’s not really a huge deal – I will get to New York this year. It’s on my list of Thesis Completion Gifts To Myself (along with swimming with whale sharks. It’s a short list, so far).

However, not being accepted got me thinking about my PhD experience so far. It hasn’t been a smooth sail. I’ve thrown in the towel and quit twice, following on from four-monthly emotion-fueled cycles of excitement, inspiration, dedication, self-doubt, despair, and all-out depression. I used to be able to predict my quality of work by how far into the four months I was; I’d get excessive amounts done in the excitement-inspiration-dedication phase, which would last about six weeks, and then stick my head in the sand for the following ten weeks and do nothing because I was absolutely so convinced that I would never succeed.

I don’t do that any more. Counselling over summer 2011/2012 helped me to deal with my perfectionism and approach problems in a completely different way. Taking the first six months of 2012 off from my PhD didn’t hurt, either. In total though, since I started in January 2008, I’ve taken about a year and a half off from study – officially. I’ve also lost countless weeks to stress and wondering why I had taken on such a monumental task in the first place. Doing a PhD was the first time in my life that I felt like I wasn’t intelligent enough… and when you’re used to always achieving your academic goals, that feels pretty god damn shitty. So much of who I am is bound up in my academic ability, and it always has been, ever since I was a kid.

As much as I like to say that I’ve changed recently, I know I haven’t. I may have learned to deal with it better, but I still sometimes feel like the kid who gets the second best mark and wonders how they could’ve gone so wrong.

When I look at the websites and CVs of other PhD students in my area, I honestly do feel intimidated sometimes. They all seem to have done so much. I’ve raised this issue with my supervisor, who reminded me that the Australian PhD system is quite different to others, especially America, where candidacy is a longer and more involved experience. When you’re paying (a lot) for your degree, you want to get the most out of it, and the academic field is so competitive that you have to be constantly publishing, presenting, sitting on committees and organising events like symposia and conferences if you’re ever going to get noticed and get a job.

Australian PhD students don’t pay their own fees. Places are fully funded, and students do not have to have a Masters’ degree to get in. There’s no expectation that they will teach, and – in my area, anyway – no expectation that they will publish or present at conferences, although all of this is encouraged.

Nearing the end of my time as a PhD student, I have few publications. I have presented at one conference and one workshop. I wandered for a very long time down the wrong path with my research, and whilst it has led me to an area that I am very interested in, I can’t help but feel like I did waste a lot of time and was really aimlessly clutching at straws that, no matter how hard I tried, couldn’t be pieced together into something good. I wish that I had discovered what I’m working on now three years ago, but would I have wanted to know about it? I hated being a PhD student three years ago. It was a chore that I couldn’t let go of, so I pottered along for three more years and it’s only been in the past six months that I’ve actually realised that this is what I want to do. I’m so excited about the research I want to pursue in the future.

I feel like there are amazing things to learn and ponder and write about, but I also know that I have to get this project out of the way before I can think about anything else. I need to remind myself that just because I haven’t published and presented widely, and just because I’m only now coming to some concepts that have been around for a few years, doesn’t mean that I’m not good enough. It’s just that I’ve taken an alternative route to get here, which is unfortunately the burden of the lateral thinking amongst us. It’s a way of looking at the world that will be of benefit to me as a researcher in the future though.