on PhD time

When asked, I’ve recently taken to describing myself as a second-year PhD candidate. Of course, where the question is about the length of time since my commencement date, this answer is a lie. It is, however, a convenient lie,

easier than attempting to explain how time is, in fact, a piss-poor indicator of research progress. I am 1.3877884517 years into my candidature — it’s the university counting, not me — is that what you want to know? I officially started the course on my 24th birthday and am now 26, is that what you want to know?

Stretching three [to four] years into five [or more]: back when all this was just a hypothetical, my [prospective] supervisors had doubts. The university doesn’t like it when you mess with its timelines; the university doesn’t want your research to become obsolete by the time you submit your thesis; the university only gets its funding when you’re done, so it’d rather you not dally. Alright then,

I lie on my application. Well, I tell a half-truth: I apply to be a full-time student, assuming I will be, at some point — so what does it matter if I start as part-time, if I will have a part-time option regardless? I give the false impression that I am planning to do my PhD at the standard pace. I get myself accepted, do the bait-and-switch,

become the syncopation to others’ even drum-beats. Classmates organise themselves into cohorts around me, their milestones lining up neatly, their fieldwork dates coinciding; [I grow envious of the bonds that shared rhythms are enabling them to foster]. Vicariously, I come to understand the typical shape of a [social sciences] PhD [in so-called Australia] — finding myself sandwiched between first-years developing research proposals, second-years in the thick of data collection.

Meanwhile, I stretch the first year of my candidature into a year-and-a-half, over the peaks and valleys of my day job. Terrified of falling behind in a life that a PhD might otherwise force me to put on hold, I sink it into early mornings, weekends, study leave days; crevices and folds, a rugged mountain range.

I warp the years of PhD time, and in retaliation, it warps my sense of weeks and days and hours. When I start twelve months of leave from my job at the end of September, two months after confirmation, I am excited to finally have some open-ended time to read, write, think. This is a luxury that fills my heart to the brim with anticipation; I add a joyful note to my out-of-office message, so that people will envy what I have gifted myself.

What I don’t anticipate is that I will first need to learn how to navigate the ocean of lonely-alone time. I’m overseas visiting family in October, but after I get back: I promptly lose the rest of November, then the summer months, to waves of anxiety-depression. I find that, without daily team check-in messages or regular meetings or co-workers or an office space, I have fewer buoys and anchors to hold me steady, help me stay the course. I become, simultaneously, captain and the sole passenger of my own fucking ship, and I am thrown overboard.

To be clear — it’s not that I can’t get shit done. I set up new routines just fine: I work up daily task lists, weekly dashboards and month-by-month timelines. I commit to mirroring my partner’s nine-to-five pattern: I settle at my desk when he leaves for the office in the morning, and attempt to wrap things up when he gets home. I make slow progress on an ethics application, an introduction and a methods chapter, and a literature review that, it seems, will never be complete. I spend every day alone in our little apartment, and read, and write, and think, as planned,

and that is precisely how I start to drown.

Without company, I am no longer able to silence my inner chorus of dread, self-doubt, despair. Without the distraction of a job greater than myself in scope — a job I can disentangle myself from at the end of the day — all my ugly feelings crescendo from background hum into big ol’ marching band. From morning til night, I am forced to listen to thoughts I have long tucked away, and they are insufferable. For the aeons that elapse between when I crawl out of bed, and when I crawl back into it, I am forced to be conscious of the pit in my belly, where all my worries congregate. My executive function keeps me treading water, but the water is rising; the dam has broken.

Time becomes cavernous. Hours blur together, scooping up and around and over me until they eat me alive.

I become desperate for time to quicken, but institutions resist. On my left: the university’s ethics committee, with its multi-step application process, yearly calendar of meetings, allotted business days for each stage of review. On my right: [organisation name redacted], where I hope to undertake data collection, is the definition of bureaucracy — a machine with innumerable cogs. I know both are slow-moving beasts, so I find myself playing

the long game. I lay groundwork from day one, gathering intelligence about processes, the questions I might be asked, the documents that I might need to prepare, every potential hurdle. I nurture relationships with allies who might be able to open doors and smooth the way forward. I am transparent, foreshadowing my asks with the right people — they are enthusiastic, and so I am optimistic in turn. Caught in the middle, I start early in my attempts to coax the institutions into lockstep,

but alas, they are bodies with their own stubborn clocks.

I have no choice but to wait as I get passed from one ethics committee to another, just in time for the Christmas-NY shutdown period; as [organisation name redacted] undergoes its forced metamorphosis. I tap out sheepish follow-up emails and offer effusive thank-yous. I rush to defend myself against the committee’s queries and concerns, and to build rapport with new [organisation name redacted] contacts, and then again: I have no choice but to wait as a chairperson scrutinises my new responses, and as a HR, then a legal team get involved. Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait,

my research proposal moving up and down approval chains, between and within the institutions. I grow impatient as institutional time pushes back the expected start date for my fieldwork, squeezing the months I have before institutional time will also, in beckoning me back to my day job, necessitate me to end it.

In all, it takes more than half a year, from initial meetings to final, written approvals.

The signatures on the paperwork have today’s date. It’s time to begin.