PhD Journal: A View from The Difficult Middle
This month marks the official midway point of my PhD. Technically, I've been doing a PhD since October 2020, but the funded time has been elongated by a year of maternity leave and a switch from full-time to part-time. Recently I did the maths and realised I have the equivalent of 1.5 years of full-time funding remaining. PhDs provide surprisingly few official milestones to mark the passage of time with (and essentially none between the confirmation process at the end of the first year and… submitting your thesis) so I thought it was worth acknowledging this one. I've been trying to work out how I feel about hitting the halfway mark. Is this the hardest part of the PhD for me? Only time will tell. Three years (double this for part-time PhDs!) is a long time to maintain motivation on one project. You think you have a sense of this going into the PhD, but (for me at least) you really don’t. Before starting the doctorate, projects I worked on could absolutely span a year or long...
