Crisis averted

Over the last couple of months I've had a bit of a crisis looming. Some academics and students had been discussing setting up a Wiki (or something similar) for general sharing of resources between students. In one sense, it was great - it demonstrates a clear demand for these things among students and staff, and a willingness to put work in. On the other hand, despite knowing about my project, they were kind of shutting me out of the discussion. From my point of view, this stood a chance of undermining my PhD project completely - if students were presented with two resource sharing systems, one seeded with content and supported by academics, and another (my project), they would naturally choose the supported, seeded system. Leaving me with no data, and no project.

Fortunately, in the last few weeks the folks in that project have started talking to me - some of them didn't want to undermine my project, and understood the risks of having two competing projects in the same space. I think they also started to realize the amount of time, energy, and money they would need to put in to build and support the system they were talking about. Last week and this week I've had a few meetings with the team, and we've all agreed to work together - they'll proceed with their plan to seed some shared resources for students, and I'll make some modifications to my system to support what the students are wanting to do, and everyone wins :)   I'm very lucky to have supportive colleagues who are willing to work with me in this way, and I owe James a beer next time I'm at the pub with him.

This is nicely in line with my research plans anyway - I'm exploring ways to kick start and sustain a social learning network. If this seeding works, it will hopefully start a snowball effect, where students see the value of contributing, and start to use the network; and once that happens, I start to have enough data to work out how students are using the system, and how it can be improved.

On being a PhD student

Some days I am a PhD student, and some days I am a person who is enrolled in a PhD. They are two very different things, in my experience. Similarly, sometimes I am an IT manager, and at other times I happen to work at a university managing IT folks. Or a Parent, or a person with kids. I guess technically, I'm all of those things at once, but in reality, I move between those roles and identities. Of course, the raw external facts always apply - I'm enrolled in a PhD, I work at the Uni, I have kids, I have hobbies. But it's difficult to be a PhD student, a Manager, and a Parent all at the same time. Each of those people has different priorities, different needs, different ways of thinking about the world.

This has been on my mind lately a bit - towards the end of last year work got hectic and stressful, and left me with no energy for study. As time went on, that PhD student identity dissolved a bit, and the idea of spending my evenings reading, coding, thinking and writing seemed less important, and less like something I wanted to do. I would see other PhD students as "them", not as an "us". December was basically nonexistent, study-wise. January wasn't much better, but improved as the month progressed. A holiday last week seems to have restored me, and now I'm back to full strength (I hope).

It's all made me realize that doing a PhD involves being a PhD student. It's a whole identity - more than just an external fact about you're life, it has to become part of who you are. When that identity isn't in place, there's no stable source of motivation for spending all those hours tinkering away, to keep eating that elephant. Those other identities coexist, and of course they take precedence at times, but it's important to hold on to my student identity - letting go of that is the first step towards not completing this PhD.