Member-only story
How to Love Your PhD: a work in progress
It was the very final days of autumn and I was doing the very final edits to my book. I had met every single one of my publisher’s deadlines and I was finally finishing. I knew I’d have to wait a while before the book would actually appear in print, but I felt a tremendous momentum and joy in the fact that I was about to be published by one of the biggest publishing companies in the world.
But I had to face reality: what next? For at least the past six months I had been desperate to quit my job, but I didn’t want to have to look for another job while in the throes of finishing my manuscript. The black hole of the great unknown loomed before me: Christmas and then — what? As it happened, the answer came pretty quickly because I ran into a friend of mine at the library where I was working. He suggested to me to apply for funding to a PhD programme. Now, I had never intended or wanted to be an academic (I was teaching in a film school). Still, the lure of “free money” and three years to just think and write on the subject that I was passionately interested in seemed too good to pass up. Over the next two months, I knocked my funding application into shape, and I won the scholarship.
Four years later I find myself in a similar position but quite a different state of mind. Technically I am in the last stages of the PhD, finishing my final chapter but…
