Looking Ahead

Originally published in the Scotsman.

The other day, I walked into an office with a few vague ideas, and walked out with a pretty good plan for the next three years. I haven’t officially started yet, but doing a PhD is already full of surprises.

The biggest change is that I’m not required to take classes – but can attend as many as I like. PhD students are expected to be geeky enough to really enjoy lectures, yet responsible enough to know their limits. There’s a middle ground, and I hope I can find it – somewhere between going to all the lectures because they look so interesting (!) and missing them all because I can’t be bothered. During my time in higher education, I’ve navigated endless lists of required classes, minimum courseloads, enrolment conditions… After so many years of strict guidelines, it’s extraordinary that I’m not required to take anything.

I’ve often had to fight tooth and nail to follow my curiosity, so it’s a strange and wonderful thing to be asked, ‘what do you want to do?’ I’m realising that I have some intellectual freedom now, within a safe structure to keep me from wandering too far. I imagine this is how a yearling colt feels when released into a paddock – it’s not complete freedom, but it’s more than I’ve ever had.

Of course, there’s plenty of non-negotiable work. The next three years will culminate with 80,000 words that make an original contribution to knowledge. But I hope my project can be useful, as well – there’s always the fear that research will fall into the abyss of irrelevant information, doomed to gather dust for eternity. It’s the quest to find something useful in an endless sea of data that makes academia so exciting. What looks dull and boring on the outside has hidden moments of transcendence, when insight suddenly illuminates the answer to a question or connects seemingly unrelated ideas. But a moment of insight can only come after extensive groundwork has been laid, so a fair amount of stubbornness is required.

Being stubborn also comes in handy when dealing with university bureaucracy, where registration procedures seem to be training exercises for the national queuing team. Sometimes I wonder whether universities are purposely designed to be as frustrating as possible, to teach patience and inventiveness. Maybe it’s just a side-effect of being a bulky institution. This will be my sixth university, and every time it’s the same.

Still, whenever I’m feeling down on the work or the red tape, I just have to open my eyes and look around. As an American, Scotland seems like paradise – weather and all. I’ve lived in Edinburgh for three years, and can think of no other place I’d rather settle. My studies will be in Glasgow, which might bring a bit of culture shock, but after having lived in Los Angeles it takes a lot to throw me for a loop. Even the commute doesn’t seem so bad.

But then, it’s easy to be full of optimism right now – this process isn’t making any major demands on my time or my comfortable worldviews just yet. It’s the proverbial calm before the storm, and I’m making the most of it; I know the real challenges will come soon enough. The reality of a PhD will creep up when I least expect it, giving me too many commitments to juggle and too many conflicting ideas to reconcile. Only when I’ve had a chance to examine the boundaries of this wide new space will I realise exactly what I’ve gotten myself into. And inevitably, that will be the biggest surprise of all.

Myshele Goldberg is a PhD student at the University of Strathclyde.