The Eureka Moment

Originally published in the Scotsman.

It’s like carefully turning a radio knob, ever so slightly, or shifting the antenna on an old television. Suddenly, there is a moment when everything becomes clear, before fading again to static. But the clarity is impossible to ignore, and it lingers deliciously.

One of my supervisors dubbed it the Eureka moment, and calls it the ‘best feeling in the world.’ It’s the moment when you realise you’re on the right track, when suddenly the disconnected elements of a project fall together, just for a split second. You get a glimpse of the shape it might someday take, and a rush of hope that it’s possible for your own humble hands to craft that shape. It’s kind of like falling in love.

In academia, you need to base your ideas on other people’s ideas, so it’s crucial to find previous scholars who have written about your area. In my know-it-all days of undergrad, I used to hate this facet of education. Why couldn’t we come up with our own ideas? Why did we always have to cite boring old philosophers and irrelevant studies? Weren’t our own insights enough? I shudder at how pretentious I must have seemed to my teachers.

These days, my attitude has reversed completely. For months, I’ve been worried that I wouldn’t find enough material to do a good PhD. I’ve been reading and thinking (more of the latter, to be honest), journaling and making mind-maps, struggling to figure out what I really want to know. Somewhere along the way, I abandoned logic and embraced intuition, which I now realise was necessary in the process of finding a good topic.

It’s been an amazing privilege to be able to shape my own project in this way. Many students are given specific topics with strict parameters, or must carefully follow their original proposal, even though it was written months before starting. But in my case, my supervisors have been wonderfully accommodating, taking my seemingly random mind-changes in stride.

Looking back over the last couple of months, it’s clear that the changes haven’t been random, that each shift brought me closer to a synthesis of latent interests. Maybe they could see that at the time, or maybe they simply trust the process. Either way, it seems to have worked – once I found my ‘hook,’ things tumbled into place. I know that this is really only the first step, but it’s an exciting space to experience.

After years of study, I’m finally starting to feel like I have some grasp of the Big Ideas and the Big Names. I’m finally seeing how the masters of the social science canon are very relevant to the areas I want to pursue. And in turn, that brings the dizzying sensation that my own work might have something to contribute to the way we think about the world. It’s enough to make you feel microscopic and heroic, all at once.

It’s also terrifying. For months, the PhD was a hazy, abstract thing. I wasn’t quite sure what it was about, and I wasn’t quite sure how to approach it. I was probably told, but it’s not the kind of thing that’s absorbed through the ears.

Now that I have a sense of direction, a sense of the story I’m trying to tell, I have no excuse not to tell it. Just as the heady feeling of falling in love gives a couple strength for the hard work of building a relationship, I imagine the Eureka moment will have to nourish me through the overwhelming work ahead. I’m trying to savour it as much as possible.