Fear and curiosity during your doctorate: weeks 6 & 7 of How to Survive your PhD.

I’m charting my progress through the “How to Survive your PhD” course, which is a “MOOC”. I seem to always miss the live chat. Last week (loneliness) I was away but this week (on the topic of fear!) I was technically available. By the time I tore myself away from something I was deeply engrossed in, I watched half an hour of the live chat, but I still failed to figure out how to send “love hearts”. I will feel that I’ve failed the course unless I learn how to send a love heart in the live chat! Ah well, I can always catch up with the recordings on YouTube.

This/next week the course deals with curiosity (incorporating information overload and crossing disciplines), and our task is to share a story of curiosity and inspiration relating to our research. Well, I’m not a researcher but I am enormously curious. I am curious about what it’s like to take part in a MOOC, so you could say that this little series of posts is one long tale of curiosity and inspiration! I feel really rather privileged & proud to be a part of the first cohort of the course, actually.

If you’re getting a bit lost about which theme is which week, by the way, well each Tuesday is the live chat on the last day of the previous theme, and each Wednesday begins a new one. Which is why I end up writing about two themes at once, and today it’s all about fear and curiosity.

For me, this theme began with a heart-warming story in the Loneliness live chat from Anna, who described overcoming her fear of public speaking. It must have been a true challenge to talk to thousands of people on the course & Youtube! Anna really is a natural though, as one of the comments said: she has a very clear delivery so she’s easy to understand. More confident speakers are inclined to garble their words more because they have not prepared them as much, and they talk too fast because, unlike the nervous speakers, they are not trying to control their breathing! They are also in danger of speaking for too long because, having not prepared as well, they haven’t timed their speech and then they enjoy speaking so much that they don’t notice the time! You can probably tell that I’ve been there, done that: for me, the struggle is to hold on to my nerves because they make my public speaking better. I have sympathy with nervous academic speakers too, because the academic culture seems to encompass dispute and confrontation. However, I love this tweet from Kim Humphrey with a decision chart about whether to ask a question or not at an academic conference.

Of course there are many types of fear associated with doing a PhD. The course focuses on performance anxiety, especially fear of writing (paralysis before that blank page) and fear of public speaking. I’ve dealt with public speaking, so on to writing. Ah, academic writing again: it’s never long before we come back to the writing! Apparently, the trick is to find ways to enjoy writing, so that you start to lose that fear: the reading suggests ways to find such joy! Once you’ve defeated the blank page, there’s the fear of showing what you’ve written to someone else. I think that as a PhD student you have an advantage here, because you’re expected to learn. Actually, we’re all learning, all the time (the “growth mindset”, properly explained and referenced in the course materials!) and I think that there is no such thing as a perfect piece of writing anyway. Rather like those hand-woven rugs with deliberate faults left in them, this adds character and charm, for we are not writing machines!

I related to the comments about people who study later in life, who already see themselves as competent professionals: it is harder to accept that you have to learn how to do something when you see yourself as competent already, or indeed when you lose that identity and must find a new one. There’s an interesting paper in the course reading which picks up on this theme:

Doctoral Education, Danger and Risk Management by Erica McWilliam, Peter Taylor and Parlo Singh “This paper examines how risk management is reworking the doctoral supervisor/candidate relationship. We argue that a larger and more diverse population of doctoral students means special challenges…”