PhD Year One

In the inevitable rush up towards the end of the year amid the terrifying and constantly noticeable feelings of time passing way too quickly, I thought I’d stop for a few minutes and type out a retrospective of my first year as a part-time PhD Student with the Open University. I can hardly believe that very nearly a full year has passed until I started on this adventure – a goal in itself which I had been working towards since 2010.

One year in. Whilst the imposter syndrome has not yet abated, I am at least very conscious now that I am part of a wide, engaging and life-affirming community of interesting and interested people. He’s probably sick of me pestering him by now but Stuart McKie who was, until recently, a fellow PhD student at the Open University researching a complimentary subject to my own (Roman Curse Tablets), is always owed thanks for putting me in touch with the right people back in 2014. We met at the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference 2014 held at the University of Reading. I was giving a paper in the panel Small Finds and Ancient Social Practices, organised by the wonderful team of Stef Hoss and Alissa Whitmore on Jet Gorgoneia in Roman Britain from a magical/materiality perspective. Stuart came and chatted to me afterwards. Later discussion eventually found out that we had both attended the University of Leicester and, although in different year groups, had lived in the same hall of residence in 2007-8. There is a fair chance that I had been serving the guy drinks in the halls bar, where I worked. Small world. A longer email discussion with Stuart then put me in the inbox of Ursula Rothe at the Open University, one of his supervisors, and through Ursula I started on the path to submitting a thesis proposal, being brutally interviewed for it, being rejected from funding, being accepted for other funding, and ultimately becoming enfolded into being a proper research student. So for catalysing this serious of fortunate events, the almost-Dr. McKie  deserves many thanks. Indeed, a short chat in Reading two years ago has led to Stuart and I collaborating on an edited volume, and we can now often be found at the same conference panels. Happily, Ursula is now also part of my supervisory triumvirate, completed by E-J Graham and Helen King.

Many lessons have been learned over the past year – explicitly, implicitly, holistically, sporadically and even theoretically. Perhaps the first lesson was that Milton Keynes, home of the OU campus, is bloody miles away. Nothing short of a three-hour each-way drive will get me on campus from t’North. Thankfully the reasonably priced coffee and fancy sandwiches in the massive OU café help to soothe a weary traveller’s woes. The distance involved has meant that I am largely unable to partake of the face-to-face development opportunities offered by the grad school and department and, for better or worse, that I will go out of my way not to commit to driving to campus.

Perhaps my greatest achievement of the last 12 months has been the periodic submission of two pieces of work totally 45,000 words. Smashing these personal wordcount PBs started on a bumpy track, with an initial 5,000-word submission on the theoretical nature of magic (in Jan/Feb 16) suffering death by a thousand supervisory comments. The only genuine existential panic I’ve felt over the last year came when I was reading the perfectly reasonable and appropriate comments by the supervisors on this first piece of work. Solution? Triple the length of the document and read everything. Whether any or all of this so-far discussed content will end up in the completed thesis is entirely academic (ha!) but it certainly feels like an achievement, if only in quantitative rather than qualitative terms.

Much desk-based writing has thus occurred so far with only period trips to fun and interesting places. My favourite of which was, without doubt, to the amazing Iris Project in Cheney School, Oxford. I was invited to give an hour introduction to magic to a group of year 8 students followed by an evening talk to a group of adults. One specific lesson was learned here – that the technical description of a ‘ring’ designed to be worn on a finger – ‘finger ring’ – is, when spoken quickly, hilarious to teenagers. First time I think the nice Oxford kids had a beardy Geordie bloke telling them to stop being mucky whist trying to hide his own vicarious giggling.  Between the two talks I got to wander into Oxford, buy some books and ponder life in the Pitt Rivers Museum. It was great fun. So much so that I’m going back to the school next year to chat about magical insects for the Festival of Ancient and Modern Science.

Over the past 12 months I’ve been rather pleased with how disciplined I’ve been with working from home for 2 days a week on my PhD. Very little distraction / video gaming has occurred in place of writing or reading. Had I embarked on this project 6 years ago, when I had originally wanted to as a fresh-faced MA graduate, I think the outcome may not have been the same. In retrospect, having a break from university and entering the working Heritage world for a few years has absolutely improved my project / life skills / writing / archaeological knowledge / caffeine tolerance to my betterment.

It’s not all rosy: the distant deadline of December 2022 remains, frankly, beyond my comprehension; I royally buggered up the finances for the first 6 months meaning I essentially lost the ability to claim from half my research grant for 2016; Part-time work in the professional world makes that time somewhat stressier, making it so tempting to take it easier on PhD days; It is very enjoyable to wind up my other half when we are both working from home.

The short path I’ve walked so far has been enlightening. I love collaborating and discussing with other researchers and students and my networking has got even better. I’ve recently been invited to write a paper for one edited volume, present a paper at the CA in a session, give an undergraduate lecture at Newcastle University, and take part in a MOOC on Ancient Health and Wellbeing. With all this going on, my data gathering to start, the edited volume with Stuart to drawn together, and organising another magic panel at TRAC 2017, next year promises to provide the full-on, exciting and engaging PhD life I signed up for. Hopefully the end justifies the means.

2016 was, in contradiction, both long and incredibly short. I’ve no doubt other people felt the same. Let’s finish up this brief retrospective with some benchmark statistics of the last 12 months by which I can compare my PhD life at the end of 2017!

• 45,000 words written

• 3 supervisors still all happily talking to each other and me

• 2 Academic papers published

• 4 new boxes of coffee pod things purchased

• 1 magazine article published

• 30 year 8 students giggling at Roman phallic charms

• 1 video interview on my PhD topic

• 24 hours spent driving to Milton Keynes

• 3 times I’ve got lost on Milton Keynes’ roundabouts of doom

• 2 days filming parts of a MOOC

• 5 years to go

And a partridge in a pear tree.

Best. A.