A PhD's Tale: ellie.rew's Study Blog

So I'm de-lurking in order to start a PhD study blog. Yay! :yeah:

I've decided to do it as a way to hopefully channel my procrastination into a useful direction, whereby even if I'm not working on my PhD I'll at least be getting motivation and feedback, or even just the cathartic feeling of venting frustrations. Seeing as how it's Monday of the first full week of term and I'm already stuck, I figured now is as good a time as any to start. In light of the fact that I'll be ranting and venting, I'm going to keep a lot of details, such as my uni etc., pseudonymous.

So me: about the start a PhD in Medieval History at Offshore Uni. A very fun topic, typically medieval, lots of knights and monks and so forth. I should be delighted and excited.

Instead I'm nervous and scared. For no logical reason. I'm funded (a very big deal in my field), I know the major literature on my topic inside out since I did a master's dissertation on a similar theme, I've attended this uni before for undergrad, I know both my supervisors well and they're great. But I'm still paralyzed with fear. I hate how my brain works.

There are a couple of contributing factors which are making things worse.

1) I'm not officially registered yet.
This is due to a bureaucratic mess-up in uni, where despite being fully funded they're looking for several thousand in fees before they give me a student card. It's frustrating because to solve it I need some special accounting codes from my administrative supervisor (my supervision arrangements are a little unorthodox; I'll explain more in a later post), who is not answering e-mails. Without a student card, I can't get student rates on public transport, can't get a locker in the PG centre, can't get a reserved desk in the library, can't borrow from the library and can't even get wifi in uni! It's only because I've got an alumni card that I can get into the library at all. It's horribly frustrating.

2) I'm living at home.
I moved back home a few weeks ago, mainly because I'm too broke to afford the ridiculous rents around here. In the past few years, my parents' house is a place I associate with lazy weekends and holidays, making it incredibly difficult to work here. And it's a 45+ min bus journey into uni each way. It's very hard to motivate myself to make the effort to do work.

Well, that's the first installment of my ranting/venting over. Hopefully future updates will be a bit more positive!

Reply 1

gutenberg

Yay another historian! :smile:

Best of luck with sorting your administrative woes :frown:

Reply 2

The_Lonely_Goatherd

WOO for funding, ARGH for administrative cock-ups! Silly uni! :angry:

:fuhrer:

Following this with interest. Especially since you mentioned the word MONKS :jebus: (don't think there's a suitable monk smiley so Jebus will have to do :tongue:

)

Hope things settle down and that your emails get answered very soon! :hugs:

Reply 3

Nirgilis

Subscribing to this thread :awesome:

Reply 4

codle

Also subscribing - good luck and I hope you get your woes sorted out!

Reply 5

Slowbro93

In to watch :h:

Not to sound uni but what's Offshore uni? :colondollar:

Reply 6

ellie.rew

Thanks for all the support! Frankly, I thought that this would be more like a diary that only I would read, but it's nice to have support/readers.

Original post by The_Lonely_Goatherd

Following this with interest. Especially since you mentioned the word MONKS :jebus: (don't think there's a suitable monk smiley so Jebus will have to do :tongue:

)

Medieval monks are quite possibly the most fun historical sources to read. They're inevitably gossipy and b-tchy and even their hysterical, over the top misogyny is amusing. Monks ftw!

Original post by Slowbro93

Not to sound uni but what's Offshore uni? :colondollar:

Don't worry, it's my pseudonym for my uni (rather than reveal everything about me) because it's not on the UK mainland. It's my poor attempt at humour, basically. :tongue:

Starting to get a little more into the swing of this PhD thing though, which is good news. As I alluded to earlier, I have two supervisors; one is primarily academic, who is retiring after this year and so will take care of the thesis itself. My second supervisor is primarily administrative; he looks after forms, expenses, course requirements, end-of-year-reviews etc. So while Admin has yet to answer my e-mails, I had a meeting with my academic Super yesterday which went really well. The only concern is that he is already having me highlight areas we might cut if we run short of words! :colondollar: