The yellow AA signs are out, and girls in short skirts wander up and down the streets handing out flyers for the hottest bars in town. A strange cuddly kangaroo waits outside the union, ready to pounce with a hug on anyone younger than 25. Dads sweat at the steering wheels of their cars, whilst their children struggle with downloaded maps. In their orange/blue/green/purple t-shirts, freshers' helpers fall over each other in their desire to help point the way.

Yes, it's that time of year again. A university town, especially when it has a relatively high proportion of students as mine has, is ghostly quiet during the summer. For these three months, it is possible to get seats in the cinema, to go out without feeling surrounded by people who are (surely?) to young to be in the nightclubs, to go shopping without lines of girls stretching across the street, woven together into an unbreakable arm-in-arm chain. And so I can't help but feel slightly resentful that 10,000 people will march in this weekend, like some colonial horde arrogantly reclaiming land that is not natively theirs.

But then again, with the invaders comes a current of happiness that is maintained in a high buzz of voices throughout the year, even during the permanent dullness of winter, dipping perhaps only just before exams. I live in a village three miles out of town, so I escape to the countryside each night, when the buzz spills over into drunkenness. But even if I lived in the town, I expect I could cope with the odd stray traffic cone, a small, if irritating, piece of evidence of the high spirits students bring with them, along with their bootloads of scrappy posters and laptops. Speaking to a policeman the other day, he admitted that they have far more serious trouble - fights, drugs - in the holiday periods when the locals have free reign, than when the students, noisy but usually good-natured, are around.

And, after all, I was a real (i.e. lazy) student once, as opposed to a postgraduate working 9 to 5. We were having a general reminisce the other day about the period which threatens to remain, in spite of the weddings and kids and the steady money of good jobs to come, the "best days of our lives." Rather worryingly, we realised that when we started university, this year's new students were probably only twelve, barely out of primary school. In spite of this horrifying age gap, I still hope to be able to pull off the old trick when I start teaching again this term. As my students line up nervously along the wall outside the seminar room, I try and join in the banter: yes, I did get most horribly drunk last night; no, I haven't read all the books on the reading list sent during the holidays...The look on their faces when I sit down, open my files, and take the register is a memory that will remain with me throughout the year, a welcome score on my part to remember when, later, I am parrying emails trying to persuade me that, really sorry, the essay has not yet been finished because they really have been laid in bed all week with a cold, and not leaning all week at the bar...

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

Friday 22nd September is OneWebDay, a celebration of the way the internet has changed peoples' lives. One of the things that never ceases to amaze me are the strangely meandering routes by which one aspect can link to another. I saw on my webstats that some visitors were coming to my site searching for "Dr. Depressed" about which I blogged last week. So I followed the backlink to Google, and realised that I was appearing number 2 in the rankings for the keywords. The site below mine was called, intriguingly, Gooseania, so I followed it and turned up the weblog for a Manchester-based PhD student, Craig Laughton. Like The Pequod blog, he uses his site to voice his anxieties and pass on experiences about doing doctoral research (in his case, in mathematics). He also wrote an article, published in Mathematics Today, entitled Exploring the Blogosphere, which I very much recommend. I was particularly struck by this comment:

Perhaps the least obvious but most beneficial aspect of blogging (from a maths student’s perspective) is that you are dragged away from scribbling sums and equations to having to write some actual English. Composing a short article every few days massively improves your writing skills, which is going to be crucial when it comes to typing reports and finally, your thesis.

The biggest change in perspective I have undergone this year is that I see my research work in a really holistic way, unlike when I was doing my taught courses. What I mean by this is that rather than simply viewing my thesis as an extended essay with a single question to be answered and handed in, I have learnt to be happy to explore routes and ideas that seem - at first glance - tangential to my research. I do not feel guilty if I listen to Radio 4 for half an hour (especially on an issue as topical as The Idea of a University). I am happy to read the London Review of Books as a part of, rather than escape from, my denser "work" reading. Occasionally I come across an article that is "outside the box" of my research but, playing into it, I receive an unexpected boost and novel insight. And I now see it as important that I write a blog entry a couple of times a week, as it is that I get 500 words written on my thesis.

For Craig Laughton, his blog protects and maintains his general writing skills when he might otherwise be in danger of becoming a stammering solipsist with his specialist equations. Although writing is the foundation of my work, and my basic literary skills do not lack exercise, nevertheless this blog does benefit and broaden my style. When I write for research, I do so fully conscious that I must be technically perfect, with the complex and argumentative style my specialist audience anticipates. But I hope that I maintain an eloquence that reaches to a broader audience than the small company of Lit. Crit. PLC and, as the best form of this writing can do (see "A Critical High Light"), that I write with a kind of creativity immanent in my critical discourse. But it is difficult to force this mode, and I cannot predict when it will flow freely. Creativity comes when I least expect it and, a fragile glass through which I seem to see so clearly the text in question, it can be broken by the shrill of a phone call. Even then, these bursts of my best work are swallowed in the gaping hole/whole of the 100,000 total.

My blog entries, however, are self-contained and must be written quickly, in response to recent events (the political situation in Lebanon, the discovery of a strange link) rather than in response to a piece of literature considered and dissected over weeks. (I have been reading A.S. Byatt, so perhaps a better metaphor, in a Byattian parody, might be: a novel whose choicest elements I excise and leave to grow on the petri-dish of my brain, so that I end up with a mouldy critical terminology which grows and spreads parasitical over the original organic text). You see, I would not have come up with this image without having embarked on this blog; certainly it would never be allowed to sneak itself into my objective and dispassionate critical prose.

Blogs can benefit all research students, whether mathematicians or literary critics, and if you are yourself a postgraduate who has followed the strange web of links to this page, I urge you to continue that journey: start at PhD Weblogs, and I hope you will find your way to Blogger.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

I commented the other day that I have been reading a great deal recently, and that this brings with it problems of perseverance that might seem strange to those who would see reading as a pleasure rather than a chore. Yesterday exemplified the extent to which, in a PhD in English literature, reading constitutes the bulk of what I do, although the extent to which my reading influences my writing can be - certainly in quantitative terms - difficult to detect.

As I have said before, I am currently working on A.S. Byatt, and in several places in her non-fiction she comments on Gabriel Josipovici's phrase "the demonic analogy." This describes the shift in modern fiction away from Dante-esque allegory, in which events in the book stand for the philosophical order of a divinely ordered universe, towards a reflection on the status of the book itself. When the metafiction so common in modern literature reminds us that we have been lulled into believing the world of fiction, we are shocked that what we had taken to be the fictional world - which was one with our private world - was actually only a projection of our unique desires. Thus analogy in modern fiction becomes demonic, a sign of our dementia. This criticism, interesting though not entirely original, points towards one of the responsibilities I think Byatt sees her fiction as holding. However, it is pretty tangential to my main interest in Byatt, and the ratio of the time it took me to read and understand Josipovici, compared to the amount of words I wrote on the primary text, is pretty disappointing, though not unusual in my experience of literary research.

I have a variety of ways of reading. For texts that are probably going to be largely irrelevant, I follow the speed-reading techniques I learnt in my first year. Those novels I know I am going to have to go through twice, the second time with a fine-toothed critical comb, or science books whose content is largely irrelevant, though the style of which is interesting, I read in the normal way, sitting comfortably in an armchair or in the garden; occasionally, I may make notes. Finally, books and articles that are particularly heavy going, or that I need to make detailed notes on, I read sat at our kitchen table, with scrap paper by my side. I make a synopsis and copy out quotations as I go along and then, at intervals, I transcribe these notes onto the computer. (In winter, our stone cottage gets very cold, with the kitchen being the only warm room as it contains the boiler; as a result, the intervals of computer work have to coincide with the central heating coming on). This process has two benefits: firstly, it forces me to read slowly, when I might be tempted to skip as my mind wanders off the difficult or tangential topic; secondly, as I go through the note taking stages on paper and then computer, I have time to step back objectively and analytically and think about how the work relates to mine, whether I agree with it or find flaws in the argument.

It was this latter approach that I brought to Josipovici, and as a result reading the 25-page chapter in The World and the Book took me the best part of a day (in between sending emails and reading book reviews and refreshing the BBC sport pages every few minutes). The chapter was probably in the region of 20, 000 words long, but when I had finished my reading and notes about it, and used that knowledge to write part of my thesis, I had added a total of 479 words to my research. Extrapolated over three years of work, that ratio works out at about 470 words read, to every one word of the 100, 000 I must write.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

Listening to Martha Kearney's excellent mini-series The Idea of a University, I hear the steady tread of modernising and economically-minded feet marching towards my ivory tower. Her series covers the rise of the polytechnic universities following Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology" speech in 1963, in which he warned that the new sciences promised to leave behind those industries with outdated practices and methods. With their musty jackets, academics in traditional universities might have provided one example of the latter, and the polytechnics were the antidote to their staid culture, with their emphasis on vocational courses that could deliver cutting-edge teaching and research and disseminate it into industry through students who would go directly into relevant, and often local, workplaces.

"Relevance" is a dread word for me. A year in to my research, and I have come up with the vital 50-word answer when, at parties, I am asked what my thesis is about. The idea of my stock response is that it be simple enough to be understood without patronising, and elevated enough so that the person to whom I am speaking is not tempted to engage in a long dialogue about it. I socialise to escape research, not to discuss it. But the question I dislike most, and one to which I do not have a definitive answer, is: "Why is my research relevant?"

Last year, my university paid me £15,000 to study, and for the coming two years the AHRC are going to donate some £30,000 to me in the form of living allowances and tuition fees. In some ways, the provision of this money answers the question, or at least redirects it: if my research wasn't relevant, then the higher bodies in education would not have sent down their nuggets of gold from the heavens. Nevertheless, higher education can be accused (and it has been in The Idea of a University) of being a self-fulfilling loop, in which traditional university scholarship is felt to be worthwhile because the people at the top in government, themselves products of that system, feel it to have been of value to them. I have to bear in mind, therefore, that ultimately the money that pays for my research (and my beer and petrol and cameras) comes from outside this loop, from the taxpayer, and the question of value asked by the typical taxpayer I meet at my parties is one I have a responsibility to answer.

The word "value" has a double-meaning. In the first sense, which the OED gives as "That amount of some commodity, medium of exchange, etc., which is considered to be an equivalent for something else," the value of my PhD is not too difficult to estimate. With just 4% of PhDs in Arts and Humanities unemployed after completing their thesis, I will be more likely to obtain a skilled role as part of the UK workforce than I would have been had I joined the ranks of my peers who left as BAs, many of whom are still either unemployed (around 7%) or doing menial work behind bars and in garden centres. In the findings of the document "What do PhDs Do?" commissioned by the UK Grad programme, "In a modern knowledge-based economy, highly educated and skilled people - knowledge workers - are in great demand. PhD graduates are, arguably, the most highly skilled and educated people in our society." According to some figures, salaries reflect this, with PhDs earning up to a third more than those with only first degrees. So, over the course of the next fifty years in employment, I can expect to repay the investment made in me several times over.

Nevertheless, in the immediate term of the coming few years, it is the second meaning of the word "value" - "The relative status of a thing, or the estimate in which it is held, according to its real or supposed worth, usefulness, or importance" - to which I need to respond. Harold Wilson may have wanted universities to drive the UK economy forward through the white heat of technology, and there is no doubt that in the science sector the universities have been powerhouses of research and development. I heard a talk the other day from a former university lecturer whose spin-off company developing imaging crystals is now worth some £15 million, with contracts from the European Space Agency and potential worldwide markets opening in airport security systems. This, from a relatively small initial investment, as the university already had the infrastructure in place to pursue new lines of interest with ease: an international research community, the freedom to innovate, laboratories and, yes, a pool of eager doctoral students able to contribute their skills much more cheaply than could similar workers in industry.

But the "white heat" quite literally generated in the chemistry labs is hardly something I experience at my desk. In the words of a famous Punch cartoon, "Sometimes I sits and thinks, and then again I just sits" in, on good days, a smoulder of good ideas and words. In Education and the University: A Sketch for an English School, F.R. Leavis may have placed the English department at the centre of university life, but his heyday is long gone. When asked by Kearney about the changes in higher education that have taken place over the last thirty years, Mary Warnock, in her considered tones, lamented the passing of the idea that one could do research simply for the joyful sake of it. She did not, however, say why this ever was a valid argument, and the idea of ars gratia artis (art for the sake of art) no longer satisfies even me; it certainly, therefore, would not be expected to satisfy most taxpayers or Blairite politicians. If Warnock - one of our most respected philosophers - failed to come up with a response, I cannot be expected to do so either, at least not in the brief space of this blog. For the time being, I will have to satisfy my party interrogators with the financial statements of my "value" to UK Plc. Answering the other part of the "value" issue is something I must, however, work on.

Labels: AHRC, PhD, Postgraduate Diary, the idea of a university

I am not sure why they didn't ask me, but The Guardian is going to be running a series of monthly columns by Patrick Tomlin, who is about to start a doctorate in political theory at Oxford. Having dropped out of "gainful employment," Tomlin notes that two-thirds of students will not complete their PhD, and that "doctoral depression" is now a recognised problem, particularly in Arts subjects:

What places you at risk of both of these problems is isolation and lack of direction. In scientific subjects, where you're genetically modifying fish to play poker, or whatever goes on in those labs, you work in teams. You have gossip, interaction and a sense of shared responsibility. In subjects like mine, where the emphasis is on reading and thinking about stuff (that wasn't quite what I put in my funding application), you are afforded no such perks. It's just you, a laptop and some books.

This experience of loneliness I well recognise. Which is why blogs like this are so useful as a space in which to air my frustrations and experiences. It's just a shame that, unlike Tomlin, I won't be getting paid in the process.

Labels: Patrick Tomlin, Postgraduate Diary