Postgraduate Diary: The Best Laid Plans of PhD Students

I like to think that I am a fairly well-organised person. I try to be punctual for meetings; I take a dull pleasure in establishing arcane filing systems for my emails; I synchronise my online calendar with my phone to ensure I never miss an important appointment or birthday. I hope that something of this aspect of my personality shows in my prose, as I also delight in correcting every last stop and comma, and perversely enjoy conforming to the rigours of MLA style.

But, as is evidenced by the scores of poets and writers institutionalised in literary history, writing is a schizophrenic activity. The impulsive Byron can produce some of the most perfectly contrived metrics in English verse; conversely, the scrupulous yours truly finds his writing refuses to stay trim. One morning I awake bursting with inspiration; the next, mind and page are a literal blank. Sleepless nights and restless dreams give rise to expansive Xanadu's of prose; hours of attention in the library yield nothing. Reconciling my writing personality with my more fastidious one has been a challenge for me, in my PhD years, as the months since Christmas (and since my distant previous entry in my Postgraduate Diary) have evidenced sharply.

Over the vacation, I attended a workshop on planning for completion. This explored the practical timetable of submitting titles choosing examiners and getting the thesis printed and bound, and also the intellectual planning required for writing up, honing abstracts and proof reading. Duly, after the workshop, I poured procrastination into the coloured bars of an Excel project planner.

I would devote March to the four conference papers I was giving that month; April and June would be focused on writing the Introduction and Conclusion chapters; three months at the end would be set aside for proof reading; and the three months between Christmas and March would provide ample time for me to write a brief chapter on The Matrix, the final part of my thesis's body.

But over the months since Christmas, that brief chapter became greedy. It swallowed contextual thinking on philosophy and religious allegory; gulped down postmodernism; fatted itself on phenomenology; and then it demanded more. More on the history of Artificial Intelligences in cinema. More on postmodern simulacra. More on representations of Cartesian deceiving demons in fiction.

By March - when I had to break off to write my conference papers - that simple, final chapter had become a confabulatory hydra, chattering about Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and about disincarnate intelligences in early science fiction, and about androids in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and about replicants in Ridley Scott's adaptation of the former, Blade Runner, and about how these different texts (the first two from 1968, the latter from 1982) illustrated the move to postmodern grounds for science fiction which The Matrix then occupies, and about how postmodernism has been conceptualised by Frederic Jameson as the product of late capitalist logic. By April, when I had beaten it into a shape suitable for showing to my supervisor, the beast was 30 000 words long, and I had not even started on The Matrix.

My carefully laid plans thus became horribly corrupted. But - and here is the thing that is both frustrating and thrilling about writing and research - the mutant that unexpectedly now constitutes a third of my 100 000 word limit has made the overall project far stronger. The fact that I was not able to predict I would cover this ground from the outset implies that I have inadvertently uncovered cultural connections and currents that will, because so unexpected, probably lend my research some originality. And, on reflection, it only took three months to write; that is to say, a third of my word count took one twelfth of my three years. Why, writing must be almost becoming easy.

Nevertheless, it is only with hindsight that I can be so positive. The last few months have been a dark and agonising period in my research career. Things now, though, are looking up. When I finally got around to it, the chapter on The Matrix only took three weeks to write, probably because the time away made me realise just how redundant many of my notes were, and to construct an argument based on just a couple of premises. The body of my thesis, though punctuated with "xxx" that mark gaps I have to fill, is now generally complete. I can even afford to take five days off, on a camping trip which I delight in planning to the last detail...except the weather.

The Art of Reading

A fun article from the Guardian Education about "The Art of Reading," from their How to Be a Student series:

you don't just need to do it, you need to be seen to be doing it (and acting upon it). Sometimes you can be seen to be doing it even if you're not. This is called adding footnotes. Always read at least the title and name of the author, however, because it's never a good idea to pretend you've read some thing unless you're absolutely sure your tutor hasn't written it.

The secret Harriet Swain did not mention, however, was that this applies not only to new undergraduates, but to doctoral students and, yes, even professors.

Indeed, without wanting to sound too vain, I consider myself a Master of the Art of nodding sagely, when asked by my supervisor/conference delegate/peer etc. whether I have read Book X, and of then twisting the subject to my own self-inflating ends. "Yes, I found Book X most interesting. But I thought Book Y" - which I have read, or at least read the review of - "was the more accessible text." This game of intellectual ping-pong can go on for hours, as my initial interrogator must dissimulate equally: "Book Y was interesting, but I thought Book Z..."

Postgraduate Diary: A PhD Survival Guide

My nemesis Patrick Tomlin (or he who writes in the column I would really like to occupy) over at Guardian Education, has come up with a "survival guide" for new PhD students. Not to be outdone (and from the superior position of my third year to his second), I have produced my own version of distilled wisdom:


1. Tomlin's number five on the list is my number one: try to treat a PhD as a job. Sure, no one will be looking over your shoulder or conducting a daily word count; yes, if you want to take an afternoon off to go shopping no one will stop you; certainly, that two week holiday in Brittany can be taken without any need to beg for time off.

However, it is precisely because of this that if you act as if you have all the freedom in the world, then you will find it difficult to do anything at all; a kind of intelletual agoraphobia sets in, whereby there seems so many limitless possibilities that it is safest just to do nothing. Instead, do something, rigorously. Turn on the computer at 9.00. Turn off the computer at 6.00 (if you happen to be nocturnal these times can refer to pm as well as am). Repeat for the equivalent of five days a week (take that afternoon off but go to a seminar at the weekend), for forty-five weeks of the year, for three years, and - regardless of how difficult the work seems, or how many bad days you have (see Number Five on this list) - you will get the job done, if not within three years then somewhere close.


2. A crucial ingredient in this recipe for success will be how you differentiate yourself from undergraduates. Sure, there will be many of the distractions of undergraduate life around you: a ready-made social scene, sports clubs, societies, and a flagrant disregard for deadlines. By all means go to the pub, play sports - indeed, make a point of doing these things (again, see Number Five). But remember that the classmates with whom you graduated could not be further from undergraduate life, since as you study they are probably being lashed under the slave-drivers who run graduate recruitment programmes for big corporations. Presumably, you did a PhD partly because you wanted to do something other than make money for other people. But that does not mean that you should feel free to stay in the student rut whilst others (taxpayers) are running out of breath around of you.


3. If all this sounds a bit like a lesson in dullness, however, realise that social life and work need not be mutually exclusive things. In my first year, I was a solipstic scholar reading books and emerging only to see my supervisor once a month. Having attended the UK Grad summer programme and all the team exercises on it, I realised that actually I really like working with other people, communicating with faces rather than staring at wordy pages. I now regularly go to three discussion groups and buzz round conferences, and work on collaborative projects. If to some extent you can combine socialising with an academic twist, then you really can have the best of both worlds, strike that work-life balance.

4. And it gets better (though possibly only for PhD students in the Arts and Humanities)! Rule number four is be omnivorous in order to become omniscient. If a PhD is in part preparation for the academic job market, you must discover and engage in all the activities – the seminars, the research institutes, the journal publications – that develop and produce the research that supports the meniscus of undergraduate teaching. You must become absorbed in your subject: devour the weekend book supplements in the newspapers or read the reviews sections of journals; go to discussion groups and attend seminar series; discover that a few notches down from Radio 1 is Radio 4, with all its first-class intellectual broadcasting.

And write on anything, whether a review of a book in a few paragraphs on a scrap of paper, or a full essay to be handed in, or indeed discover the benefits of blogging. One of the worst aspects of PhD research is that it can sometimes take months between the germination of an idea, the reading around it (which often leads down dead-ends anyway), and its manifestation in a solid, completed chapter. Weeks go by, and you feel that you have done or produced nothing. Writing regularly and engaging in the full range of research activities provides a vent for this frustration. Further, the more broadly you read and write, the more chance that you will hit upon an innovative idea, and take the unusual angles of approach that will distinguish your research from its predecessors, making it - that crucial requirement of a thesis - original.

But.

5. They say that only two things in life are guaranteed: death and taxes. Most PhD students being young, the former probably seems quite a long way off, whilst as students taxes are mystical demons we have heard of but never encountered in their scariest guise. But, lest we lack a grindstone that keeps us keen, a third thing is guaranteed for the PhD student: that there will be times when you will simply feel unable to work, and the guilt sets in.

Writing seems to be going badly, you cannot seem to get your head around a chapter, the tab bar on your web browser becomes cluttered with football stories and Facebook because you simply cannot concentrate on the task in hand. Everyone else seems to be getting on with productive study, and if you happen to live with people in gainful employment, then it seems all the worse that you have swivelled on your chair all day whilst they have been chained industriously to a desk between nine and five and come home relieved at the end of the day whilst you are only plunged deeper into self-pity.

Accept these times as inevitable, and learn to let them go. When they loom, walk in the countryside. Spend the afternoon taking photographs. Or go camping for three days. Or, if you do not share my tastes, choose your own favourite escape. And if you still feel down at the end of the week, go to the pub regardless and treat yourself to a pint. Sure, it tastes best if you know it signals the start of a weekend, a break from hard and productive work in the five days before. But if you don't make any distinction between play time and work time no matter how little you seem to have spent on the latter, you will risk becoming a melancholy loner, the archetype of the sick genius tormented by the great idea that always seems elusive. But writing and serious researching is hard; if it wasn't, there would be no need to do PhDs. It is precisely because it is tough that there will be bad days (or weeks, or months); these are sometimes a signal not that you are weak and inadequate to the task, but that the work you are doing is worthwhile and the end all the more significant.

Postgraduate Diary: If In a Literature Thesis a PhD Student..., or, The Lotarian Trap

In Italo Calvino's famous meditation on the relationship between novelists and readers, If On a Winter's Night A Traveller, comes a warning about the fundamental trap of a literary research thesis:

A girl came to see me who is writing a thesis on my novels for a very important university seminar in literary studies. I see that my work serves her perfectly to demonstrate her theories, and this is certainly a positive fact - for the novels or for the theories, I do not know which. From her very detailed talk, I got the idea of a piece of work being seriously pursued, but my books seen through her eyes seem unrecognisable to me. I am sure this Lotaria (that is her name) has read them conscientiously, but I believe she has read them only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them.

In science, you carefully choose the dataset on which you will run a test for a hypothesis, selecting a target which will provide results most efficiently and with the minimum of uncontrolled variables. But, ultimately, the dataset chosen by the scientist should be entirely irrelevant: the data must be independent of the conclusion if the scientific theory is valid. In the apocryphal story, Newton may have been standing under an apple tree when he reasoned the theory of gravity, but that theory applies equally whether the observational data is falling apples or dropped bombs. Were the theory to stop being applicable in a comparable situation - under a plum tree, for example - then the theory would have been falsified, such that we would need to recognise either that the theory must be fundamentally wrong, or that it requires modification in order that it apply (or appreciates why it cannot apply) equally for different varieties of fruit (or, more realistically, in the extreme conditions of entities such as black holes).

In literary study, however, the division between theory and data is less clear cut, as the Calvino passage makes clear in its parody. Currently researching some of Umberto Eco's semiotic theories, I notice that although deconstruction claims itself as a method applicable across all texts and language - since it places language as the very centre of our way of being in and knowing the world - most often the texts to which it is applied are always already open to deconstructive readings: works that are self-referential, embrace paradox rather than conclusiveness, are conscious of their being as texts. Thus Barthes examines some stories by Edgar Allan Poe, but not the editorial correspondence from the New England Magazine in which many of them were published.

And literary writers such as Italo Calvino (or A.S. Byatt, Umberto Eco, John Fowles), conscious of the ways in which the academy will appraise their texts, deliberately pre-empt and parody those modes of criticism. Thus texts such as If On a Winter's Night adopt what I call the critically sarcastic attitude. A Lotaria, or other academic reader, comes to the work from a pre-conceived theoretical angle, finds that the text deconstructs itself (or performs according to the predictions of some other theory), and thus the text can do nothing but applaud that critic ironically: "Well done," it says, "of course such and such a theoretically knowing symbol/structure/tone/philosophy etc. was there. I put it there. I knew you would come looking for it."

I am not a poststructuralist myself, though I am aware that I regularly (often subconsciously) dip into its toolbox in my analysis of texts, just as I do Marxism, psychoanalysis, historicism, or the close readings of new criticism. However, though I do not have a single preconceived critical angle, in my research I still risk falling into the Lotarian trap.

Without giving my game away too much (anonymity matters, as does the intellectual property of my original idea in my thesis), I am examining the use of a particular metaphor in literary fiction and science. Now hovering on the brink of its third year, my research is well-developed, most chapters are drafted or written, my ideas are well-honed and focused. Among other things, I am going to be looking at four novels and a couple of films which use my metaphor. However, to select these - effectively my dataset - I discarded tens of other novels which I read over the previous two years which did not happen to contain the image or symbol for which I was looking. It is therefore inevitable that I will give the impression that I "read them only to find in them what [I] was already convinced of before reading them." This is where Chapter One: The Introduction comes in, and I realise only now that in spite of it being only a small component, it is probably the most important single chapter of my thesis, since it is this that will make-or-break it in a viva.

If I fully admit the qualifications, and paradoxes of my research there, then what follows will stand or fall by the internal logic of the framework I publicly have set myself; I admit my theory works only within the orchard of texts in which I have chosen to wander. If I fail to recognise the inherent limits of my methods, however, then a single plum dropped by the examiner will falsify it, showing my data to rely wholly on my theory, rather than existing independently of it. The moral of my experience, and Calvino's story, and The Lotarian Trap, is that literary theory becomes a bad pseudoscience when it seems to explain both apples and plums.

Postgraduate Diary: Literary Boredom

Johnathan Wolff has a very astute article about the innate dullness of much academic writing in the Education Guardian. In the midst of a PhD crisis at the moment deriving from precisely my feeling that a thesis should be engaging and interesting (perhaps even in the loosest sense "tell a story"), his article hits home. I will say more about how my writing is going when I am less fraught.

Postgraduate Diary: Plagiarism Happens to the Best of Us

Further to my previous posts on plagiarism and my warning in the citation guide for this website, it is humbling to learn that plagiarism can be committed by even the best of scholars. The Times Higher Education Supplement this week announces that "Cambridge University Press will issue an apology and correction after The Times Higher revealed that passages in its Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence had been lifted from a 1960s work without acknowledgement." Apparently two Cambridge scholars, Con Coroneos and Trudi Tate, had quoted from Graham Hough's book The Dark Sun: A Study of D.H. Lawrence without acknowledgement. Thankfully, according to Kevin Taylor, director of intellectual property at CUP, the plagiarism appears to have been due to unconscious error: "The co-authors made notes before writing up their chapter, and Con Coroneos made notes on Dr Hough's book without annotating them, which he later took to be his own words."

Though in my earlier comments on the subject I have admonished those visitors to The Pequod who may deliberately represent my work as their own, plagiarism of the passive sort is certainly the more insidious, and perhaps even the more serious. For my own part, I am sure that in my 100 000 word thesis, some concepts will be paraphrases or - horror - direct quotations of authors I have read, and that some will slip through the net of my referencing due to my shoddy scholarship and less than meticulous methods. Though I try to keep my bibliographic databases up to date, and in all my writing make footnotes referring in brief to the full Reference Manager record, in many cases in which I was desperate to get the flow of my thoughts on page uninterrupted I have digitally scribbled an "xxx" instead of an author's name. Like pornography or weak Australian beer, these letters indicate something nasty lurking beneath my thesis. I hope that as I start to edit and proof over the coming final year, the xxx's resolve themselves into proper names and books, and remove any risk of my having copied the work of others without acknowledgement.

Postgraduate Diary: Marks for Effort

I have not posted anything here for a while. This is not due to my unwillingness to comment on Tony Blair's retirement, the climate change bill, the bad science of Panorama's Wi-Fi "investigation," or the hilarious science of the newly opened Creation Museum in Kentucky. Rather, it's got much to do with the large pile of exam papers that have been sitting on my desk for the past couple of weeks. This time last year, I commented on the postgraduate perspective on undergraduate exams, lamenting the communal hush brought by exams upon the lively university activity as well as remembering that they provide for one of the great British moments of the communal moan.

This year, that general moan has felt a little more prosaic, as I have heard it not amongst the students but amongst staff who have to mark the papers. Merrily responding to an email asking if I would like to mark some exams this year, my smile dropped as I was landed with 70 plus scripts. Marking these has been a frustrating experience, time consuming, often repetitive, but - conscious of the responsibility of marking summative as opposed to formative work - I have had to focus closely on the task.

Marking criteria in a subject such as English are notoriously problemmatic. Whilst the rubric has obviously been carefully considered, how is one to judge the difference between "well focused work" (65% to 69%) and "relevant work" (60% to 64%)? The mark schemes can only be taken up to a point, from where intuition takes over, the sense of a First as opposed to Two-One class work; this indefinable difference leaves high Two-One students seeing through a notorious glass barrier between a 69% and 70%. I have some sympathy with the government's plans to standardise degree classifications, which at the moment are not comparable across different universities or subjects, making it very difficult for employers (who may not be aware of the divide between a First and a Two-One, or of the difference between the University of Polytechnic and the University of Redbrick) to compare candidates.

And yet, having covered so many scripts, the glass barrier seems to me to be a valid one, and there is a qualitative difference between top and good work, one which cannot accurately be reflected in the quantitative difference of a single percentage point. Further, marking by a combination of rubric and experience does appear to work, at least according to the systems of double marking, moderation, external examining and the distribution curves against which we are judged. My grades passed their moderation, though with some slight modification in precise percentages in the first category, and the tally chart of grades I have been keeping has turned out to form the tell-tale bell of the normal distribution, centred around the high two-one.

More positively from a personal point of view has been the opportunity to get the sense of a year group, and a year's work (something I can't obtain by teaching a few tutorials a year to a few groups). As script after script pursues similar lines of argument, and presents comparable pieces of evidence, and similar historical, social and philosophical understanding, I realise that teaching does actually work: lectures have been attended, information has been absorbed, knowledge gained. Even when formal teaching comprises the minor part (about six hours) of the undergraduate week, it has a huge impact on a student's cumulative education.

However, the recognition of this leaves me frustrated that a further opportunity to educate students is not being pursued. The greatest frustration of marking has been my inability to follow up those marks with individual advice about how they might be improved. A student (not one of mine) last week remarked that she had never attended any of the one-to-one essay handback consultations with her tutors. I remarked that, regardless of whether they wanted to go or not, it is slightly unfair on the lecturer not to attend, since if they are anything like me, the greatest satisfaction is filling an essay with red pen, but then being able to tell the student precisely which aspects of their work were really positive, and how they can build on them. Seeing their subsequent essays, in which they have adopted this advice, gives a massive boost to the teacher. Teaching the really bright students, those who come with a unique and advanced writing style anyway, is rewarding, but I'm not sure how much "teaching" they actually benefit from; teaching those with potential not yet fulfilled, and bringing it out through contact with them, is by far the best aspect of the job.

Yet it is an aspect for which there is not as yet a replicable system in relation to the end of year exams. How frustrating it is to mark a paper in which one answer attains a good First, whilst the other two answers are solid Two-Ones! I am confident that, because the students don't see the breakdown of their marks, that Two-One candidate might go away from the board on which results are published believing themselves to be sitting comfortably in that latter category, whereas I know that, if they were told that they were capable of the very highest work, and shown the evidence of this on the papers, then the prophetic fallacy might kick in. At the bottom of our marking forms is a reminder that under new data protection laws, students can ask to see the forms, but since I doubt many are pro-active, we should make it available to them from the beginning. Our feedback may only take the form of a couple of sentences, and clearly there are not the resources to have face-to-face meetings with students, but to see that First on the page, nestling there amongst the expected results, would be, one hopes, a significant incentive for the second and third years, when marks count towards their final degree classification.

There is a great danger that the First word is something only whispered to a select few, adding to the mystique of the glass barrier. I know this was something I encountered, and even by the end of my degree I was still unsure precisely what constituted top work, and even whether I deserved it. This really is a culture of (a word often used wrongly) elitism, because every student coming to the top universities with good A-level grades should be capable of striving for the ultimate result, though for a number of reasons they may not reach it (the formal degree is only a part of a university education). So today, with almost every student, I bring the word into public discourse, saying openly which parts are First Class responses, demanding that if they get a Two-One on their early essays they should be aiming to achive the grade above by the end. Inexperienced (and possibly naive), I cannot know what impact this actually has. But it's a shame to put so much effort into marking, only to have students discouraged from making efforts for top marks.

Postgraduate Diary: The Simpsons' Take on Postgraduates

Once again, the greatest work of American culture reveals itself highly tuned to the nuances and stereotypes of life, this time of the humble postgraduate:

Postgraduate Diary: A PhD Week, Thursday

Today is the big day: the poster I have been working on since Christmas goes into a competition against others from the Grad School. As I sit at a desk in the printer room, waiting to trim the edges on the large cutting board, ahead of me in the queue clutching her tightly rolled printout is a woman dressed in a sharp suit and shocking pink high-heels deals. I am dressed, as I usually do, in jeans and a hoody. I wonder whether it will make the slightest difference to my chances, and suspect not - albeit an old one, I am a student, after all; casual is what the judges will expect.

The competition itself starts after lunch, and as soon as I walk into the room I am struck by the odd atmospheric mingling of the sociable (the hoodies) and the serious (the suits). We are given information packs and name badges, as if this was a proper conference; however, it is the tea and biscuits which occupies as much attention, as student stereotypes prove fitting again. Whilst I chat to other amiable postgraduates (there's no one I know particularly well, though I recognise faces from having sat with them at other Grad School events and training sessions throughout the year), there's a tight undercurrent of competition, as we glance at the other posters on their assigned boards and compare them cautiously to our own: Is that one too texty, or is it that mine does not say enough? That one seems to lack colour, but is it perhaps that mine is too cheerfully bright with its red and black fonts?

As I stand by my poster, I get the first hints that mine is not really fulfilling its job as a piece of publicity about my research, as three different people ask me "So what's this about, then?" Though I (gifted with the gob) am happy answering questions and talking through my research, the poster is supposed to be largely self-evident, and to communicate my project and findings to a broad audience. At least people seem interested and when comparing my research with those scientific topics displayed around me, I realise that is the best I can expect: whereas the scientists' posters tend to be divided into neatly boxed sections with aims, method, outcomes and applications, mine lacks the latter. Not for me the carbon nanotubes that promise super-lightweight building materials in the future, or studies of how sleep patterns affect obesity in children. The only thing I can hope for, then, is that people from all backgrounds and interests agree that my research is interesting, if it is not of direct public benefit (this is the old "What is the value of my PhD?" question I have posed before on this blog).

Once the judges arrive at my stand and make the same observation - though put in the subtle terms of, "Oh, this looks interesting, so, er, talk me through it then" - I see the prize money (up to £200) fluttering away on the wind. Again, the judges seem to go away full of praise for my research, but left a little cold by the poster itself. Sure enough, out of the four posters entered in the Arts and Humanities category, I come one of bottom, second from bottom, or third from bottom. The winning entry, on medieval history and romance, was certainly a well-designed poster. But, sore loser that I am, I note that whereas following the workshops I have been on my poster text was in at least size 30 font, so as to be legible from five feet away, the winner's required closer peering and reading. I am thus left uncertain as to what constitutes a good poster. Is is one which visually grabs the attention, attracting a viewer towards me rather than another so that I can then discuss my research with them, doing the all-important "networking"? Or is it one that explains my study in a thousand words, such that a reader can leave with new knowledge of some recent research (rather as in a conference paper)? The one drawback of an otherwise excellent event is that I leave more baffled than pleased. I will certainly redesign my poster so that it makes clearer the aims and methods of my research; but whether I should use large fonts and pretty pictures, or aim for an essay which happens to be dispersed in boxes across the page, I am less sure.

Postgraduate Diary: A PhD Week, Wednesday

In contrast to the previous two days, which have seen me quite productive, today is a slow one. I spend some of the day chugging my way through Charles Taylor's philosophical treatise, Sources of the Self. Like much contemporary theoretical philosophy it's hard going; in order to ensure as logic dictates that every plausible loophole or opposition or flaw its closed, it becomes dense with argument, packed with detailed reference to earlier arguments, both Taylors and his beloved Plato.

When I get bored, or realise I have been turning the pages without actually reading (a strange case of mind-body separation?) I set to work on the computer, typing up my notes from Warner's Phantasmagoria.

At this stage in my thesis, half-way through with around 60,000 words written, any secondary material tends to get inserted into my existing chapters, rather than leading me down new research lines. Whereas I imagine a scientist might spend the first year doing background research, the second year collecting data, and the third year writing-up - with the difficult decision being when to stop reading and when to start experimenting or writing - there has been no such distinction for me. In an English PhD, and with my personal style of thinking, my writing is my research: I develop my thoughts as the ink gets laid on the page, and I do not make a distinction between researching, drafting, and writing - in true evolutionary fashion the finished chapter emerges out of the gradually growing embryo of my notes, so that it is not clear where or when my notes end and my essay begins. The benefit of my approach is that I progress steadily, and I am perhaps more likely to produce some original insights than if I were to read everything already written on my topic and merely produce a synthesis of existing argument; the drawback is that, if I write too much too soon, my work becomes concretised and rigid in the mould of the early stages of my thinking, and is hard to alter if I read something later which modifies it. This is the issue which, albeit in a mild form, I am encountering now. With seven chapters, I find myself cutting and pasting between them, trying to insert quotes or concepts from my latest reading (in this case, Marina Warner) wherever they best fit, then tying the loose edges together. I am sure it will all work in the end, and I am confident that my research is going to be quite novel and develop through a clear argument; but I have several frustrating months ahead of me during which I must tidy up the tens of paragraphs of bold type, which indicate changes or drafts that exist, like monstrous lumps, within the tidy text of an otherwise finished chapter.

Alongside my writing, I also make a mini-bibliography of books referenced by Warner that might be useful to read. Naturally, having wiped my record clean by returning most of my books to the library yesterday, now is a good opportunity to get more reading material out to plug the gap on my shelf - they will look impressive, even if they will never be looked in.

Postgraduate Diary: A PhD Week, Tuesday

Today starts badly. As I open Thunderbird, the email program downloads headers for several messages that require my responses today, and then stubbornly refuses to open them. Regardless, I type an email - containing an abstract for a seminar group in a month's time, on the topic of "What Darwin Means to Me" - hit send, and watch as the blue bar moves, jerks, then stops. Unsent, unsaved, I try to retype my piece as best I can remember, then save it in notepad for later; clearly there's a problem with the University's email system - but how strange it is that whereas on most days email is a distraction, on the day when I actually need to use it the system is broken.

Luckily, the library seems to be up and running; given that over the past few days I have been bombarded with emails reminding me to take books back (the postgraduate loan "quarter" is coming to an end), I realise it would be a good time to return those tens of books I got out hopefully months ago, and have never read. The most depressing thing when checking my loan record is how many of those books have been renewed too many times, and thus must go back today - this means I have had some out for nearly a year, without opening them.

Bag packed, I go back to my note taking and reading, then head into town for a meeting with other English Postgraduates at our weekly discussion group. We start off discussing the agreed topic, biography, but somehow we move from discussing why Jade's story is a reworking of the Biblical redemption narrative, or is grounded on a fairy-tale prototype, to bemoaning the dropping of Shelley and Keats from G.C.S.E. English. At least, the Romantics in the group bemoan the fact. As I commented in my post on the English National Curriculum, and on my criticism of Andrew Motion for believing all school leavers should have read Ulysses, I think it is naive to expect modern students to study the Leavisite canon on its own. Certainly, there should be some Shakespeare, some traditional poetry, but we cannot be sure that teachers, straitjacketed by the demands of league tables and curricula, are going to have time to explore and explain these works; thus their presence needs to be tempered by other, more immediately accessible forms: modern poetry (even rap, as I suggested yesterday, to some sneers), contemporary novels, science fiction. The discussion got a little personal (along the lines of you're so middle class what would you know), but out of it I did take one point that I had not thought of before, having never experienced it in my excellent education: how demeaning it is for teachers not to try to teach, for example, Shakespeare, because they believe that their inner-city pupils are more interested in drugs and sex than the romantic story of a couple falling in love against the wishes of their parents; to not teach Shakespeare because it is "beyond them" is to reinforce low expectations, and is a prophetic fallacy to be avoided for sure, though it is one of the risks of my middle-way approach.

After lunch, I go back to my poster, spending an hour trying to work out how to print to the A1 plotter printer in I.T. services. I think I have it cracked, and hit the "Print" button (not a minor decision, given that I have been working on the poster for months and printing it will cost £6.00). As the clock ticks towards five, and I get ready to go home, the email system comes back online. I spend another 45 minutes writing to a student worrying about an essay. One of the frustrations of teaching as a postgraduate is that I don't have an office (not that I do enough teaching to justify one). Instead of suggesting that a student come and chat to me, perhaps show a draft, I have to try to guess what their problems are, say what I think would be most helpful for me to say, and put at the bottom a "if you have any more problems please don't hesitate to get in touch" disclaimer. The email's sent into the void; I keep fingers crossed that it will arrive at the desk of the student and let them work through their problems with their essay.

Postgraduate Diary: A PhD Week, Monday

The alarm goes off at 8:00 this morning, and, it being quite light outside, I manage to get out of bed after the third snooze. Some people, citizens of the alternate universe called "RealWorld," would envy my being able to lie in this late before getting up for work. For me, though, it is often the most challenging aspect of the day. Since I am completely flexible with my time, why worry if I want to stay in bed until 8:30, 9:00, the afternoon? I can always work later into the evening, or make some confident excuse why the extra time in bed now can be worked off later in the week, month, year. Neither probed by the demands of immediate work deadlines nor, in the cold and dull days of Winter, prodded by the sun piercing even our net curtains, I often feel no impulse to get up at all.

This morning, however, perhaps on account of it being a Monday, I do manage to roll out of the duvet and into whatever warm clothes happen to be lying on the floor. I eat breakfast whilst listening to a Naughtie rant and a Humphries hump on the Today programme and, there being few stories of interest, and Start the Week that follows having no topics of literary interest, I open my first book by 8:30, and start to read.

This time, it's Marina Warner's Phantasmagoria, a glorious miscellany of ghosts and spirit encounters in art, literature and life, from the Renaissance to the cybernetic age. She has a wonderfully encyclopaedic range, though sometimes reading her I feel as her father must have felt as, taking her around museums as a kid, as I am sure she would have tugged him insistently in many directions, running through the galleries trailing demands and questions. The first hour is almost always my best for concentration and reading (the writing hour, if it comes at all, will kick in at some unpredictably late hour of the day), and I get to 10:00 without a break.

I spend the next hour getting myself up-to-date online: I scan BBC News for the stories and sport that didn't make it onto Today, check the stats for this website (75 hits the whole of yesterday, Sunday, and the same number by 10:00 today), use Google Reader for feeds from my favourite books and literary blogs, as well as photoblogs, and check emails. I also start this post - as well as all its other benefits, blogging is my equivalent of an athelete's warm up, a way of getting into a writing frame of mind. As I start to waste time online, and I realise that I really am did not need to know that Britney Spears has shaved (or pulled out?) all her hair, I go back downstairs and continue to read.

I get close to the end of the book, before it's time for lunch. Often over recent weeks I have taken to working in the library or in one of our Postgraduate study rooms. Maybe it's simply because it's too cold to think in our house, or (more likely) it's the absence of other distractions and the presence of numerous hunched heads working hard, but I have found the change quite conducive to writing. Today, however, checking the bread bin in the morning, I discover only half a stale loaf, suitable for toast but unsuitable for lunch box sandwiches. Thus I decided to work at home until after lunch today. It reveals something about life as a PhD student that deciding whether to work in the "office" or at home comes down to something as simple as the quality of your bread.

In the afternoon, however, I go back to the computer; intending just to check my emails before heading to the library, I suddenly become inspired. I am trying to produce a A1 size poster outlining my research; I've been at it on-and-off since before Christmas, but somehow the deadline (this coming Thursday) has crept up on me. By the time I turn from my text boxes and pictures (does carefully dragging a text box half an inch to the left, then an hour later carefully dragging it back again count as "work"?) and look at the clock, I realise it's late into the afternoon. This period is when PhD work becomes an absolute pleasure rather than a chore; utterly absorbed in my research interests, time really does fly as I have fun whilst being thoroughly productive. I an perverse way, I often feel more tired having done an hour's plodding reading, or staring at a screen searching for inspiration on a blank page, than doing an entire afternoon in full flow.

I go back to Phantasmagoria, and finish it off, before heading into town. There is an evening lecture series on Darwin I have been attending; seriously high quality speakers, it has been often accessible but sometimes baffling. Today's falls into the latter category - an argument for a three-dimensional, topographical approach to descent and ancestry that I don't quite follow. Nevertheless, I have done another hour-and-a-half of "work" with the minimum possible effort on my part; it being late in the evening, I feel I have built up time in lieu to take off later in the week, when I'm bored of working and the next level on Project Gotham Racing 2 really does need to be completed.

Postgraduate Diary: A PhD Week

Every Friday afternoon, whilst up and down the country workers recieve early parole from their stuffy offices to go to bars and pubs, I sit in our kitchen and grumble at Helen. Rather than looking forward to the weekend as a time of relaxation, I moan about how little I appear to have done over the preceding five days. As a result of my perception, the concept of time-off over the coming 48 hours does not seem so appealingly different from time-at-table, with books in front of me.

When you think about the numbers, doing a PhD in an arts subject should really be little effort. I have to write about 80,000 words, in three years, which works out at around 500 words a week, or 100 a day. No wonder, then, that I feel like I do little on a week by week basis. Of course, behind every word I write are several more books and papers read, not to mention emails written, lectures and seminars attended, discussion groups done and games of Yetisports played. In spite of the fact that in theory I need to write so little, I seem to manage to fill my weekdays from 9 to 5 just as any other office worker does. Indeed, unlike many office workers, my days are not spent in distracting coffee room banter or chatting about marketing strategies, but head down, pen up, solitarily in front of a book and a desk. So, Helen suggests, I should keep a diary of what I have actually done during a typical week of PhD research. Over the next five days, that's what you'll get, then, on this blog...

Update: Once again, Patrick Tomlin of the Guardian beats me to it: he writes on Monday about a typical day in the life of a politics PhD research student.

Postgraduate Diary: Interest Free Loans!

It is a phrase which no doubt appears in your inbox several times a day, and gets dragged to the junk folder. However, in trying to push through the financial reforms in higher education - under which students would take out loans to pay for their university tuition and living costs, rather than getting grants - the government likewise advertised that these loans would be "interest free." Just as you should never click on a spam email, you should always suspect something is not quite right when a government promises you something-for-nothing. Read the small print in this case, and you will find that the "interest free" loans are tied to the base-rate of inflation, increasing annually by the same amount. But who of us desperate to go to university ever bothered to read the small print? I didn't, and clearly neither has Donald Macleod, who writes on the Education Guardian Blog that:

When tuition fees of £3,000 squeaked through the Commons by five votes keeping student loans to zero real interest rates was obviously a price ministers had to pay.

Students in fact got an outrageously good deal - no fees upfront, interest free loans to cover the cost of tuition and repayment when they were earning as graduates.

Macleod concludes that:

Spending £1bn a year to subsidise graduates who as a rule earn more than the national average seems a waste when there is so much that deserves funding in universities - and even more so in schools.

As one respondent complained of Macleod "You make me sick - tory w@nker!" I agreed with his tone, if not with his vocabulary, so (for all that they will not be read) I added some words of my own, nothing that from my own experience, with inflation running at around 2.5% a year, I graduated owing £10,000 and now five years later I owe around £12,000. Having chosen to do a PhD, and hence defer entry into the job market, you could say that I brought this extra £2000 of debt upon myself.

However, I have friends who went into jobs from graduation, are now on average salaries, and their repayments only just cover the cost of the "interest" on the supposedly interest-free loan; they have yet to pay back a penny of what they originally received from the government. Of course, I also have friends who have yet to find graduate jobs (in spite of having not one but two degrees, the increasingly-necessary postgraduate degree being paid for by further debt through the Career Development Loans scheme), and I also have friends whose salaries (often in the public or voluntary sector) do not track inflation, unlike their loans.

Even so you could argue that many students will ultimately end up in better paid jobs, perhaps working as corporate bankers in London. I agree that students, and not just the average taxpayers of Blair's generation, should put something back into the system. Unfortunately, the way the loans/tution fees scheme was instigated has been unfair on students, unfair on taxpayers who are still owed money by graduates, and unfair in relation to foreign students who can take from the loans pot without being compelled to put back into it.

Nevertheless, I pleaded to Macleod, please don't imply students got the good deal, as if they are scrounging on the society that put them through university. It is this generation of students who, besides, possibly, earning salaries higher than the national average, will be developing the technologies to combat the climate change for which our parent's generation are entirely responsible, and the medicines which will allow them to live longer (and enjoy a longer retirement). They may even do something about spam.

Postgraduate Diary: Fun Beginnings, Footnoted Ends

In this week's Education Guardian I read two articles that resonate with my experiences. In the first, postgraduate Patrick Tomlin writes about his first experience of living in a University town during the holidays. For him, the benefits are "finding books on shelves (even the popular ones!), reading without ringtones, getting a seat in the pub, making my way to the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? machine without having to push past several people." For myself, as I commented in Postgraduate Diary: Return of the Natives, relief comes from being able 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." But we both of us noted that the calm is not necessarily preferable to the storm of voices and bodies, since these are so often full of humour, energy and passion.

Sadly, as Jonathan Taylor observes, these are traits which get lost as one moves from being an English undergraduate to being an academic. As he entered university, he remembers that "studying English was a synonym for laziness, hippiness, laid-backness...[English students] were fascinating because they studied a subject that they actually enjoyed, yet frustrating because they never seemed to do the subject they enjoyed so much." But by the time they have completed their PhDs, lecturers seem to undergo a magical process of embalming, or "dry-ification", in which "old hippies lose their bodily moisture and start wearing ties, using words like "scholarly" and quoting institutional regulations."

I don't wear a tie, even when I teach, and in my mid-twenties I can get away with a hoodie and jeans. But what to do if ever I do get a full-time university post? If I wear my casual clothes, I become a comedy Cameron, trying too hard to be "street"; but if I dress smartly but dispense with the tie and wear a white t-shirt beneath my suit, I present myself as a dilettante artiste. Yesterday in the pub (I'm clearly not a fully embalmed academic just yet) my friend showed me two books, and their author photographs. The one showed a man in a muscle top, looking not unlike Jack Black in wrestling comedy Nacho Libre. He may have been literal example of what Jonathan Taylor calls the "academic bouncer," one who ironically in spite of his hard-man look was dedicated to "making sure all who enter have sufficient footnotes and footnotes of footnotes in their work." the other showed a feminist, dressed to kill, in sharp suit with hair tied tightly into a pony tail. I suspect she may indeed have felt that "Joy is a deeply suspicious character who is probably working for the bourgeois."

Although my thesis is going well, my writing starting to flow after the break of Christmas, I wonder if I should try and slow down somewhat. I just bought Project Gotham Racing 2 for the Xbox. An afternoon spent playing that should reawaken the remnant genes of undergraduate life that are still dormant within me.

Postgraduate Diary: The Idea of a University, Part II

(This topic continues the theme of a post earlier this year)

Around this time of year, as the Christmas holidays draw to a close and after they have had a chance to reflect on their first term at university, I receive a trickle of emails from first year students asking advice about changing course. The majority of these involve students who have started doing joint honours (such as English and Philosophy) deciding that they wish to convert to single honours in one of the subjects. Little do they realise it, but my students are touching the fringes of a large and key debate about what a university is, and what sort of education it should provide.

For the fact that students are encouraged to pick and choose courses from the vast range offered by universities is the key complaint of Peter Berkowitz, who writes in the Hoover Institution's Policy Review that "at universities and colleges throughout the [United States], parents and students pay large sums of money for — and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support — liberal education, despite administrators and faculty lacking a coherent idea about what constitutes an educated human being." The essay is slightly stilted, in that it attacks the liberal education system in America - in which students can choose from a large range of courses and "major" in one branch in their final year - whilst comparing it unfavourably with the principles Mill set out in the British context in the mid-nineteenth century. Had he looked over here in the United Kingdom, he would have found less evidence of the "compassless curriculum": in this country, rather than "majoring" in one discipline only in their final year, students generally do a single honours degree for the full three years, or a joint honours split 50-50 between two related subjects.

However, whilst I think (and Berkowitz's complaint confirms) that specialisation is preferable to spreading study across an eclectic mix of subjects, one of the limitations of the British system is that it deceptively compartmentalises us into different areas of interest, when in fact there is a great deal of overlap: several of my peers doing an English PhD started off in philosophy, and I'm sure the reciprocal is true over in the philosophy department; conferences tend to be organised by faculties rather than individual departments, and over coffee you encounter scholars from all backgrounds, not just those in your prosaic field.

If cultural theory has done one thing successfully, it has been to spread itself seductively across every discipline, so a student doing history or archaeology or literature may well encounter the same broad scheme of ideas - from postmodernism to postcolonialism - in each discipline. What shifts is the subject matter, whilst the approaches to them run through parallel perspectives. It is this fact which means that in response to my students' emails I almost invariably advise them to go with their hearts, since their heads are probably more than capable of absorbing the switch. However, is it really the case that all disciplines are of equal value in sending students into the world equipped with a philosophical and scientific guidebook? F.R. Leavis certainly didn't think so, when he placed the English department as the spider at the centre of the entire academic web, which could interpret any branch of intellectual life since it critiqued the language which structures thought, whether in particle physics or historical research.

Even if English departments are no longer seen as the most important generators of liberal wisdom, a residue of the Leavisite approach can be seen in the buzzword of modern academia, literary criticism especially: interdisciplinarity. Almost every call for papers that lands in my inbox on a Friday stresses that papers that straddle traditional disciplines are most welcome; I myself am not so much reading English, as philosophy, history, fiction, film, novels and computer games. The critical arts now possess a proud sense of the range and scope they are permitted to cover, and so I would suggest that academia is starting to find a middle way between variety and speciality.

Of course, one risk of this is relativism: if it is not what you say or study which matters, but how you say or write your study which matters, do we not end up with an aimless mess of disciplines shouting ever louder but actually doing very little by way of good and lasting research. This is a danger Berkowitz analyses, when he notes that professors tend to teach the fields which coincides with their interests, rather than teaching those texts, in those ways, which will most permanently benefit the student entering the "real" world.

The second problem with the spreading range of Arts study is that it sets itself up to compete with the sciences (both theoretically and in the battle for funding), rather than seeing both Arts and Science as necessary elements of a student's education. Leavis's elastic approach has become stretched by some brands of postmodern criticism, which, as the Sokal hoax showed, absurdly recruits empirical principles to scrutinise texts or narratives. Obviously, it is not possible for the arts student to use particle physics to analyse Silas Marner; equally particle physics is not simply a narrative in numbers that expresses ideology and meaning in the same way that a George Eliot novel does. (I critique this in my essay "Science as Writing, Writing as Science: Addressing the Boundaries of Literary Criticism and Fiction"). What participation, then, should science make in informing the student of the liberal arts? Here, Mill also strikes a chord with my views, arguing along utilitarian lines: "While it is not to be expected that many will achieve mastery of the laws to which the physical world is subject, students should acquire the basics that will enable them to distinguish those who are competent to provide the public advice on scientific and technological matters." Certainly, with Bush's withdrawal of funds for embryological research (leading to a bizarre jumble of red table and stickers in science labs) and Blair's hysterical reaction to supposed hybrid cow-men, one can see the value of ensuring that leaders educated in business (in Bush's case) or law (in Blair's) are encouraged also to appreciate, if not to deploy, the dispassionate scientific method.

In this coincidental way, the opposition between Arts and Sciences in the university context can be seen to affect the political split between conservatism and progressivism. Berkowitz notes that Mill was open to the positive aspects of both wings of the political spectrum, and argued that the cultivation of a liberal "third way" means accepting that each side, for all that its general outlook may be erroneous, may nevertheless have something of value to contribute to the detail of moral debate. Berkowitz argues that:

universities that purport to provide a liberal education will be failing in their mission unless their graduates, progressives and conservatives alike, prove capable of sympathetically understanding the positions of the political party to which they do not belong and discerning what is true and enduring in the beliefs of their partisan opponents.

But the comparison between Bush and Blair highlights that the liberal education systems of Harvard and Oxford have, in actuality, very much succeeded in providing perspectives on both parties. So much so that this Republican right-winger is now the best of friends with the Labour prime minister, one who marched for CND in the 1960s. Blair's brilliance has been his ability precisely to understand the position of the right, and to simultaneously occupy that ground whilst pulling both progressives and conservatives closer to the centre - the rise of fellow blogger (oh, yes, and Conservative leader) David Cameron indicates his success. Unfortunately, rather than promoting toleration (as Mill hoped) the accommodation of those on both left and right who are close to the centre has further marginalised anyone who breaks from the new majority centre. As Bush said two months after September 11, "you're either with us, or against us": if I am against Bush, detest Guantanamo, and think the war on terror utterly misguided in its approach, I am, by inference, a terrorist.

If the risk of interdisciplinarity in the Arts has been a relativistic "anything goes so long as you can talk the talk," the risk of representing and treating both political outlooks as equals is to imply that it does not matter whether you are left or right wing, so long as you fall into line under whoever happens to rule. This is where study of the classics might come in, since they (as Paul Cartledge reminds us on Radio 4's recent: "The Greeks: For Better or for Worse") form the philosophical foundations for modern culture. As Berkowitz says:

Accordingly, liberal education should concentrate on the languages and literature of the ancients, of the Greeks and Romans, because of both their farness and their nearness. On the one hand, the circumstances and sensibility of classical authors differ the most profoundly from ours (without being, Mill stipulates, like those of Asia, “so totally dissimilar, that the labor of a life is required to enable us to understand them”). On the other hand, their writings are rich in the wisdom of the common life of humanity. The classics both challenge our moral and political assumptions and provide models of human excellence. Particularly the writings of Plato and Aristotle represent “the perfection of good sense.”

Happily, having plummeted down the ranks of academic esteem, classics seems to be starting to come back into favour. The new, controversial, Cambridge Latin Course is helping us to see that Latin is far from a dead language. Study of the Ancients mi