PhD Journey: Week 13

Time for a break!

A couple of people have told me that it’s really important to take proper holidays during my PhD, to stop thinking about research for a bit, so I didn’t look at my laptop for the whole week of Christmas.

Surprisingly, after a couple of days I didn’t think about Entrepreneurial Ecosystems once!

The biggest challenge, funnily enough, was people I hadn’t seen for a couple of months asking how things were going. I’m finding it a very odd experience when people ask about my research — they are clearly genuinely interested, but only for about thirty seconds. Part of this might be that I’m not yet articulating the interesting bits of what I’m working on very well (even mentioning the phrase “entrepreneurial ecosystems” makes most people’s eyes glaze over), but I think there is definitely a level of superficiality in how we react to other people’s work and research.

I don’t make new year’s resolutions, but if I did then this year’s would be to try to really, genuinely be interested in my colleague’s research interests. I think it will be good to help me connect with them, and I’m pretty sure I’ll learn some interesting things.