PhD Journey: Week 7

Networking

Academic networking is an odd concept. I’m very familiar with business networking, both formal BNI-style (*cough*don’t do it*cough*) and less structured network building throuhg courses, events, common interests and online. But the idea of doing that in academia is a bit alien to me, and I’m finding it a little bit difficult because a lot of what I’m seeing at the moment is a bit ‘trumpet-blowing’. My idea of good networking is about helping others, not talking about myself, and I’m not 100% clear at the moment how I can do that in this setting.

My supervisor talks about ‘Brand Phil’, which I like the idea of and appreciate the encouragement, but even the idea of updating my profiles and talking shit on Linkedin makes me feel a bit nauseous. I think to deal with this I need to find some opportunities to interact more casually with other academics or peers — beer might even be involved…

Working

This is the first week where it’s been challenging juggling work and university. I imagine most people have to work at least some of the time whilst working towards a PhD, because the level of funding attached to either a studentship or a loan isn’t really enough to live on unless you’re happy going back to a student lifestyle — which I’m not and my wife really isn’t! Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful to be getting this opportunity, never mind being paid to do it (and whilst I’m on the subject, a word of praise for my university for reacting so quickly to the problems that inflation is causing and increasing the level of the studentship grant, employers and the public sector should take note that it can be done if the will is there), but if I’m going to keep up mortgage payments am going to have to do paid work over the next three years.

I’m doubly lucky in that my research subject is related to my work, which reduces the mental stress of juggling a little bit. Despite that, this has been the first week that I have run into problems with scheduling and keeping all the balls in the air. There are a few things I’m going to try doing to see if they help with this:

• Merging my calendars, and making it visible to my supervisor and team (if I can just show my commercial work in my uni calendar as ‘busy’, so much the better!)
• Blocking out time for tasks, in particular reading and writing

Just basic time management, really, but it’s easy to get caught up in the doing and lose control of it.