I submitted my PhD about 10 weeks ago now. It was entitled "Power, inequity, and socio-ecological transformation in UK rewilding". I’m still waiting for my viva. I’ve been doing this thing for quite some time now so I have could write a lot! But I’m gonna try and just write some bullet points, which maybe I can expand in other posts.

1. Well, fuck. I've submitted. That was my first thought.
2. The second was: that seemed to be way harder than it needed to be. Don’t get me wrong, doing all that work was never going to be easy. It required a lot of work, and writing 80,000 words of academic quality is hard... but it didn’t need to be quite that hard either. Most of the major difficulties were from lack of understanding and confidence rather than anything intrinsically complex about the process.
3. The most difficult parts arose from lack of understanding of social science as a field (compared to my background in political economy and computing), indecisiveness over methodological approaches, lack of alignment between my analytical approach and my theoretical framework, and being slow to understand how to write and structure chapters.
4. I feel like most or all of these could have been resolved with more support from the university. However, there was basically no support for someone outside of social science to understand the requirements of this field. The services they do provide, such as writing support, were not advertised nor did my supervisors seem to know about them.
5. Other academics, when I have complained about these issues, often seem to say “those struggles are part of doing a PhD!” This is particularly frustrating when it comes from critical scholars, who, when writing academic papers, are critical of precisely this kind of language. Yes, some struggle is necessary, but that doesn’t mean that PhD students don’t deserve some basic services to help them!
6. As PhD students from PGRS.UK said at the time, when Covid-19 hit it, wasn’t the final year students that struggled, it was early- to mid- stage researchers, whose plans were left in tatters because it changed everything. I not only had to change my approach to my research, I became quite ill and I also lost access to the community of PhD students that might have helped me when I was making poor decisions, confused about my methodology or analytical approach, and struggling to understand the feedback from my supervisors. The powers that be, of course, took little notice of the campaign for a blanket extension to be granted to all students. I was lucky enough to be given an extension. Many others were not.

These are just some of the thoughts that occurred to me since I submitted. I’ve been poor at blogging recently, so hopefully I will expand on some of these in future. I might alo post about some of my programming projects, or my explorations in moving away from big tech. Since I submitted I moved all my notes away from Microsoft OneNote into Joplin because training ChatGPT using my notes is not cool. It's going OK so far but I'm still finding out how Joplin compares as a notetaking app.