Yesterday was my graduation — the culmination of what I started in the final year of my full-time work more than 7 years ago.
Getting the hat was what it was always about!
The last few months have been a series of celebrations, from submitting my PhD thesis to its being accepted, my PhD being conferred, and then graduation yesterday.
It was awesome that my favourite person and son were able to attend in person and my two otther children for whom I could not get tickets were able to watch the live stream. One of my grandchildren also watched and was delighted to tell me he had seen me walk across the stage. He occassionally calls me Doc, which is fun!
It was a big day. A sense of excitement, achievement and celebration.
I am in a period of reflection about my PhD. I don’t think that’s surprising as it took an enormous part of the last six and a half years of my life. If you include the preceding two years to complete Honours which was a precursor to being admitted into the PhD program, it has been the best part of a decade.
I still subscribe to blogs from various sources that provided inspiration, advice and support during my PhD. In my feed for today was Pat Thomson’s Patter where she discussed how much writing goes into completing a PhD.
I have spent the morning ordering a bound version of my thesis and organising my academic gown. The puffy hat will finally be mine!
Last Monday, I received advice that I had fulfilled the academic requirements for my PhD and that conferral would occur on the 31st of July. As I read the letter, I had a feeling of joy and my favourite person one of relief!
It is the culmination of the first chapter of the journey thatI entitled “What’s Next” when I started this blog. It’s a theme I have returned to since, as a fifty-something, I contemplated retirement from the professional firm I had been privileged to have been a partner for more than 20 years. With the completion of my PhD, I feel that the transition is complete, and a new chapter of What’s Next will begin.
When I commenced the journey with the assistance of Michael and Tim, I had no idea where it would take me. Through many conversations with Michael and Tim and the benefit of Hermina Ibarra’s book “Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career”, I am now just over 7 years into that journey.
Across that time, my favourite person and I have been lucky enough to travel to Italy several times; I have seen my first EPL game live and walked the beautiful beaches on the Isle of Sandy in the Orkney Islands. Other highlights have been attending my first large academic conference and becoming a published academic author. Across that period, there has been the joy of two of my children marrying, the arrival of three wonderful grandchildren and my youngest daughter’s graduations.
Late last Friday afternoon I completed the final step in my PhD journey when I resubmitted a short abstract that for some reason the University could not find. It had originally been lodged at the time I submitted my thesis for examination, so lodging it again was not a big deal. However, it was a bit of an anticlimax from submitting my thesis with all the sign offs which I’d done the day before.
In any event, it’s all done now and conferral of my PhD should occur at the end of July.
Knowing it is all done, was a liberating feeling at first , followed by a sense of excitement that led to a difficult nights sleep helped by having the Tour De France to watch until the early hours of the morning.
I used this pen for months after our visit to Coimbra. Although its long since run out of ink it still holds pride of place on my desk
Hitting the send button on my thesis manuscript wasn’t the feeling I’d expected. I thought it would be eeuphoric but instead it was a a flatness that comes from sheer relief.
It was early. I’d been up since 5 in the morning, tidying up formatting, which had been the bane of my life in the last few weeks. I had been pulling my hair out over headings, renumbering themselves for apparently no reason – of course; there was one which I found with the help of a colleague for whom I am eternally grateful. Full stops were missing in my final run-through, a random page break, a bold line in a table, and an incorrect reference on the second last page of a 365 page document. And of course, there was the conversion to pdf process that saw the pages slighting alter, meaning a few tables had to be reformatted.
What I thought would take an hour took two and a half hours, so at 7.30 in the morning I hit send and into the examination process my thesis goes. I’m hoping that will be straight forward but I can’t be sure.
Thre was no one else in the house awake – how to celebrate? Upstairs and a 45 minute bike session on Zwift. I’ve racked up countless hours on the bike over the course of my phd. It along with the gym have been a welcome release from the daily phd process.
It was quite nice to have an hour or so my own to take in the fact that it was done. The countelss journal articles I’d read,the more than 1 million words written of which nearly 115,000 found there way into the manuscript.
