The Third Degree

Negativity & the PhD   I think we all know that the PhD is not a walk in the park; no one expects it to be. There are challenges, some quite big too, as part of the journey.   Our growth and development is both professional and personal.   Professional in developing our skills and credibility as a research. Developing research skills, intuition, communication skills, and of course, learning along the way. Personally, we grow in our confidence, in our interpersonal and collaborative skills, and in our negotiation, compromise, and maybe even crisis management skills.   To me, these are all positives. Growth is positive, even if there’s a little pain in the way.   What concerns me personally though is the excessive, almost overwhelming negativity out there about the journey, especially on social media. So called ‘support groups’ over-emphasise negatives on the journey – poor supervisors, funding issues, R2, the toxicity of academia – many as ‘horror stories’, memes