Marathons Not Sprints

I have, as of last week, sadly now left my role as a Local Area Coordinator at City of York Council. I am now a full time student again, so it feels like a timely point for an update and some reflection. At the moment I am 10 weeks into my PhD, but for 9 of those weeks I’ve also been working part time handing over my previous role, whilst under the shadow of grief and juggling lots of practical personal bereavement activity. Unsurprisingly, burnout and mental health have been on my mind not just in terms of my research aims - but in a very immediate sense, too. This is something I’ve been very passionate about in my previous work and research, and something I’ll be returning to as a subject here. Cue the title of this post, a wonderful piece of advice that has been given to me by many people in the past 10 weeks.

A PhD is a marathon, not a sprint.

Beginning this transitional stage of my life has brought about lots of interesting conversations with colleagues, peers and friends, old and new, about identity and our career roles. Starting a PhD is an unusual activity, unlikely ever to be repeated, that has - for me - involved lots of new ways of thinking. Many commentators and writers have suggested that being a PhD student is not just about conducting research into a niche area, but a constellation of skills and challenges coming together. Authoring a PhD involves coming to see ones self as a “writer”, something I’ve always aspired to but never really known how to embody. You may for the first time acquire the professional title “researcher”, and enter a curious new space that brings with it some reverence and many assumptions. Being a PhD researcher also changes the way others may relate to you. It’s a privilege to be able to study at this level, and something quite elitist and inaccessible for many. In my last blog I mentioned how much of a challenge imposter syndrome can be in academia, and the pressure that exists in research. Since networking with peers, it’s even more obvious that this is something everyone struggles with. It can be hard to know where to start, and it can risk being a very isolating experience. Thankfully, I am lucky to have two amazing supervisors, and I have found York St John to be a wonderfully welcoming university. I’ve attended quite a few events already and started to build links and make new friends, something I’ll be talking about in my next blog post.

I met with the inspiring Prof. Nick Rowe from York St John University following the Converge Evaluated conference last week to discuss his work, university life, and Connecting Our City, and he said starting a PhD is like walking into a vast cathedral. It’s quite an overwhelming process at the start, as you finally get through the doors and realise just how much there is that you could look at. If you don’t know York, a cathedral is an apt metaphor for exploring as new space - our city feels small sometimes but it’s packed to the brim with medieval stone, old buildings and gorgeous churches down every snickleway and around every corner. I’ve been thinking about psychogeography a lot during my networking, and how inextricably connected thinking about “place” and “space” is to thinking about mental health services, community, and improving the wellbeing of people living somewhere. It’s a fitting metaphor for where I feel I am right now. There’s a starting point on a map, but the edges are fuzzy and it’s too early to be able to spot directions, roads, connections. It makes me think back to my master’s dissertation, where I drew inspiration from Grayson Perry’s Map of Nowhere, which combined human form and map making to explore the Western human experience. There is an overlap of geography, art and mental health here, that fits so well with innovative models of improving wellbeing in the community, much like Local Area Coordination. I loved working as a local area coordinator, a model whose values focus on strengths, active citizenship, inclusion and more equal power distribution - a place based way to support communities to build and foster the improvement in mental wellbeing and connectedness for people living in the communities it serves. If you’re not familiar with Local Area Coordination, I’d really recommend taking a look at the Local Area Coordination Network Website. I’m really looking forward to where this line of thinking can lead me in my research.

In Patrick Dunleavy’s Book “Authoring a PhD”, he describes another helpful metaphor drawn from the world of art. By likening a research project to sculpting, he brings together science and art in a way that appeals a great deal to me. There’s something reflexive about sculpting and the necessary process of balancing what you hope to achieve with how your material yields to working, has its own personality, the way you must respond to material and how the process becomes an embodied one.

“Your early ideas on what your thesis will look like, in your first six months or first year, will be like those of a sculptor choosing a block of stone and marking the crudest ‘rough form’ concept on it, before embarking on the long job of chiselling out a finished piece".

I’d recommend the book to anyone starting out on a PhD, or thinking of doing one. His tone is quite amusing and it has some really helpful advice that goes beyond clinical breakdowns of structure and terminology. The sculpting analogy has also resonated with discussions I’ve had with creative practitioners working in the research field, who have encouraged me to draw upon my background as an artist and art therapist in making personal responses to the research process, and working reflectively. This is something I’ve taught students on various courses before, and something I use in my work in art psychotherapy and as a practising artist, so it makes absolutely sense that it is integrated into research too.

I have also started to share more of my process on my website, social media, and in wider circles. I’m currently writing a more day to day blog on what it’s like to start a PhD and advice on making connections, attending conferences, productivity and structuring your time, which I’ll be submitting to the York St John Postgraduate Research Blog. You can also now see information about my studies on the York St John Communities Centre Research page, and I also wrote a short update for the Communities Centre Newsletter, which you can read by clicking here.