My First Semester Experiences as a Ph.D. Student: The Process of Failing, Learning, and Not Giving Up.
Doctoral research is a time period when a student learns about research, submits a dissertation that has been conducted using a rigorous methodology, and contributes with the intention of contributing to the field of knowledge (Hockey, 2004). However, my first six months’ experience as a P.hD. student at Kathmandu University School of Education (KUSOED) has already made me realize that it is more than that.
Unlike many Ph.D. students for whom the doctoral studies become their transition into an academic career as an educator, I had applied for my Ph.D. in education leadership after already working for eight years as an educator and was already convinced that this is the field that I envision to be all my life. However, my experiences were no different than the ones who were new to this domain as I also went through a major difficulty with the change in educational understanding and the status I was in.
Meanwhile, similar to other Ph.D. students’ as mentioned by Hockey (2004), I also went through notable problems that included social isolation, time constraints, the need to take individual responsibility for work, the need to feel a sense of intellectual self-worth, and the need to have a solid relationship with the supervisor, particularly in terms of mutually shared expectations. Especially given my introverted nature it was quite complex for me to find a bond readily with my professor and my fellow friends because of my own insecurities and hesitation. Asking for help does not come to me readily as someone who has spent her considerable amount of life working and living all alone. Interestingly, month after month, I started learning to asking for help and creating a bond with both my professor and my colleagues' bit by bit. As I reflect back, that all trickles down to the fact that I found the University open towards listening to the problems that I have and also the University helping me to learn even without me asking for help. I was not expecting the University and the professors to be sharing the resources, links, and documents for different conferences, seminars, and presentations to all the students irrespective of their department. That helped me immensely to learn from so many faculties as well as students and to know more about them even without approaching them. Therefore, for an introvert like me, the identification of these relationships with my faculty, peers, colleagues became a crucial part of my learning (Sweitzer, 2009).
In this process, I cannot discount the fact that the opportunity provided to me to work as a teaching assistant for the M.Phil. students right after I joined, was very instrumental in helping me create the bond as well as find my self-worth and also see me as someone contributing to the University system. During my work as a teaching assistant, I not only helped the lead facilitator but I also started learning more about the university system as a whole. Coming from a completely different university system, I was amazed to see how approachable my current University system was.
The students’ past experiences, as well as their social context, influence their development and learning during Ph.D. Jarvis (2009) mentions that the experience of starting, engaging in, and completing a doctorate is certainly a process of becoming: learning, changing, and reflecting. As someone who had hated learning online, even when I was provided the opportunity to some brilliant scholarship opportunities in the past, the forceful transition to an online mode of teaching and learning due to the Covid-19 pandemic, not only made me question my own beliefs but also made me analyze and see the things from a more creative and optimistic lens. That made me look deeper into myself and understand what my own potential as a learner is. Also, looking back at how my months went by and what books and articles did I study as a part of an assignment helped me track by myself.
On the other side, I was also working on my own proposal. I was trying to get acquainted with several theories and methodologies that my professors had assigned me to read. Of course, in the beginning, I did not have a very firm framework in my mind apart from the fact that I want to do something that was in relation to emotional intelligence, something that I had been very passionate about for quite a long time. From sometimes being too ambitious to sometimes being too lousy, I kept on learning about the methodologies that were in line with my research interests. As my work evolved, I started solidifying what I want to research but still not being able to figure out how can that be beneficial to me as well as to the greater good to the ones that I was thinking of. With numerous thought-provoking questions, some days of confusion, and some days of angst, I started becoming clearer in wanting to learn more about my own process of learning and reflections. This journey of reflection sometimes became so heavy that I needed an outlet to vent out. I vented it out sometimes to my husband. I am glad that he is someone who can calm me down when I am crying or when I am being too self-critical. Most of the times, I made my social media as an outlet. Poems and paintings became my medium of self-expression. Also, my weekend moments with plants were calming moments for me to rejuvenate myself to muster the courage to start another loaded week.
With the end of my first semester, as I am moving on, I am slowly beginning to question my deeply held beliefs about what the idea of emotional intelligence means to me; and what does it mean to be a practitioner of emotional intelligence in the field of education. I am starting to question how are my practices different as a teacher leader, as an organizational leader and as a wife and these reflections are triggering numerous concerns and I am trying to navigate that. I cannot still say if I have come out of the fog to be able to see or even visualize the next step but what I can conclude at the end of my first semester is that there is no alternative but to keep moving, keep doing, keep reflecting, keep asking for help, keep crying in front of my husband, keep waking up till the midnight until the fog clears.
References
Hockey, J. (1994). New territory: Problems of adjusting to the first year of a social science Ph.D. Studies in Higher Education, 19(2), 177- 190. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079412331382027
Jarvis, P. (2012). Learning to be a person in society. Routledge.
Sweitzer, B. (2008). Towards a theory of doctoral student professional identity development: A developmental network approach. The Journal of Higher Education, 80(1), 1–33.https://doi.org/10.1353/jhe.0.0034
