Upgraded!

(Originally posted on 10 April 2014)

As I mentioned in my last post, it seems like for as long as I’ve been at King’s, I’ve been “preparing for my upgrade”. Now, after 18 months, I have survived the process and am finally a fully-fledged PhD candidate.

I really had no idea what to expect from the upgrade meeting. I had spent the day before rereading the 20,000 word chapter that I had handed in for examination back in February, assuming that I would be quizzed on it. As it turned out, I wasn’t expected to say much at all in the meeting. Instead, it was a chance for the examiners, especially my secondary supervisor who had not previously commented on my work, to share their comments, queries and advice. While my two supervisors work on literary/cultural studies like myself, my third examiner was from political science, so she brought an interesting alternative viewpoint to the discussion.

My supervisor insisted that it went really well and that all three examiners had been impressed with my chapter, but I must admit that at the time I was just completely overwhelmed by the amount that I still have to think about. The wealth of further reading recommended by the examiners, and their suggestions on how to expand or refine sections of the chapter will surely prove invaluable in the long-run, helping me to make my thesis better. However, at the time I just wanted to run away and hide from it all. Only now, two weeks later, having finally completed the paperwork, that it has finally sunk in that I’ve passed. Now I can relax for the next 18 months (well, except for researching and writing and teaching and conferencing!) until submission, which I’m sure will come around all too quickly.

Putting It Together

(Originally posted on 23 February 2014)

Art isn’t easy
Every minor detail is a major decision.
Having just the vision’s no solution,
Everything depends on execution.
The art of making art is putting it together.

Writing a PhD might not seem like ‘making art’, but while I grapple with the sprawling mass of knowledge I’ve accumulated over the last 18 months, Sondheim’s words are stuck in my head.

It seems that almost since I started my PhD I’ve been preparing for my upgrade. It was going to be after 9 months, then 12, then 18. It really is happening now, as soon as we can find a time when all three of my examiners are free (which is proving remarkably difficult). As part of the process, I had to write ‘a substantial piece of work’, which usually translates to about 10,000 words. I set myself the challenge over the Christmas holidays to turn the knowledge I’d amassed so far into a coherent contextualising chapter. It took many hours of puzzling over spider diagrams and discussing with my supervisor before the lightbulb moment when I suddenly realised how it all fits together. It turned out I had far more to say than I thought and the chapter ended up at 20,000.

With that done, all I had left to prepare was an outline of my thesis. It was only one page yet I almost found it harder than the 60 I’d written over the holidays. I had been planning to write a chapter about each novel in my corpus but it soon became apparent that this wouldn’t work, or maybe it would, but a thematic approach would make a far better thesis. Having worked out a plan with the main themes arising from the novels, I took it to my supervisor who promptly suggested that I lose the whole first section  and concentrate entirely on the second.  While I know that she is right, it will make a much tighter, more coherent thesis, and I’m excited to be working on this one theme (metafiction and intertextuality in contemporary Venezuelan novels), I can’t deny that I felt a brief mourning period for the topics that I first came in to the PhD with (reactions to nationalism and socialism in fiction). I know I’m not alone – another girl in my department scrapped half of the material that she had planned to include in her thesis at the halfway point too. Part of the PhD process seems to be accepting limitations and evaluating how to do the best research in the time-frame allowed. I keep reminding myself too that the work I’ve done so far isn’t lost or worthless by any means. Hopefully once I finally get this upgrade out of the way, I can turn that earlier work into an article to publish. In the meantime, it feels great to finally have an outline of my thesis on paper and start to envision the finished product in the not-so-distant future.