EXCITEDITHINK?

How to Prepare for a PhD

How do you prepare for a PhD? The feeling of starting a new school has followed me all summer, but I haven’t known what I needed to do. Starting school, I always knew what I’d need. A new pencil case. A new bag. A new haircut. Textbooks. Supplies for the inevitable round of homework demanding I “cover my books”. With the start of my PhD looming, I wanted someone to hand me a list of essentials, a survival kit, something I could do to prepare and feel ready, but I didn’t know what that list would contain.

Starting School by Janet and Allan Ahlberg, still the best guide to starting eduction anyone will ever read.

I don’t want a pencil case and I love my bag so there’s no need for a new one. I got a haircut but (unsurprisingly) that didn’t magically make me ready to step off a cliff into the unknown. And that is exactly what starting a PhD felt like: stepping off a cliff onto a tiny winding path I can only just see in the mist.

A few weeks ago, Lauren asked me how I was feeling about my PhD. I answered excitedIthink. The words came so quickly they blurred together. It was an entirely accurate descriptor of my emotions. The ‘I think’ an honest admission of the fear and nerves dampening my very real excitement.

Without the need for a pencil case, and with my hair happily and beautifully cut I still felt a burning need to prepare. But preparing before the induction days that would explain what I would be doing and how to prepare kept proving impossible, so I did the only thing I could think of.

I made stuff.

I spent an afternoon making notebook covers with the glorious paper I brought back from Venice earlier this year.

I worked on my van for hours and days at a time.

I sewed my first ever piece of clothing, a gorgeous green skirt I’d bought the pattern and fabric for in December.

Making Things

Every day spent making, building, crafting, kneeling on the floor with fabric or wood around me made me feel calmer and more prepared. My anxiety took a back seat as my busy hands and focused mind brought me into my body. I’d found a way to prepare and then, finally, the induction days were upon me.

Last week I spent three exciting, exhausting, thrilling, brain melting days being given all the information I could possibly need to prepare for my PhD. I wrote so many notes my pen needed new ink twice. I laughed, smiled, shrank into myself and breathed through the fear to find the joy. Explaining my project to strangers was beyond scary. I can hardly explain it to myself, it’s still too unwieldy, unformed, deeply important to me but without shape. But after three days of inductions, I know what the first steps are to start shaping this huge thing into something real.

So how to prepare for a PhD? Send an email to my supervisors, pay the first terms tuition fees, put the timetable into my diary, tell work when I’m available for shifts, take a deep breath in, out, in again. Then step off the cliff.

My PhD is about the earth crisis and mass extinction. It’s practical and creative. It’s four years crafting artwork and writing and researching until I come out the other side with A Thing.

I want the start to my research to be powerful, to be that deep breath I know I need to sustain me. I want my first step off the cliff to fill my mind and imagination with something powerful.

With that in mind I am setting off on my first adventure in my half-competed van. I don’t have the gas system yet, so I have no hot water, heating and my oven doesn’t work. But I’ve built the bed, made a bright, inviting nest, and am driving to Scotland. My route it planned. For a week and a day I will drive beautiful roads, walk among standing stones, and visit places the last wolves in the UK are rumoured to have lived and been killed. I will fill my mind and imagination with the best views I can find, with big skies and big weather. I will fill my lungs with air and my heart with the more-than- human world my art is being created to protect. Then I will come home, step off the cliff, and find out where that tiny path into the mist will lead me.

My nest.