Last week, I shared a letter to my first year self. Going into the second year of my PhD, I realise hindsight is limited. And so, as this blog is intended to highlight the Scotland research community, I thought it best to call upon researchers at all career stages to share their own letters to their first year selves. This week, Charlotte Bird, Ziqiao Wang, and Hope Doherty-Harrison are sharing what they wish they would have known at the very beginning of their research journeys…
Charlotte Bird, PhD Researcher (4th Year)
Dear first year me,
Congratulations, you’ve made it to the final year of your PhD. I knew you could do it! Here is some hard won advice you definitely need to hear.
There is no map. This will be your first and hardest lesson. You’ve spent your entire educational and professional life following well-marked paths. Complete these courses, achieve these milestones. The PhD has no roadmap. There is no checklist that guarantees success. You’re scared – I get it. What does my day look like? How do I make sure I don’t waste four years on the wrong thing? There’s a secret though; you work better without a map. You’ll learn to trust your instincts, to submit papers when they feel ready enough, to propose ideas that excite you, to keep moving forward even when the destination remains unclear. Embrace the uncertainty.
Get outside! Right now, you’re convinced that productivity means eight hours at a desk with a thirty-minute lunch break. You’re wrong. Big time wrong. The flexibility of PhD life is one of its greatest gifts, yet you’ll spend basically four years feeling guilty every time you step away from your computer. Ignore that feeling. Go to the beach. Play tennis, surf. Get a burger and watch the sunset. You’re going to look back and wonder why you didn’t claim these moments whilst you had them. You can work when you get home!
Listen to the rhythm. Here’s the best advice you’ll receive: when the work is there, take it. When inspiration strikes at 11 PM, write, read, create. When your brain is ready to think, think. Conversely, when the well is dry, walk away without guilt. Be honest with yourself here. Sometimes you might spend 15 hours at a desk because you had the battery. That doesn’t mean you are in credit to take the next day off. Learn the signs. Forced productivity is an oxymoron in creative intellectual work.
Writing is thinking. Ideas don’t exist until you write them down. This isn’t metaphorical, it’s practical truth for you. Your thoughts will feel clear in your head, but the act of writing will reveal that they are half baked, incomplete and messy. Write daily, even badly. Write when you have nothing to say. Those review cycles you’ll initially dread? They’re good. They don’t feel good even now, but they are. Put your work out there.
Read voraciously. You think you’ve read enough about your topic? You haven’t. Every paper, every book, every random article will shift your PhD’s direction by a degree or two. Read outside your field. Read things that seem irrelevant. Read for fun! Let your research evolve organically. Rigidity is your enemy, trust me.
It feels lonely because you are alone. This is perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the PhD journey. You’ll be four years deep into a tiny corner of human knowledge. It is lonely out there. Accept it, ignore it. No one else will understand your work quite like you do, that’s fine.
Finally, it’s just work. That’s it.
With love from fourth year me.
Ziqiao Wang, PhD Researcher (2nd Year)
Dear Ziqiao from the first year,
Congratulations on your progress in the first year. I still remember that during the first meeting, there were many challenges and anxiety expressed, because of your unfamiliarity with the degree of preparation to start a PhD. After nine months, however, you had successfully justified your capability for doing independent research. It has been commented on as “a fascinating progress” at the meeting. Your progress is shared below as a means of reviewing and celebrating your great achievement.
Your life during the first year was filled with uncertainty, no less than the anxiety of survival in the first year. However, you had actively participated in the department workshops, as a way of reducing the stress. One important event inspiring your research was titled ‘How to Develop a Thesis Question?’ Attending with the first-year peers, you were immersed in the centre of brainstorming questions and approaches. Your initial interest in Chinese narrative pictures was elaborated through their introduction on other lenses of research, including gender theory and the digitalisation approach. You have presented your own independent research later in the year, after taking these fresh approaches as food for your thought. You showcased your rich observation of details of the representation by artists to those audiences who are not familiar with Chinese art. Still more importantly, you enjoyed the process of decoding and revealing the mode of representing real space in Chinese art, in comparison to the perspective theory in Western art. In consequence, your independent research has received many positive comments, as a great source of confidence in completing your first year.
In the first-year study, personal engagement with your research object, in physical terms, was another impressive experience. A physical replica of the 15th-century masterpiece of Chinese painting, Eighteen Songs of A Nomad Flute, was being carried by you from China to Edinburgh. It has sequential illustrations about a woman’s exile from China to Mongolia during the 3rd century. As a continuous visual narrative, images of mountains, cities and tribes, and the Mongolian’s lifestyle were all richly illustrated. Through rolling the long handscroll and reading the pictorial content, your hobby was helpful to your research. It inspired you to embrace different concepts such as temporality, gaze, and agency of things. Still more interestingly, you received invaluable insights from supervisors when you were doing this in the supervision meeting. They suggested the significance of temporality, from their own expertise, the Chinese art and the Aztec art. Your transnational scope in the research of the first year work was influenced by this interactive experience.
During the first year, you also fell in love with reading different books on art history research. These were your dear friends, who kept your interest in knowledge fresh during the year. Visiting both the University library and the library of the Art School every weekend, you were immersed in the world of world art, as well as many inspirational ideas crossing the book pages, from experts in the Aztec art, medieval art, and contemporary art.
Moreover, the world of knowledge was not the only one you embraced. The grassland near the library, the sunshine, and the bright glass window were also important. They “took care” of your body and soul well in the first year, making sure you were always feeling energetic and ready to embrace challenges. They were the most precious source of joy in Edinburgh.
Well done. Wishing you can continue this way and have a rewarding and prosperous research life in the forthcoming second year!
Ziqiao
Dr Hope Doherty-Harrison, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
The first year of a humanities PhD is often a very strange time. I had just emerged from a masters degree with an intense, short-term structure, three essays and a dissertation packed into nine months; I felt very lost with the sudden expansiveness of a PhD timeframe. PhD time itself often doesn’t feel linear, or consistent; my first year seemed to take forever in an empty, wandering sort of way, whereas my last six months fled by but were so packed full of writing and rewriting that when I remember the actual work it feels expansive again through being so rich in thought and experience.
Something I wish I’d realised from the beginning is that doing a PhD is not only about coming up with a new idea and writing a lot about it, but about figuring out if you are enjoying that process. Be prepared for the PhD to surprise you, and give yourself room to respond to that surprise. Enjoyment is the best, most important thing you can get out of a PhD, and any work that comes beyond it: it will get you through the most difficult times and animate all your conversations and friendships over the PhD years. If you are stuck with your topic, ask yourself what your favourite ideas or sources are, and what they have in common; you can trust yourself to reform your research to develop their interconnections. The chances are that your favourite aspects of your work are also the best.
Following this, the PhD has to be worth it on its own terms. Remind yourself of this all the time; this is your thesis, your work, and your time. You deserve to make it what you want it to be. Securing a position afterwards – whether that be a temporary teaching job, a postdoctoral assistantship on a collaborative project, or finding success with a fellowship scheme for your own project – is difficult, uncertain, and demoralising. Postdoctoral careers require both a lot of tenacity and a lot of luck. I got through my last few months of the PhD by compartmentalising this and focusing on the fact that no matter what was going to happen afterwards, I would have the thesis – a piece of work I had made, a new set of ideas I had discovered. Tenacity is easier to build when you value having done the PhD even if it does not lead, immediately or longer-term, to an academic position. And it also helps within the PhD itself, for example if you want to resist advice to move your work in a particular direction, or if you have to deal with a destabilising critique – both happened to me!
There are many injustices in academia and its infrastructure necessitates competitiveness, but there are spaces and times it can also be characterised by generosity, care, and solidarity. Find these spaces and hold onto them, not just for your own wellbeing but also to learn from and emulate them where you can. This is part of enabling and encouraging other people to find joy and strength in their work, which is a responsibility you can take on when your own feels worthwhile and productive.
Trust the process. It will be very difficult, but try to remember it is not useful to compare yourself to others, and (usually) to spend time trying to calibrate your work with the time elapsed in your PhD period. I realise this is inevitable to some extent, especially given the financial pressures of doing a PhD, and if I were able to say this to my first-year self, I know I would not have listened! – but my experience has been that it is true when people say the work speeds up monumentally in the last few months before submission. I rewrote my entire thesis in my last 3 months, which sounds terrifying, but was actually very satisfying – being able to refine all my chapters with the knowledge and experience of the whole PhD behind me was actually a great confidence-building exercise. Trust the expansive potential of that time, as this is also a way of trusting yourself.
Charlotte Bird is a fourth year PhD in Design informatics at the University of Edinburgh. She holds an MSc in computer science and a BA in Literature. Her thesis will be focused on Ai systems for creative practitioners. She is supervised by Professor Ewa Luger and Dr. Caterina Moruzzi. She has held a number of research assistant positions across various research projects. Most recently she has worked on the BRAID project (enabling responsible AI in the UK, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)). She works remotely and lives by the beach in San Diego, California with her husband and two cats Basil and Rue.
Ziqiao Wang currently pursues his doctoral degree in art history at the University of Edinburgh. He holds a MA in medieval European art and architecture from the Courtauld Institute of Art and the MA East Asian art and archaeology from SOAS, University of London. Ziqiao’s deep interest in the east-west visual culture stemmed from his interdisciplinary training in art history and visual culture in the United States. Ziqiao’s research interest lies in the transcultural art history of the pre-modern world. He had presented his research on comparative studies of portals in Christian and Buddhist religious architectures at Kent, while he had also proposed a postgraduate conference on the visual culture of borders at Leeds. One recent lecture was about David Hockney’s medieval-style stained glass window in the Westminster Abbey, delivered during David Hockney’s solo exhibition at the Modern Art Museum Shanghai.
Contact: s2741955@ed.ac.uk
Hope Doherty-Harrison received her PhD from Durham University in 2022, then was a Teaching Fellow in Medieval Art History at the University of Edinburgh from 2022-24. After postdoctoral fellowships at IASH (Edinburgh) and the Paul Mellon Centre (Yale in London) Hope returned to History of Art at Edinburgh as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow.
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