Watching Them Finish While I Am Just Beginning.

It is July, which means graduation season is upon us, and across universities, campuses are suddenly filled with gowns, photographs, flowers, proud families and that kind of joy that comes when something difficult has finally been completed. 

This year, however, I am watching it all from a very different place. 

I am still in my first year of the PhD, only a few months into a journey that still feels new, uncertain and, at times, difficult to imagine all the way to the end. Yet some of the people I met when I arrived are already leaving. They are people I have seen in corridors, spoken to at events, sat beside at workshops or simply come to recognise as part of the wider postgraduate community, and suddenly they are graduating. 

There is something quite strange about meeting someone while you are still trying to understand your own research question, still learning how supervision works and still wondering whether everyone else knows something you do not, only to see that same person a few months later standing in a graduation gown with a doctorate beside their name. 

Watching them, I cannot help but wonder what that moment will feel like for me one day, and whether I will ever fully believe that the person standing in the gown could eventually be me. 

Their ending looks different when you are at the beginning 

When you are in the early stages of a PhD, the end can feel almost impossible to imagine because you hear people talk about submitting their thesis, preparing for the viva, making corrections and finally graduating, yet when you are still trying to find your feet, those things belong to a distant world that feels far removed from your own reality. 

Then graduation season comes, and suddenly the end is no longer an abstract idea because it now has a face. 

The person graduating may be someone you had coffee with, someone whose presentation you listened to or someone who once admitted that they had also struggled, questioned themselves, changed direction and wondered whether they would make it. 

Now, somehow, they have. 

I think that is one of the most hopeful things about witnessing someone else graduate while you are still at the beginning of your own journey, because their graduation does not tell you exactly what your own path will look like, nor does it promise that the road ahead will be easy, predictable or free from disappointment. 

What it does offer, however, is a reminder that the end is possible. 

Someone else once stood where you are standing now, looked at a thesis and wondered how on earth they would ever write the whole thing, endured difficult supervision meetings, bad writing days, unexpected life events, financial worries, self-doubt and long periods when the research seemed to make very little sense. 

Somehow, they kept going, and now they are standing at the other end. 

What would they tell us? 

As I watch people graduate, I find myself wondering what they would say to those of us who are just beginning, and I do not mean the polished answer that might be given at a formal event or the carefully worded advice prepared for a university brochure. 

I mean the real answer. 

What would they tell us if we sat down with them and asked what they now know, after everything it took to arrive at this moment, that they wish someone had told them at the beginning? 

I imagine that some of them would tell us not to panic every time the research changes, because changing your question does not necessarily mean that you have failed, and sometimes discovering what your research is not becomes part of the process of finally understanding what it actually is. 

I imagine that they might tell us to stop comparing our progress, because there will always be someone who appears to be reading more, writing faster, publishing earlier or speaking with greater confidence, yet another person’s pace can never truly tell you whether you are moving well. 

Perhaps they would tell us to ask for help sooner, to speak honestly with supervisors, to use the support available and to stop treating silent struggle as if it were somehow evidence of academic strength. 

They might also tell us to keep a record of the small victories because, by the time the larger moment arrives, it may be easy to forget how much it took to get there. 

The chapter finally begins to take shape, the conference abstract gets accepted, the difficult reading starts to make sense, the supervision meeting ends with more clarity than confusion and, somewhere along the way, you have that quiet moment when you realise that you actually do know something about your subject. 

Perhaps they would remind us that there is more to a PhD than the final thesis because there are also the people we meet, the ideas that stretch us, the assumptions we are forced to question, the places our work takes us and the person we become while trying to answer a question that mattered enough for us to begin. 

More than anything, I hope they would tell us not to spend the entire journey looking towards the finish line. 

A PhD is not a sprint 

We hear this often, that a PhD is a marathon rather than a sprint, yet I think graduation season gives that familiar phrase a slightly different meaning. 

When you watch others finish, it is easy to become focused on getting there too because you begin calculating years, imagining the gown, thinking about the thesis being done and wondering what it will feel like for the title beside your name to change. 

Perhaps, however, the point is not to finish first but to finish well. 

A marathon requires a different kind of wisdom because you cannot run every mile as if it is the last one. You need stamina, you need to know when to push and when to slow down, and you need enough self-awareness to care for your body and your mind along the way. 

You also need people on the route with you, and you need the humility to accept that some stretches will be harder than you expected, while still remembering why you started running in the first place. 

For those of us at the beginning, perhaps this is the invitation that graduation season offers us: do not become so consumed with completing the PhD that you forget to actually live through it. 

Read deeply, ask the questions you are afraid might sound foolish, change your mind when the evidence demands it, build friendships, rest when you need to rest and take time to celebrate the small things that keep the journey moving. 

Take the photograph, go to the event, speak to the person who has already walked the road and allow yourself to become the person this journey is slowly shaping you into. 

Finishing matters, of course, but so does who we are when we finally arrive at the end. 

For those crossing the stage 

To everyone graduating this season, CONGRATULATIONS! 

Congratulations on the thesis that no one else saw being built sentence by sentence, on every time you returned to the work after disappointment, on the chapters that had to be rewritten, the ideas that had to be released and the days when simply continuing was an achievement in itself. 

You fought the good fight and you finished your race. 

Those of us who are closer to the beginning are watching you, and perhaps you do not realise that your graduation is doing something for us too because it is giving us a picture of possibility. 

Your ending reminds us that this long, complicated and uncertain journey can, indeed, come to an end. 

We may not yet know what will happen along the way, and we cannot see every difficult season, every change of direction or every unexpected thing that life may bring, but we have seen others arrive, and perhaps, for now, that is enough to keep us moving. 

One day, it will be our turn, and until then, may we not become so consumed with finishing first that we forget the importance of finishing well. 

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