The public sees the presentation, but the preparation is personal.
Ten days and ten hours of preparation for a fifteen-minute presentation. And when it ended, it ended. That’s it!
I’ve been thinking about this since presenting at my first academic conference, and it reminded me of something that I believe is important, especially for those of us navigating the PhD journey. When we see someone deliver a well-articulated presentation at a conference or read the novelty of an argument in a published article, what we are seeing is the result of something that happened long before it came before us. Yet, somehow, we often assume we know the full story based on what has been presented.
And that is where I think the danger lies.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Danger of a Single Story (2009) comes to mind here, because so much of what we think we know about people is based on the little we have seen or heard of their experiences. We encounter one part of someone’s story and sometimes make it the whole story.
Funny enough, this was part of what I was challenging in my recent presentation, Blood Money: Decolonising the Way We See Violence in Jamaica, at the University of York’s Intersectionality and Social Justice Symposium. I was questioning how we construct narratives about violence and what happens when those narratives become the dominant stories through which we understand people’s lived experiences.
But the experience also brought that argument much closer to home.
No one in that room, other than my husband (my cheerleader!), knew just how much work had gone into those fifteen minutes. The sleepless nights and the constant revisions, all whilst on maternity leave. No one knew that just ten minutes before it was my turn to speak, I was breastfeeding my newborn.
And you know what? They didn’t need to know.
They were there to hear what I had to say and engage with my argument. They assumed I had done the work, and rightly so. But I knew what it took to get there.
I recall Usain Bolt talking about the years of practice it took to run a race in under ten seconds. Imagine that! Years of work for less than ten seconds of performance. We see the race and celebrate the victory. We know he must have trained, but knowing that someone worked hard is not the same as understanding what that work demanded of them.
And I think the same can be said about this PhD journey.
We spend years working on our research, sometimes wondering whether what we are doing even makes sense. Then, when the time comes, all of that work might be presented in fifteen minutes or condensed into an article. And sometimes, the response is not even what we expected. But does that mean the work was for nothing?
I don’t think so.
When I think about those ten days and ten hours, I realise that I learnt far more than I could possibly have demonstrated in fifteen minutes. I had to work through my argument and figure out how to communicate what I was actually trying to say. That alone was valuable to me.
So, I’m saying all of this to those of you just commencing your PhD journey, those of us somewhere in the thick of it, and even more so to those nearing the end.
Don’t lose hope because your work doesn’t seem to be receiving the applause or attention you had hoped for.
Every time you put yourself and your work out there, you are learning something.
I also want you to remember that just as you are learning to question the stories told about the people and communities you research, others will be constructing stories about you. They will make assumptions about your abilities and how you got to where you are. Some of those assumptions may be positive, others not so much.
But just because others may not consider the other side of your story doesn’t mean that what they say should determine how you see yourself or the value of your work.
And perhaps we need to be careful about the stories we tell ourselves, too.
We see someone else’s publication or conference presentation and begin comparing it to our own journey, forgetting that what we’re seeing is only a part of their story. We don’t know everything that happened before that moment, just as they don’t know everything happening behind ours.
And I think sometimes we become so focused on the final product and how others will receive it that we forget to pay attention to who we are becoming in the process of producing it.
That’s something I’ve been reflecting on. How much of this journey is changing the way I think, even when I don’t have a finished piece of work to show for it? And how often do we overlook that growth because we’re so concerned with what comes next? Perhaps that’s something we need to appreciate more, especially in a journey where it can feel as though everything is measured by what we produce. So, focus on your efforts now. Do the work, even when it means starting over. Don’t become so concerned about the final product that you overlook what you are learning along the way.
I am glad I had the opportunity to present at my first academic conference, but I am equally grateful for what it took to get there.
The audience got fifteen minutes. I got ten days and ten hours of learning that I will carry into whatever comes next.
The presentation was public, but the preparation was personal.
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