It’s a strange feeling when a four-year phase of your life comes to an end. Especially if you’d didn’t expect it. Getting your head around things can be difficult to process.
But, resilience is a skill that is undeniably useful in today’s day and age. And so it is that I move towards the end of my Phd journey and towards the beginning of what will hopefully be some great experiences of working in academic research.
It’s been a most excellent journey from early 2020 when I started my Phd. It was just as Covid first arrived that I first started with a ton of reading, a move to a cottage on the coast and the arrival of my four-legged life-partner Flo. I spent three years in the cottage enjoying the freedom to ‘deep dive’ into learning and thinking and also into the bracing Northumberland sea. I attended conferences online and then in Poland and Manchester. I talked to experts on yoga, critical race theory and health inequalities. I worked with colleagues on green spaces, dementia and embedded research. I learned huge amounts from my Leeds Beckett University supervisors and received huge amounts of encouragement and support from them.
Despite being a planning and scheduling person somehow, at the end of three funded years, I hadn’t completed my thesis! I then started a new stage. With a forced move into town, and taking up a 12-month paid role, in the summer of 2023 I embarked on a head-down push, writing furiously and submitting a chapter a month for comments. In the spring of 2024, with the final deadline in sight, I became permanently glued to my lap top – reaching for it first thing in the morning and only putting it down last thing at night. Working every available hour of every day of the week I limited my human contact to phone calls during dog walks only and occasional Friday nights off at the pub. The washing and washing up piled up. But it worked. Slowly but surely I inched towards completion, finally falling over the line with just a few weeks to spare.
But I was pleased with the results. I felt I had pulled together words of the yoga ‘outsiders’ I’d interviewed in a way that made sense, was interesting and enlightening. I’d used an innovative but well-researched and respected framework to interpret my findings. And I could justify the conclusions I’d reached. Most of all, it was all in the interests of a very good cause – greater diversity, inclusion and improving health. All things that have always been incredibly important to me.
So now I have to wait the verdict on what I have produced. Hopefully my external examiners will see merit in my thesis. Hopefully the academic and yoga world will find value and interest in what it says.
And then I embark on a new stage. Taking up a new 12-month role at University of Leeds I’ll be conducting inequalities-related research in primary care. It’s unnerving to have to move on but I’m feeling excited and hopeful too.
It’s been an amazing journey … and it’s not over yet 😊
#PhDLife #MyPhD #PhDVoice #EarlyCareerResearcher #HealthResearch #HealthInequalities #Doctorate
