Okay, I lie.
This part is not going to be about how I failed my proposal defense and had to re-defend it. That might be in Part 4, now that I kiiinda have a rough outline of this story. This part is going to talk about…the bliss of being a new PhD student. Because it’s important for me to flesh out, like a great storyteller, the growth I went through.
I’ve been in academia for six years now (per the date this was published). Almost every semester, very eager students come to see me to ask what their paths should look like, should they decide to pursue their Master’s degree, then a PhD. And I see in their eyes the same innocence and enthusiasm that was reflected in my eyes five years ago.
This enthusiasm, don’t get me wrong, is important. It’s what turns the academia world around (or maybe part of it). Without eager students, there wouldn’t be admissions, and without admissions, I wouldn’t have a job. But I always give my students the same advice: Get some experience first, then decide. I always tell them to only register as a Master’s or PhD student after being very well prepared about what they want to get from it.
But of course, they rarely listen to me.
That’s what enthusiasm does to you. It clouds your judgement, fills you with excitement and overconfidence, and next thing you know, you’re a student again.
Ready Committed Doomed to follow the path that will challenge you beyond measure.
I was giddy beyond excitement when I first registered as a PhD student. Wiser colleagues tell me that the PhD is an important stepping stone that will propel me towards becoming a full academic, and they are not wrong. There are many, many, many benefits of doing a PhD, especially if you’re already working as an academic.
My colleague and I, in our excitement of becoming PhD students, even designed a hoodie to wear to show just how srsly we were taking things.
(My to-do list. I wish I were joking with this picture, but I’m not)
My thought process was clear. (Looking back, it was clearly delusional and muddled, but let’s not go into that). I had a long-standing record as being a very, very good student. My grades and CGPAs have always been quite stellar. I was a Tunku Scholar. PETRONAS taught me to adopt a growth mindset, and I knew that everything is achievable if you learn and apply and strive for what you want. I knew that if there was ever a time to pursue the PhD, I should do it now.
Early on, I learned that there’s a term for tertiary education called GOT – Graduate on Time. For a PhD, you are considered to graduate “on time” if you can complete your studies in three to four years. And to me, as a person who had always excelled in her studies, I thought this was a no-brainer. GOT was going to be my goal.
I thought, Fahim would be five years old when I finish my studies. He’d be young enough that he wouldn’t remember his ummi studying and working until late night and during weekends—at least that was what I prayed for. Because that’s the kind of student I am. I’m the kind of student who burns the midnight oil, studying. I have a Kindle with me at all times. I have journal articles saved onto my phone for me to read. I’ve always worked damn hard for my grades, and I would do the same for that GOT – for Fahim.
(November, 2019 – I wonder if this is Fahim correctly predicting it would take me five years to finish my PhD lol)
But PhD is like parenting. You just don’t know what you’re getting yourself into…until you have the cute, scary bundle in your arms.
I would soon be humbled into learning that a person’s PhD journey is not entirely in their hands. Situational factors and interpersonal factors would play a crucial role into making or breaking your PhD.
In my case, yet another mistake I did going into the PhD was not having a proper research topic I wanted to pursue. That was my supervisor’s first instruction for me. Figure out what I wanted to do.
The assignment turned out to be incredibly hard.
I bounced between several ideas, alternating between curriculum development, writing, and professional communication. For weeks, I read journal articles and brainstormed, but the topic just wouldn’t materialize. However, there was one issue at the back of my mind that had nagged at me since I was in the oil and gas sector. The more I thought of it, the more it bugged me. And soon enough, I began to go down that rabbit hole.
I’ve been incredibly blessed to begin my career at PETRONAS Leadership Centre – the training arm of PETRONAS. It’s a place where people read books and gift each other books. A place where people talk about leadership, people development, and effective communication, on a daily, if not hourly basis. My main job entailed working with the Top 500 executives in the company – the GMs and above. I’d go into meeting after meeting, tagging along with my immediate superior, and have very personal conversations with top leaders who would come and do their magic at PLC.
One of the things they always talked to me about, was communication.
“I wonder, why are fresh graduates so bad at communication?” they’d always ask me. And I had never had the answer for that.
As a newly-registered PhD student, that question continued to haunt me, time and again. It nagged at me. It bothered me. It annoyed me even, because “communication” is such a throwaway blanket statement. Like what about communication are we talking about here? Language? Proficiency? Delivery? Nonverbal comm? Paralinguistics? Sociolinguistics? They can’t be all bad, can they?
I tinkered with this idea for a while. I wanted to know—when employers or recruiters complain about “poor communication”, what exactly do they mean?
“So. Have you thought about your topic?”
That was the question that was posed to me by one of my dad’s oldest friends, Uncle Nazori. He had begun his own PhD journey a few years before I did and had, throughout my life, been a solid presence who always took interest in what I was up to.
(PS: I wholly believe that Uncle, and everyone else reading this, should also write their PhD stories. Do it. Peer pressure.)
With his background in chemical engineering, I really wanted his validation that my idea was viable. I reasoned that if his science and mathematical mind could get what my creative brain was trying to convey, this would be doable. So I tried to communicate my ideas to him.
“I want to figure out what employers actually mean when they say fresh graduates are ‘bad’ at communicating,” I said to him.
“Okay. In what sense?” he asked me back.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. That’s the whole point of needing to research this!
He didn’t sound convinced. He said I needed to set some parameters—that I needed some kind of idea what I was researching, some kind of framework, constructs. Of course, being so far ahead of the journey than I was, he knew what he was talking about, and he was right. I, meanwhile, was still floating in Lala-land with my complete ignorance of research methods. I didn’t even know what theoretical or conceptual frameworks were.
But his probing and his questioning did get me somewhere. I knew that my study would be primarily qualitative. Still, that conversation, I remember, made me feel frustrated, because I knew what I wanted to study…I just didn’t have the language, nor the ability, to communicate what I wanted to do.
Quite ironic, that, considering my background.
That picture of me by the beach wearing my “To-Do” hoodie was taken in October, 2019. I was a very eager and very energetic student. I was reading sooooo many journal articles to get ideas, because that was what my supervisor advised me to do. I’ve been reading books since I was four, so reading journal articles was not at all daunting to me. With every two journals I read, I was downloading twenty more. Peak productivity!
Looking back, however, I wish I had received another advice. I wish I had been told to read books on research methods. I thought my Master’s degree had taught me what I needed to know about research methods, but I was very, very wrong. But of course, how was my supervisor to know that?
We speak different languages sometimes, student and supervisee. His advice for me to read journal articles was sound. In fact, some books I’ve read targeted for graduate students did say that you need to have at least 20 to 30 related articles to your research area to even begin writing the proposal. I suppose once you get to a PhD level, basic research methods should be foundational knowledge. Only it wasn’t, at least for me.
Oh I picked up Creswell, of course I did. I just never saw how things tie together. I knew individual parts of a research method as solitary components and never knew how they related to each other. It’s like being presented with a wide range of nuts and bolts, but not knowing which would go with each other, and what other rivets, clamps, pins, or even duck tape I needed to hold my PhD idea together.
I also didn’t know about good and bad quality journals. Back then, I thought that all journals reflect great research. How little did I know back then, and how damaging this lack of knowledge would be to me when I did my proposal later.
Do note, I don’t place fault on any party when it comes to my journey. I see this as like the Johari window. There were things I already knew. There were things my supervisor knew that I didn’t know, which he taught me. And then there were many, many things I didn’t know, that my supervisor also didn’t know or realise about me. It would be another eight months, during my (failed) proposal defense, before I would realise any of this. But I’m jumping the gun.
I was reading. I was enthusiastic. I was developing my proposal.
And then COVID-19 hit.