I can’t believe it has taken me more than a year to write this final episode of my PhD journey. There are several reasons for this, I suppose, which will be clear by the time you reach the end (maybe).
The previous post was about my viva, and it was published on 7th April, 2025—more than a year ago. What I had no way of knowing was that the very next day, on the 8th April, my university held its 317th Senate, endorsing me for my PhD after such a long, long journey.
I received the official letter three days later, on the 11th April 2025.
Dear Sir/Madam, the letter read.
I am pleased to inform you that the University Senate in its meeting on 08 April 2025 (Senate No. 317) has confirmed that you have successfully completed all the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy with thesis entitled “English Professional Communication Competence Framework For Graduate Employability”.
The Award of Doctor Of Philosophy (Applied Language Studies) will be conferred during the University’s 103rd Convocation.
In the movies, we see life captured in highlights. If my life were a movie, there would be a shot of me passing my viva, then receiving the Senate letter (probably handed to me in an official ceremony rather than by an email sent at 3:42PM). The next shot in the movie would be my graduation ceremony.
But that’s the movies, isn’t it?
After passing my viva, I took a weekend to celebrate with my family, then immediately put my head down to work on my thesis corrections. Between my notes, my supervisors’ notes, my examiners’ reports, and the viva’s meeting minutes, I listed 25 corrections that had to be done. Some of these were trivial, like adding a sentence or two to my operational definitions. Some required me to rewrite and even add entire sections.
I was given three months to complete these corrections, which really means four weeks, to give time for my internal examiner to review and endorse them, then to format the thesis, and finally submit it, by March. So, in January, I once again worked like a zombie, as I had done throughout the five years of working on the PhD. I would work late into the night, or sleep early and wake up at 3AM. Some weekends, I would work in the morning. Sometimes, it would be in the afternoon, when my daughter napped in her swing. Some days, inspiration (and energy) would strike, and I would work the whole day, into the night, and to the next day.
“I can’t keep doing this,” I said to my friend one day. “There are so many corrections. It’s overwhelming.”
“You’re at the last stretch,” she reminded me. “Just take it one comment at a time. Start with the easiest ones, then work your way through them.”
And that’s what I did. One comment after another, I would address a comment, write, cite, edit, rewrite, then move on to the next one. One of the major comments I received was regarding triangulation. As I had done a mixed methods study, I was asked to show how I triangulated my quantitative and qualitative findings. It took several weeks for me to finally have the idea of how I would address it. I was writing up my findings, explaining how the two datasets correlate, when it hit me: it was a matrix, akin to the Eisenhower Matrix. There are four quadrants, which I use to determine the contents most highly/not highly discussed in the interviews, and the ones correlated to the high/low ranked results in my Fuzzy Delphi survey.
Solving that lifted a huge burden off of my shoulders. I could pass this PhD, I thought then. Once I resolved that comment, the rest became much easier.
I submitted my thesis corrections on 3rd February 2025, and I received the final endorsement from my internal examiner three weeks later, on 20th February, 2025.
When I received the senate letter on 11th April, it was anticlimactic to a degree.
We had a family event that weekend, and on the Monday afterwards, life went on as usual. I still had to attend meetings. I still had to make myself available for student consultations. I still had to prepare and deliver classes. It was early in the semester, and I had a new subject to teach, which meant having to prepare for it.
Life does not stop when you get a PhD, at least for someone like me, who did it part-time. Apart from some close friends and family, nobody would even grasp the magnitude of having finished something so big. The working day continued as usual. There was no extended leave or time given to celebrate. Nope. Monday morning, 8AM, class as usual at a campus forty minutes away from home.
In a way, having life continue as usual was both a good and bad thing. It was good, because I did not have to figure out what to do with my life now that it was done. It was bad, because it did not give me room to contemplate life after PhD, and the depression finishing a PhD brings.
In the English language, the word “depression” stems from the Latin word depressio (derived from the verb deprimere), which literally translates to “a pressing down” or “sinking”. One of the earliest uses of the word is for geography, to describe a hollow dip in a terrain or ground. If you’re walking and you see the ground sunken, concave, or hollow, you call that a depression in the ground.
The term is later used in economics and business. When you see a trend line that suddenly dips or drops, we call it a depression. Something is there, is level, and then drops. There is a depression.
When I did my Master’s degree in counselling, one of the subjects I took was psychopathology—the study of mental illness and abnormal behaviour. I learned that depression, in counselling and mental health, is often mistaken to mean sadness. But it is not. Depression is not sadness.
Sadness is a feeling, an emotion. We can feel sadness, just as how we can feel happiness. Depression, on the other hand, is the total absence of feeling. We feel something, and then suddenly, we don’t. We feel nothing. People who don’t understand depression might mistake it for sadness, but it’s not. It’s emptiness. Numbness. A disconnect from yourself and others. You feel neither positive nor negative emotions. That is depression.
When I finished my PhD, it left a depression in my life that I did not know I had to address.
When I received the senate letter, I was suddenly faced with a hole in my life. What used to take hours of my time was suddenly not there anymore. I used to schedule my time very carefully. I would identify when I had one or two hours that I could spare in a day, on any day, and use that time to work on my PhD. I also used PhD as an excuse for many things, like when I could not commit to certain events or outings.
Now, I no longer had that.
For weeks, I felt that sense of…not knowing how to utilise my time. Whatever spare time I had, after dinner was made, or the kids were settled or asleep, or work was completed for the day, I would use to browse social media and YouTube and get absolutely nothing, nothing at all, that is beneficial in return. I felt hollow, directionless. I stopped contacting my best friend for several months, just because of that emptiness, a searching I did not know I was doing eating away at my energy.
One thing I did know for certain was that I did not want to throw myself into work. As someone who had worked in a Fortune 500, multinational company, I knew that work would not solve my problems or sense of emptiness.
I did not want to be whisked away into the world of KPIs and employment milestones. I did not want to chase publications and conferences, an associate professorship, or any of that. That game, of chasing employment gains and KPIs, is a moving goalpost that keeps resetting itself every year. I did not want to find myself trapped in that kind of rabbit hole.
It came as quite a huge relief when, at the end of May until early June, I took a break from life and travelled alone to the USA to visit some lifelong friends (I documented my trip in a different post that you can read here). For ten days, I spent time with my friends and enjoyed the 12-hour time difference, which limited contact with people on my mobile phone. In the USA, I was able to observe just how full life could be when you strip away work.
Emily, bless her cotton socks, has a group of wonderful friends who I got to meet while there. I marveled in the socialness of it all. Of just hanging out by the fire pit, making smores and chatting away. Of going over the titles of her books on her many bookshelves and discussing its contents.
I noticed very early on that our conversations were never about what we did for work. We talked about everything else. Our friends and family. Hobbies. Interests. Travel plans. Life plans. Places we wanted to go to, things we wanted to experience. Things we had already experienced that we would recommend to others. And books. Many, many books.
I reflected upon this a lot when I came back from the USA.
For six years, my PhD had trapped me into the life of an academic. I was a full-time academic, but also an academic student during my off hours. I would write journal articles during my working hours, and work on my thesis during my off hours. My writing style became so very academic, with its citations and passive sentences. But I was tired of that. I did not want my life to be defined as purely an academic one. Not anymore.
The trip to the USA made me realise the importance of having a life outside of academia, to not be defined by it. There is a joy, I found, in having projects with friends and organizations outside of academia. A fullness in enjoying life with family and friends and hobbies and interests.
There is a life that I had always wanted to pursue, the contents of which could be found scattered throughout my house. In my house, there are unused paints, brushes, canvases and books. There are photobooks, and many unsorted photographs. There are ingredients and recipe books and kitchen devices for dishes I want to try and make. There is a sewing machine, with various presser feet like the zipper foot, hem foot, with multicoloured threads. There is a yoga mat, with various bands and resistance weights. There is a controller hidden in my wardobe, with an unfinished copy of Elden Ring “Shadow of the Erdtree” and Witcher 3 on Steam. There are several notebooks, dedicated to jotting down ideas and pieces I want to write someday. And there are books. So, so, so many books.
All these are items and interests that I had accumulated over the years. Things that I said I would do, once I finished my PhD. I suppose in the first few months, I had forgotten about these items. Had I not gone to the USA and had that time to reflect, I would risk being swept away by social media, with its neverending cycle of useless content. Or with KPIs, with its neverending, moving goalpost.
Slowly, over the past few months, I have started to fill this “depression” in my life with my interests.
I have taken up painting again. I have begun experimenting with recipes again (much to the delight of hubs). I got myself a treadmill, and slowly have started learning yoga again. I have started to play chess again. And I have continued to read books. In fact, if there is one thing I am extremely proud of, it is that I have never let books go, even when I was doing my PhD. My Kindle says I have held a reading streak of 365 weeks—that translates to seven years, where there hasn’t been a single week that I hadn’t read something on my Kindle.
Why did it take so long for me to write this post? I guess it’s because I didn’t want a PhD journey story to end with the scroll, with graduation. For something of this magnitude, something this big, it leaves a depression in your life once you finish it. It’s like parenting. When the kids are little, you spend so, so much time with them. Once they grow up, you need to fill that time with something, somehow.
I am thankful of my PhD journey, of doing it part-time—because with its absence, I am reminded of the many hours I can use productively on other interests.
Some people turn to work fully after the PhD. I prefer not to, because work has an end date, a retirement date. And in the journey towards that retirement date, it is filled with yearly moving goalposts that only end once the retirement comes. Thankfully, being in academia means being able to dive into scholarship, and that never ends. A scholar is always a scholar, and I hope to always be a scholar.
I don’t want to be someone who might become lost post-retirement. I want my life to be full, perhaps fuller, with interests and passions and projects and people outside of work, when work inevitably ends. I don’t want to only start pursuing interests when I’m close to retiring. No, by the time I retire, I want to be great at my interests. The older we get, the harder it will be to learn new things. So I believe the time is now, and I’ll work on getting just slightly better, day by day.
And so, having completed this biggest marker of formal education, I believe it is finally time to dabble into these other lifelong lessons. To learn perspective drawing. Or how to make delicious mapu tofu. Anything I try to learn after this, after all, will probably never be as hard as the PhD after all.
Here’s hoping.
Leave a Reply