When my application for unpaid study leave was rejected on 11 June 2021, I decided to throw myself into a bit of…housekeeping work. We had been staying in our new-to-us (rented) home for about 10 months now, but it was a house that needed serious upkeep.
For starters, we had moved from a three-bedroom apartment into a double-story, four bedroom, 20×70 terrace, so having such a big floor plan was already a challenge to keep clean and stay on top of the dust. There was also ten feet of soil at both the front and back of the house, which was notorious for growing weeds so tall that predators can hide themselves (I’m being dramatic). Every other week, hubs and I would need to spend a couple of hours outside addressing these weeds to prevent overgrowth.
Note: Pulling weeds is a lot of work for someone who was already perpetually busy, and is one of the reasons why I’ve sworn against purchasing any house with open land for the foreseeable future.
The house itself was built in the early 2000s, and had been vacant a number of years before it was rented out to university students. But because it had been rented out to university students…you can somewhat imagine that the upkeep wasn’t the best. (We also had to call in Darussyifa’ for ‘spiritual intervention’, but I shall not talk about that).
The day was Saturday. 19th June 2021. Only eight days after my application for unpaid study leave was mercilessly rejected.
Whenever I get into a bad mood, I always fall back to Swedish death cleaning as my therapeutic outlet, and so it was Cleaning Day. One of the problems of the house was its severely low water pressure, and when you’re stuck in a house with low water pressure for weeks on end due to MCO, it can get very, very frustrating. Hubs and I wanted to figure out what was causing the slow water pressure, so we decided to check out the water tank in the attic. I had been up there before, during my childhood, to pass a tool or another to my dad and had been instructed to always step on the beams when I’m up there. So I knew to do that.
As fate would have it, despite all the knowledge I had, my foot slipped from the beam for whatever reason and I fell through the plaster ceiling to the floor below. That would be a…10-foot drop? Kind of?
I’ll spare you the gory details, but I ended up with a burst fracture to the T12 bone of my spine.
I know, right? Just what I needed.
Now you may be horrified, and the story kinda is, if I’m being honest. But my closest of friends are my close friends for are reason, and when I told them what happened, their reactions were exactly what I needed:
We all need friends like this in our life.
I was hospitalised for three days and had to wear a metal back brace for six weeks. Throughout the recovery period, I worked minimally on my PhD, simply because I was discouraged from sitting for long periods.
And so, just like that, I lost close to eight weeks of my PhD journey, recovering from the spine fracture. The beauty of having gone through NLP coaching, however, was that I wasn’t that phased by the loss of time. If the accident had occurred before the intervention, I probably would have been reduced into a puddle of tears. I would have been so, so frustrated. NLP coaching, however, helped me reset my mental state. I was calmer. Whenever I could work on my PhD, I did. Whenever my back began to protest, I stopped.
It was a weird sense of calm, if I’m being honest. My emotions used to be so frazzled, taut like a bowstring, but NLP coaching had put things into perspective for me. Life goes on when PhD is going on, and the recovery from the fracture enabled me to really see that.
The recovery period takes us to early August 2021, where I then had to face another looming issue: my main supervisor was retiring at the end of the year.
On 18 August, 2024, two days after submitting my thesis for viva, I wrote this on my Facebook status:
“Mai five years ago was a fearless albeit very ignorant and naive young woman who ended up learning some pretty hard life lessons in academia along this journey.“
The whole debacle with the change of supervisor is one of the real testaments to how naive I was, and how little I knew about how academia worked.
Coming to the end of the second year of my PhD in September 2021, I had to face the hard reality that my supervisor was retiring at the end of the year and that I had to start thinking of who I wanted to nominate as my new supervisor. This came as somewhat of a surprise to me, because I had been told, early in my journey, that there was a high possibility that my supervisor would be offered a contract position considering he still had pending PhD students.
The problem, it turned out, was that none of his PhD students, myself included, were far enough into our research to allow for that—a detail that is kiiiiinda important, I know, but one which we were sadly unaware about.
By September 2021, I had already long completed the 21 interviews and was in the process of constructing an instrument (survey) for the quantitative part of my study (my study employed mixed methods). But I was nowhere near ready to distribute the survey. In fact, I procrastinated on it a lot. I had severe imposter’s syndrome, particularly because I knew that once I distributed it, I could no longer turn back. Getting respondents to that survey would put myself at a point of no return, where my data analysis was concerned, and I wasn’t ready to relinquish control over that. I expect a lot of quantitative researchers understand this dilemma.
My supervisor encouraged me to nominate my new supervisors. In my case, both my first and second supervisors retired in 2021, so I had to nominate not one, but two new supervisors. I was naive in my choice of supervisors, I know. People found out and asked me, “Why did you do that to yourself?”, to which I could just shrug. I wasn’t from academia. I was both naive and ignorant. I had selected two supervisors who were close to retirement when I registered in 2019 and I have nobody to blame but myself.
The supervisor debacle essentially put a stop to my PhD progress, which had already been largely halted due to my spine fracture. I didn’t want to distribute my survey until I was sure that it receives the green light from my soon-to-be new supervisors. The process, however, took weeks.
Weeks.
There was the problem of looking for new supervisors, and finding someone whose area of specialization or knowledge was similar to mine…which was challenging, as my faculty did not have an abundance of supervisors to choose from.
Once I did get my new supervisors (and what a blessing they were), we had to then spend several weeks getting them up to speed on what I had done, and what I was planning to do. In fact, it wasn’t until December that I could really focus on making more progress on my PhD.
Between the spine fracture and change of supervisors, I had lost six months of my PhD journey.
I was also at a point where I felt very done with it.
Since registering for my PhD in September 2019, I saw my journey as being nothing but a path full of thorns. The pandemic hit. I failed my proposal defense. My application for a one-year unpaid study leave was rejected. Then I had to change both supervisors. I was coming to the end of my second year and just felt dejected with the whole thing.
During those six months, there was nothing I really could do, apart from going back to whatever I had written in my thesis and just…making improvements. Like this:
(A lot of my “improvements” look like this. Whole sections or an entire chapter that I decide to just scrap and re-do.)
Added to the problems were things happening in my personal life. Hubs and I were quite uncomfortable with the house we were renting, as the upkeep was becoming too much for us to handle. Hubs had also, at this point, done a lot of odd jobs, but with MCOs being announced here and there, he could not secure proper employment. He would be offered something, then have the offer rescinded for one pandemic-related reason or another.
If anything, the fact that I was being sponsored by YTAR was probably the only thing that kept me going. I did not want, or need, a breach of contract on top of everything else.
Thankfully, the cycle of life always brings you back up, after its period of lows.
On November 4th, 2021, I met my university’s Vice Chancellor for the first time.
It was Deepavali, a public holiday. My colleague had roped me into a project with the VC, who was looking for a few editors to help complete her Professorial Lecture book. She had already written 14 drafts of her manuscript. She really just wanted the book done, and in her busy schedule, the only day she could spare was Deepavali. Among the three of us who were appointed to help with the book, only I could attend the meeting. And so I ended up getting a very private session with her…which was one blessing I did not know I needed.
I had mentioned in Part 2 of this story that I began my career at PETRONAS Leadership Centre, working closely with the Top 500 executives (GMs and above) of the PETRONAS group. My job entailed a lot of one-on-one short meetings with them, so I was blessed to be, at a very young age, very comfortable conversing with anyone from top management. Since leaving PETRONAS, I had been regularly invited to attend several leadership sharing sessions by PETRONAS leaders and tasked with writing articles based on them.
In a way, it felt as if I was meant to be there—in the VC’s office with her on that 4th of November.
The meeting ended up being several hours long. I told my VC that her book needs to have a chapter of her life story. Her expertise aside, everyone wants to know how she became the first female VC of UiTM, I said. Everyone would want to know her story. So we went through that full story in that meeting. From her childhood, to how she became the VC. She brought her walls down and recounted her inspiring, challenging, wonderful story, most of which are captured in the chapter “The Journey” if you come across her book, “Managing University Data for Quality: From the Lens of a Practitioner” by Prof. Datuk Ts. Dr. Hajah Roziah Mohd Janor.
I came out of that meeting so very, very inspired. Through her story, I learned that all PhDs are challenging. I learned that if you want something big, there’s no way to get through it without suffering and pain. It did not make my journey any easier, but knowing that all PhDs come with its own challenges brings a sense of solidarity and understanding that it’s all part of the journey—a rite of passing that I needed to go through.
(Datuk Rozie and I, on the morning of her Professorial Lecture. Of course I had to get a signed copy of her book.)
When I worked on that project with the VC, I didn’t think anything would come out from it. I thought it would just be another book that I’d assist with, because I had worked on several book projects by then. Editorial work is nothing new, nor outstanding, when you’re in language studies.
I was wrong.
On 11th January, 2022, on the cusp of the new year, I received a message from the VC’s Office.
“Assalamualaikum WRT,” the message began. “Strategic Planning Workshop – Vice Chancellor’s Office and VCOSP Future UiTM. Puan, kindly provide your full name, identification card number, and vaccination status for ferry ticket purchase arrangements.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but 2022 would turn to be a very, very different year than the previous two.