By the time I had completed and submitted my PhD proposal, I was already nine months into the PhD programme and registered as a full-time student. In my university, full-time PhD students are required to pass the defense of the research proposal (DRP) within the first year of their study, so I was on the clock. I had only three months left to pass my proposal defense.
(Note: Some of you may be wondering exactly why I was pursuing my PhD on full-time mode. I’ll make this clear in the next installment.)
I submitted my proposal on 12th June 2020 and received almost immediate confirmation that I would present on the 23rd June. The DRP was scheduled to be held at 2.30pm, online. I remember texting my friend in anticipation because the panel was headed by a Professor whom we were both very well-acquainted with. When we were undergraduates, the Professor was one of the lecturers in our faculty, and while she had never taught any of our classes directly, she had always had an authoritative reputation about her.
In the ten days leading to the DRP, I began to prepare. I worked hard on my slides, knowing that I would be given barely 20 minutes to present my proposal. I read, and constantly reread, my proposal.
On 19th June, I bought a second monitor, so I could present my slides while still being able to see the faces of my panel.
(The monitor I bought four days before the DRP. By now it should be kiiiinda obvious that I don’t tend to do things half-heartedly)
A few days before the DRP, I made plans to see my friend in the evening after the DRP was done, thinking we would be able to celebrate. In my mind, my research idea was clear. I was also overconfident that I would pass the DRP. I had read so many papers and worked so hard on the proposal. Nothing could go wrong, I was sure of it.
Because the DRP was to be held online, I decided to have it from home. I remember feeling jittery all morning, having never experienced anything like a proposal defense before, but it was the kind of jitteriness that felt good, you know? I knew this was a major step in the PhD journey, and now, almost one year into it, I was already feeling very good about making some real progress in my studies.
At 2.29PM, my friend texted me, “Good luck dude!”
I took a breath, and began presenting.
Despite the excitement in buying a new monitor, I cannot for the life of me remember what the panel’s expressions were like during my presentation.
I presented and shared my research topic, my methodology, why my research was warranted. I had relied primarily on journal articles in developing my proposal, and now, in hindsight, I realise that my knowledge on research methodology was mediocre, perhaps even basic, at best. I never realised this at time, of course. I thought I had nailed the whole research methodology thing.
Of course the panel, being who they were, saw through my flaws immediately.
My study was to focus on the productive skills of writing and speaking. I wanted to discover what subskills of writing and speaking would contribute to enhancing the employabilty of fresh graduates, and so I would adopt the exploratory sequential mixed methods design. The first phase would be a needs analysis, while the second phase would be a case study.
Like many, many, many oblivious PhD students, I thought one year is an extremely long time to collect data. I was overly ambitious, no surprise.
The exploratory sequential mixed methods design often utilises a QUAL → Quan approach—which means that conducting a qualitative study, then confirming the findings through a quantitative study.
For the qualitative phase of my study, I said I would conduct an ethnography study.
You read that right.
ETHNOGRAPHY. Ethnography.
In the middle of a global pandemic.
What is ethnography, you may ask? It’s a research methodology, where a researcher goes to a certain setting and experiences it fully. They would conduct interviews and observations. They would immerse themselves into this new setting and experience it fully. In my research design, I said wanted to go to the industry, to observe fresh graduates in a company and examine the skills they’d require to assimilate into the workplace. I would conduct interviews and focus groups. I would assimilate myself and watch, and learn.
Of course, there are many, many, many issues with this. The most obvious would be that it was 2020, and the world was stuck in the middle of a pandemic and many people are working online anyway. Not to mention, the last thing ANY workplace would want is to open doors to a young, snotty researcher to observe everything they do.
For a year.
In my head, however, I saw this study as doable, because I already knew which company/industry I would go to, to apply this ethnography study. In my head, my methodology was sound. Doable even, for someone as crazy a workaholic as myself. But of course, the panel, being far more experienced than I was, saw all the flaws and risks in my idea.
You see, with ethnography, I would be placing all my eggs in one basket. All it took was another declaration of MCO (which did happen a year later) to tear my research apart. The company could even decide, after a month or few, that they didn’t want me around anymore. They certainly were under no obligation to continue to host me. There were so many risks I would be taking. There was simply too much at stake for me to proceed with the idea.
In the end, they gave me the result of “3”, out of a possible of four for the defense. A “3” means I would have to rework the proposal, and re-defend it.
I cannot even express the sadness I felt in getting that result. Or the humiliation. Even though I understood the panel’s reasoning, and completely agree with them, I was mortified that I had failed my proposal defense. I never saw it coming, and that was the problem. I thought for sure that I would pass. I mean, a “3” is not as bad as a “4”, which is to fail entirely, but I thought I would pass. The idea of needing to re-defend my proposal shook me.
The DRP ended at around 4pm, almost an hour and a half in total. Shell-shocked, I exited the room, and hubs, who was home, could tell right away that something was wrong. He asked me what happened and that was all it took to get the waterworks going. That was probably the first time that PhD made me cry, but boy it would not be my last. I told hubs I wanted to cancel my plans to see my friend. He told me we should still go, at least to get my mind off things.
I texted my friend, telling her the DRP was over. She said she had ordered KFry for us. So we picked up Fahim and went, lamenting that night over very spicy Kfry and I had to remind myself that this was not over.
Failing the DRP hit me in so many ways.
It hit me personally, because I had always been a stellar student, and I had never failed academically at anything before. If there was one thing I could always count on, one thing I knew I was good at, it was academics. Failing at studying just…never occurred to me.
It also hit me professionally because everyone in that DRP, the panel and chair and minute taker, were also my workplace colleagues. I just knew that word would go around about how badly I had performed, and that ashamed me.
It also hit me because it was just another bad thing on that…I really did not have the emotional or mental energy to deal with at the time.
My husband is an academic, albeit in the private sector. When COVID-19 hit, the private sector took the biggest hit, and my husband’s college was no exception. They tried to hold on as long as they could, but eventually, they had to let a lot of their lecturers go, hubs included. He was one of the many unfortunate individuals who lost their jobs during the pandemic.
Till today, as I’m writing this, the college he was at never fully recovered.
In many ways, failing that DRP was like the straw that broke the camel’s back. We were already dealing with so much pressure, with him jobless and the pandemic still affecting our daily lives. This was just salt and lemons added to a very raw wound.
We decided to move houses so I wouldn’t need to travel so far to work. My parents had a house in Puncak Alam that they had been to students. Thanks to the pandemic, those students had gone back to their hometown, so the house was vacant.
We moved there around six weeks later.
In many ways, moving was a blessing The house was much bigger than our small apartment, which was nice to raise Fahim in. It was near a lake park, where I would spend many evenings running to keep my mind off things. It also had a sizeable room that I converted into my home office. And so, while I worked on my PhD, juggling it with my work full-time as a lecturer, hubs managed the home, our son, and did odd jobs here and there while looking for a more permanent job.
I am grateful that I grew up as a chess player.
In chess, there is a feeling of frustration when you play against someone who keeps beating you. When you play against someone who completely wipes the chess board clean with you, it builds a feeling of, “Oho I’ll get you next time” that just burns inside.
Psychologists have studied this phenomenon with children, with unsolveable puzzles. Some kids would attempt these impossible puzzles and give up or lose interest. Some kids would rub their hands together and be even more driven to solve the puzzle. And these latter kids, who don’t give up, end up being very successful adults in the future.
To me, having been trained a chess player, I was no stranger to losing. When faced with an insurmountable challenge, all it does is burn that emotion stronger, that now I REALLY want it.
After failing the DRP, and taking some time to grieve, I threw myself into my PhD with a feverish drive like never before. I went for the second defense in August, two weeks after we moved houses, only two months after failing the first one, and passed. The second defense was not without its issues though. There were still a lot of them, chief among them was that I did not have a workable theoretical/conceptual framework. But I passed.
The experience taught me that my PhD was my own. I couldn’t rely on anyone to help me, and I was adamant to be the master of my own field.
Remember that at this point, I was only about a year and a half into academia, having been from the industry and a masters by coursework before. I decided to start from scratch and treated myself like the dumbest PhD student ever.
(Two days after failing my DRP, I shared this quote from JK Rowling’s Harvard commencement address on my Instagram stories. I had to work really hard to pick myself back up)
I attended a webinar on systematic literature reviews, then proceeded to conduct one for my study (something I should have done from the beginning, only I never knew about its existence before). Following the SLR method, I scoured Scopus, Web of Science, and Science Direct, and identified 159 articles relevant to my study. I organized all of these into a Google Sheet, read them, highlighted them. The exercise helped me distinguish between good and terrible journal articles. I also began to realise the existence of predatory journals that would publish articles, no matter how bad they are, as long as authors paid for them. So I began to distrust a lot of articles I read and turned to textbooks and reference books.
I bought, and proceeded to read, many, many, many research methodology books, so that I could cross-reference different scholars and methodologies. I never EVER wanted to be caught off guard again, so I memorised terms, made diagrams, watched videos. I knew I had nobody I could rely on, but myself. PhD is a very lonely journey in that regard, but of course, I had been warned about that before.
I submitted my application for ethics approval in early November.
I obtained ethics approval in early December.
By mid-December 2020, I began collecting my data.
People always talk about the importance of balance. There was nothing balanced about my approach to my PhD then. If I’m being honest, I might have been a little unhinged. This was probably also because I was the only one with a stable income, so I felt like everything rested on my shoulders. So it was no surprise that my frenzy led me to one of the biggest risks in any PhD journey: severe burnout.
I shall leave it there for now.