In January 2022, I found myself at Langkawi for the Vice Chancellor’s Office Special Project (VCOSP) workshop, following the Professorial Lecture project with UiTM’s VC at the end of 2021. My colleague and I were roped into another project, this time to “book-ify” (I’m trademarking this term) her “Coffee Talk with Rozie” monthly engagement sessions.
On the second day of the trip, we were assigned to go to different spots in Langkawi as part of the late afternoon recreation activity, where we then had to come back and deliver a presentation on the trip and our reflections on it. I was really hoping that I would get to go to ride the SkyCab or go up the Sky Bridge. I drew out my group number from the box they passed around, and lo’ and behold…
My group had to go to the Cenang beach.
I mean, to say I was disappointed was an understatement. I married a Terengganu man for many reasons, one of which is to always get to see beautiful beaches whenever I wanted.
Cenang was just…eh.
Still, we decided to have a good time of it. There were four or five of us, and we walked by the coast, had some ice cream, and just chatted the late afternoon away. Of course I was bullied tasked to be the one to deliver the presentation in the evening.
(Side note, but my friend always says that I have this talent for BS-ing my way through any kind of presentation, and I cannot say she’s wrong)
As a team, we drew a really insightful reflection from that Cenang beach trip. As the presenter, I elaborated that yes, we were disappointed, or at least I was. Like Cenang, that’s it? But we decided to have fun. And I mentioned how, no matter what projects we’re working on for the VCOSP, the key is to have fun, even in the parts that wasn’t so fun, just like our little trip.
I was awarded as Best Presenter for that presentation, which does send me into a fit of giggles when I recall that.
Still, little did I know, that was when my name began to be recommended to join one department or another among the other academics there.
A little while after we returned from that trip, I was contacted and asked to apply for the position of the Communications Coordinator at the university’s Rankings department (DoR)—which I did. I sent my application at the end of February, and in early April 2022, I was asked to report for duty at the department.
In hindsight, that position was instrumental in allowing me to complete my PhD. My teaching load was halved, and I was whisked away from my faculty and was no longer asked to participate or contribute in any projects or events. This freed up a looooot of time for me to focus on my PhD.
Not to say that I wasn’t busy. All of a sudden, rather than busy myself with faculty business, I was exposed to the big picture of our very big, very comprehensive university. But I was also given tasks that I was very good at. Writing press releases and articles, editing articles, delivering workshops on writing, bookify-ing the CTWR project. I was wholly in my element and what more, my talents were both recognized and appreciated.
After the rejection for that unpaid study leave, such appreciation felt so, so wonderful.
It was what I truly needed, after two very, very challenging years.
PhD-wise, I began to make good progress again.
In early March 2022, a month before I joined DoR, I finalised my instrument for the second phase of my data collection and sent the application for ethics approval.
Two weeks after reporting for duty as the Communications Coordinator, on 18th April, ethics approval was granted.
Two days after that, I sent the link out for the instrument to be piloted. I analyzed the results, determined that the instrument was reliable, and, in June, began sending out the instrument to experts I had identified for actual data collection.
This phase lasted until early October.
The second phase of my study is a modified Delphi survey, where the calculation of the results is done via fuzzy mathematics—the term we use is the Fuzzy Delphi method (FDM).
FDM is a quantitative method that is often employed when your respondents, like mine, are experts in a field. In my case, I needed three types of experts to answer the survey: HR managers/recruiters, researchers of CEFR, and very experienced English language lecturers. I only needed 15 respondents, but them being who they were…it took a while to get their responses. Five months, more or less, for 15 experts.
I remember being extremely anxious while I waited. Would I even be able to get 15 of them? Would they give the instrument the attention it deserved? How long would it take to even get them to respond? Would I need to downgrade the experts I was reaching out to? Would I even get the number of responses I needed?
It was an anxious five months.
A large part of 2022, PhD-wise, was spent on just…getting those responses. And analyzing them. I also had to learn fuzzy Delphi. I read books and papers on it, attended online lectures on it. I know some PhD students outsource their data analysis to experts, but I have trust issues and would prefer to know how to do everything myself. So it was a lot of learning to me.
I won’t lie though, seeing mathematical formulas in my PhD thesis also makes me feel super cool.
Priorities, I know.
Speaking of priorities, in 2022, hubs and I went house-hunting.
In case you were wondering, jobs were still extremely hard to come by in 2022, and he still hadn’t been able to land a secure job. So, to make use of the time, he decided in January to register for a culinary arts certificate, which he did for six months, taking us to July. Remember he was still pursuing his Master’s degree part-time, but we decided that adding skills would be a good idea for him. It’s always been a lifelong dream of his to venture into the F&B business, which we might get into someday, so getting to know the trade seemed like a good idea.
(Plus who wouldn’t want a husband who could cook, right? <3)
Now for all intents and purposes, I was also relatively “free” between June to October while I waited for respondents.
That sudden lull in our lives gave us too much time to worry, and worry I did.
Fahim was four years old in 2022 and was in preschool near where we were staying. It was an hour’s commute from our house/his preschool to my workplace and I hated that. I hated that I was an hour away in case of any emergency, especially now that hubs was busy getting his culinary certificate. I hated that we would have to pay overtime soooo often because traffic would make me fetch him late. It broke my heart every time I drove up to his preschool and see him among the only ones left waiting for a parent because everyone else had gone home.
We already knew we didn’t want to stay in that area, and I won’t lie—after my accident and spine fracture, I came to really dislike that house.
(It wasn’t the house’s fault, I know, I’m irrational. But I still didn’t like that house. Sue me.)
In May 2022, we began in earnest to survey houses. It didn’t matter to us whether it was a landed property or not. We just wanted a place that we could settle in for at least 10 to 15 years, near a good school, and near to my university.
Hubs was more patient with the process, as he is with everything in life. I, on the other hand, was feverishly desperate to move out. I’d spend my nights going through house listings, reviews, price comparisons. I’d look up pictures on Pinterest and Instagram and dream of the day where we’d settle in a more permanent spot.
I mean you could say I manifested the dream.
On 31st July 2022, we went and viewed a house, which I instantly, instantly loved. It was ten minutes away (by car) from my university, and a short walking distance from a good school for Fahim. The price was right, and though it needed renovating (the home was built more than two decades ago), we were sure it was the one. The day after viewing, we put in our offer, which the owner accepted, and we paid the booking fee two days after that.
As subsale purchases go, we wouldn’t get the keys until 23rd February, 2023, almost six months later.
And wouldn’t move in until mid-June 2023, due to the major renovations that needed to be done.
But I’m jumping the gun with the story here. We need to dial back to 2022.
If there’s one thing I did not really account for in my PhD journey, it’s the amount of downtime there is where you just…cannot make any real progress. If you’re doing a quantitative study, the time you spend waiting for respondents to answer your survey can take up a significant duration of your PhD. Ethics approval is also something that can easily take four to six weeks, and for someone who had to do it twice, like me, that’s around three months spent for that. When you write things up and send them to your supervisors, you’ll also spend a lot of time just waiting for their feedback.
The only advice I can give, while you have these major downtimes, is to work on what you can. I did a lot of reworking and rewriting in 2022.
Case in point, in early 2022, I spent a month rewriting the fourth chapter of my thesis (the results of the qualitative phase) and all that did, after a month of solid work, was to just add 431 words and reduce my page count to just 5 pages. It wouldn’t even be the last time I would have to rewrite that chapter.
Now, if we’re talking about word count being progress, you could say there was hardly any progress done. But in all honesty, every rewrite, every edit, every re-coding or re-analyzing of the work made me even more intimately familiar with my PhD, and the rewards came back to me later on.
One of the things I did, which I’m extremely proud of, was to send an email to Dr. Dale Cyphert from the University of Northern Iowa. I had come across an abstract to a book chapter she had written, “A Developmental Framework for Professional Communication Competence”. I was working on something very, very similar, but for ESL graduates and employability. I knew I had to have that paper, and to utilize her framework as part of my theoretical framework to analyze the second phase of my data.
I sent an email to her on 28th November 2022, introducing myself and saying that the book was (sadly) far too expensive for me to afford (which it was). I asked if she would be willing to share the framework with me, and bless her, she did. Her framework ended up being instrumental for me to refine the findings and draw the conclusions for my thesis.
This is why, as I’ve said before, you are never 100% in control of your PhD.
External factors play a major role in making or breaking a PhD.
It could be that something you’re studying can become obsolete in the blink of an eye—the government can decide to move on from a certain system, or your university can introduce a new policy that affects the relevance of your data, and so on. You could work on a really good proposal, only to find that you need to go with a different idea because someone else is already working on your exact research idea. You could spend months waiting for respondents to answer your survey, or even fail to get respondents.
But also, external factors can lead you to succeed in your PhD. The right job position at the right time (thank you, DoR) may finally give you the necessary free time required to focus on your studies. One very generous, wonderful researcher could share a framework with you that just…makes everything click into place so very, very beautifully. A supportive spouse, who keeps doing everything he can to shoulder life’s burdens, can make you feel like you can do it.
It’s all a matter of perspective, and on focusing on the positive.
I may not get my study leave, but I was able to join DoR and get my teaching load halved.
Hubs may not be employed, but his culinary certificate allowed him to make dinners at home, in the many, many evenings I would come home late to work on my thesis.
I may have been transferred to new supervisors who needed to familiarize themselves with my research, but I was also blessed with one scholar who had no hesitation in sharing what she could to help.
There’s just so much beauty in life, if you open yourself to the opportunity and have the stubbornness to want to see it. Force yourself into the positive, because the alternative will take you nowhere.
In October 2022, my last respondent submitted the completed instrument for me, allowing me to proceed with data analysis.
In November 2022, a month later, I found out I was pregnant.