There is something strange about being at the end of a PhD. For three years, I have been working towards this moment. The submission date has always existed somewhere in the distance, quietly getting closer. And now it is suddenly almost here.

There is a particular absurdity in knowing that something you have spent so much time thinking about, worrying about, writing about, eventually have to end. And not because you have said everything you wanted to say, but because it NEEDS to end. Because the project ends, and with it the fundings. Even if you would need more months. More years. Possibly, more lives.

You count words. You find new references you should have included, arguments you would make differently. You read paragraphs you wrote years ago and wonder what on earth you were thinking. Someone once told me that a PhD thesis is never really finished. At some point, you just surrender to your doubts, your imposter syndrome, and put a full stop.

I have been thinking about this post after a conversation with a colleague of mine. I was sharing with him – looking for empathy – the physical disgust I felt when reading some of the text my younger academic self had written years ago.

“I am so mad at her,” I said. “Why would she write something like that? Why wouldn’t she include more references? Why would she think that was acceptable?”

“You should be happy about that, actually,” he said. “This is just proof of how much you have grown into your academic shoes”.

I think I finally had to admit to my critical self that, in this time, I had (maybe) learned something. It is not always easy to recognise change when you are inside the process.

Doing a PhD was quite outside of my comfort zone and being part of PARTICIPATE challenged me in so many ways. Being part of a Marie Curie programme is no joke. There are requirements and demands that make the three years you have available under the funding very far from being “enough”.

In these three years, I have moved to Denmark, conducted fieldwork across four schools and two countries. I travelled to Australia, Scotland, Norway, and South Korea to present my research at international and European conferences. I have given seminars, delivered lectures and training courses, participated in trainings, summer and winter schools, and international meetings. I have packed myself, my laptop, my research, and my mind twice to move to Ireland for two secondments. I took university courses. I tried to participate in university life in the department. I have met academics and practitioners across different communities and countries discussing about ways and common efforts to understand better bullying. Somewhere in between all of this, I was also trying to write my PhD.

And now, when I am almost at the finishing line, it is hard to see all of this as something that I have actually done. But – at least – listing it all now makes me think of my old self in a kinder way.

I guess my colleague was right. And I was surprised to admit it. Even if I would not call it growth. My supervisor once commented that she found the concept of “growth” problematic. I think I understood what she meant only later. Growth suggests a direction, a progression, an improvement: a better version of yourself waiting at the end of the process. I am not sure that is what has happened to me. But something has certainly changed. My mind has become more complicated. Or perhaps I have become more comfortable with its complications. I ask more questions. I challenge thoughts. I engage more critically with readings, with ideas, with my own assumptions. I have learned to stay longer with uncertainty.

Maybe this is also what the end of a PhD is about. Not necessarily “growing”. But being more unsettled by things. Being challenged, stretched, contradicted, and sometimes completely overwhelmed by – while also becoming somewhat more at ease with being overwhelmed by – the things you read, the people you meet, the conversations you have, the questions you ask, the questions you learn to ask, and those that may never have an answer.

I do not know how useful this blog entry could be for you, reader. But it has been useful for me to start processing all of this. Perhaps also to be kinder to that version of myself who wrote the terrible paragraph. To the chapter that did not quite work. To the question that led nowhere. To the argument I have changed my mind about. To the days when I did not write. To the days when writing felt like the only thing I could do.

Every moment – whether moving forward, backwards, sideways, or seemingly not at all – was silently or loudly unsettling and reconfiguring something.

Perhaps getting a PhD is partly a matter of endurance: staying with something for long enough to reach the point where it has to end. But maybe endurance is not only about making it to the end. Maybe it is also about staying with the process long enough to notice that it has somehow changed you.

 

Giorgia Scuderi