So It Seems That I'm Now A Former Postgraduate Student

I submitted my thesis today.

Well, I handed it in to the printery, and they’ll pass it on to the Thesis Office once it’s bound, so to all intents and purposes, I’m done.

The degree isn’t conferred yet, of course, but that’s out of my hands.

The feeling is rather anti-climactic, which I think is largely shock—the shock that I’ve actually come out of this with what my supervisors feel is submittable work. And I trust my supervisors on this; they wouldn’t allow me to submit something that was rubbish.

I can’t trust my own opinion of my work, because I have no judgement of it any more. That, I think, is the worst of the debacle that was my M.Phil.—I lost the ability to judge my work effectively, and I haven’t got it back yet. Maybe I won’t, but I think the experience of this last degree will help.

Because this Ph.D. was an unmitigated joy from beginning to end.

There were certainly periods when I felt the work wasn’t going anywhere, when I was blocked or near to it, when I was frustrated by the inability to locate sources (I’m still a little miffed that I had to hand in my beautiful Chronology of the Works of Eliza Winstanley—102 items, where the previous listings hadn’t exceeded forty—with some items marked “not sighted”).

But none of that ever took away from the sheer joy of the work, the euphoria that—unbelievable as it is to many of the students I’ve taught over the years—that comes from good, tight, plausible expository writing, the sense that this is actually a contribution to research in the field.

I’ve loved every minute of this work.

And I’ve loved being a postgraduate student. There’s always a sense, when you’re a postgrad., that other people don’t feel you’re holding down a real job. I even embarrassed a telemarketer once when he asked me my job and I told him I was a postgraduate student; “Oh,” says he. “So you don’t work, then?”

We know postgraduate work is exhausting.

We know the remuneration is problematic; you can live comfortably, certainly, but when emergencies arise, there’s nothing in the piggy bank, and always there’s a sense of nagging anxiety that you’re in a precarious financial position. But we don’t do it for the money.

We do it for the research.

We do it for the contribution to knowledge that we can make.

We do it because we know that education is more than job-training: that is can enrich society in broader, deeper, and more profound ways than the previous government would have us believe.

We do it for reasons that, when we come to blog about them, look like cliches, and yet are no poorer or less sincere for that.

For all these reasons, I’ve loved my work and never regretted it.

And I’m going to miss that.