Working on your PhD, working a full time job (that turns into more hours than full time but I suppose 40 for a full time job was just arbitrary anyways) and raising 3 kids while keeping the family together is quite a lot to have on one's plate and something, it seems,will always slip...For me, it's the blog and my poor poor house. I'm going to have to start charging the dust bunnies rent!
Fear not though! I'm going to try my best to jump back into it and hopefully keep up the pace a bit more than my sorry self has been able to. Here's an interesting article for you to read in the meantime...maybe it'll shed some light onto the plight of the PhD candidate:
For me this article hit home. The road to getting a PhD is extremely long and arduous ... and to what end? I keep grousing to my husband (who I'm surprised just doesn't autotune me out by now) about how my CV is in rough shape and I need to become more of a "force" in the academic world. I see people cited and quoted and used as an "expert" in their field and that's the position I want to be sitting in.
I keep having dreams lately that someone else publishes on my dissertation topic and I have to start over... I wake up in a cold sweat; sometime I wake up crying. Such are the real fears of walking down that PhD road. I've been researching video games for over 10 years, and written on a large variety of topics. It KILLS me to see that things I've written about years ago are now being published. I read it and say, "Jesus...I wrote on this...I was trying to explain this well before it was published...why didn't I publish this?!" Part of the problem was believing in myself and the merit of the work that I was doing. Let's say researching video games before they became such a buzz, not only in general culture but in the academic world as well was not an easy feat. The other part...well, it's all my own in being a tad to complacent and lazy... But no more! I just need to have my priorities in order and I think some housekeeping has come due.
The path of a PhD candidate is not an easy one. I think that you can really only truly understand that road if you've gone down it. There are so many hoops to jump through, some academic and many more that are bureaucratic in nature. I'd love to teach, as the article discusses the PhD's ultimate end; working academia. However, as the article also points out, those jobs are few and far in between. So what's a PhD candidate to do? At least if nothing else I KNOW at the end of all of this I'll have two things; a very large student loan debt and the authority to say, "No, it's not Mrs., you can call me Dr.".
