Before I give everyone the impression that I’m doing nothing but having fun here, I should point out that I’m on the outset of a minor intellectual crisis!

After arriving and settling into Canberra in mid-February, it took me a while to get my brain-cells going. For a while there I thought my brain had died - I was reading no more than one journal article a day - that’s about 40 pages or so. It wasn’t until this week that I feel that I’m finally reading an acceptable volume of material on a daily basis. I’m now reading four articles/chapters a day which is acceptable.

[For the uninitiated, a degree in International Relations and Political Science largely consists of a reading, reading, reading, and more reading. Also, at the early stages of a PhD, most students do what's called a "literature review" which consists of ... yes, you got it, reading!]

That said and done, I discovered a problem, also known as the “first symptom of the PhD disease” - I think, no, I know, I need to change my research topic. Why? Because (1) I discovered a number of published articles that have effectively argued what I would have wanted to argue in my thesis. (2) Even if I did advance the same argument and turned it into thesis length, I don’t now think that the topic lends itself well to a PhD thesis length discussion.

I’m in a bit of a quandary, especially since I’m due to meet my supervisor at 14H tomorrow for a discussion. After an intense weekend of reading and much reflection [that's the other thing that students do - think, think, think and think some more], I think I know how I want to change the direction of my research. While it will remain within the same broad research area, i.e. international political economy of the Asia Pacific, it will take on a slightly different form and focus. Problem is I haven’t concretely conceptualised what it is that I want to do yet - all I have now is an intuitive feel for it (I tend to work that way…on intuition). I think I need another two weeks worth of intense reading before I can intelligently describe what it is I want to do for the next three years of my life.

Meanwhile, I’m worried I might sound like an idiot in front of the supervisor tomorrow. But that’s probably no different from how I have been feeling in the past month. I feel like an imposter half the time - a PhD makes such intellectual demands on a person and I’m constantly insecure about my abilities to meet the challenge. I think people overestimate my intelligence and abilities. God only knows how I ended up here… it certainly wasn’t in my grand plan of life! So aside from the short term worry of how I will look in front of the supervisor tomorrow, I’m also worried about my longer term intellectual project that I’m ever so afraid will bomb out.

I know I hop from one existentialist crisis to another but honestly, some are more real than others. And this one is one of the real big ones.

God help me …!

Posted on March 13th, 2005 by jl
Filed under: Crisis !!!