As an American literature postgraduate student I'm in a constant battle with myself, my supervisor – heck, anyone else who'll listen – to fix upon a topic for my PhD. I've got a while yet: I'm only at the start of the second year (of two) of an MRes, so you'd be forgiven for thinking there's plenty of time to work out the nuts and bolts. As anyone who has gone through the painful and soul-destroying hell of applying for any kind of postgrad funding will tell you though, you have to get started early. The idea is that you submit a proposal to the funding body around Easter. A funding body consisting of members who, after several months, eventually gather in a room somewhere, read said proposal, laugh, and send you a letter saying 'thanks, but no thanks'. The process that eventually ends with anger, depression and too much cake/beer/career death doesn't begin at Easter, however.
No, it begins now, in October. Now is when my supervisor sends me emails with a hint of anxiety: 'Do you think we should meet soon to discuss your proposal?' Now is when my supervisor sends me more emails with more than a hint of anxiety: 'Have you had a chance to think any more about your PhD? Perhaps we should meet?' Now is when my supervisor starts casting concerned looks in my direction when we pass in the corridor and I try to look busy. I try to look confident. I try to look unconcerned. Distinctly un-anxious.
There really was no more putting off the inevitable, and so we have a meeting scheduled for this coming Tuesday. In which I will no doubt mumble something into my sleeve about 'struggle' and 'contemporary lit' and he'll do his concerned face for a while, I'll mumble a bit more, pretending I know what I'm talking about, he'll look less mortified and I'll leave feeling both relieved and bereft in turn.
From there I draft a proposal. A proper one. By Christmas (I'm slightly disturbed, being an atheist and all, by how I'm managing to order my academic funding proposal around the Christian calendar - what PhD would Jesus do?) I'll need to have a pretty polished finished article in place, to be ruminated, digested, cogitated and spat out again by as many lit academics as they can press gang into the process. Then come the revisions. Oh god the endless revisions! Versions of the draft going backward and forward, reply all, damn I forgot to attach it, reply all again, etc. Hour-long meetings, me, 3 doctors/professors and the damn proposal in a tiny, stuffy office, thrashing out semantics and structure, how to spin the lacklustre reputation of the department into a plus, into a reason to give me money to sit on my bum and read books for 3 years.
D-Day will be some time at the end of February/beginning of March. The final draft goes to admin. Along with the 46,451 page application form. Which will no doubt be sent back to me 3 or 4 times for more revisions before it finally – FINALLY! – gets sent (by means I don't know - at this stage I'm willing to believe an owl comes and collects it) to the panel in May. The panel who will leave it in a pile for a few months while they go off on their jollies and I sit at home with my arse glued to the bottom stair waiting for the postman to bring my rejection letter at the end of August.
The whole process is, for me, my supervisor, the poor souls who have to read my revisions, the panel and everyone else involved, like pulling teeth. With pliers.
4 comments:
I FEEL for you. I remember it all, and the admin has got a zillion times worse since I wrote my PhD. It's a hoop jumping exercise - press the right sort of academic buttons, make the proposal coherent and know (don't know whether this is encouraging or not!) that the actual thesis will be organic and dynamic and will resemble your proposal in no way, three years down the line... And good luck!
You're right about having to jump through hoops. My institution doesn't do well securing research council funding (from the AHRC at least), and I'm 99% positive it's a futile exercise, but I'm going to have a bash at it anyway, if only because the university-based funding (for which there can be only 1 'winner') won't consider you unless you have already applied to a research body.
Hey, at least it focuses the mind. That's what I'm telling myself anyway :\
I like the title of the post. The AHRC should give you money for that alone. Also I think you're missing a trick here: isn't there a great PhD proposal in an investigation into what PhD would Jesus do? I'd fund that one out of my own pocket!
In my experience the people who think filling in a funding application is a tedious, energy sapping waste of time are precisely the type of people who have the potential to produce intellectually stimulating and engaging research. Maybe you should put that on the proposal? Hhmmm... may be not. Good luck with it. And keep us posted on how it develops.
Rabelais - Oh I imagine I certainly will be leading everyone through every single, tedious step of the application process. If I have to go through it, well it'd be rude not to share.
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