it should be a smooth progression right? you start as a grad student, and you emerge as an expert! a doctor! a colleague!!
but why does it feel so bumpy? let's talk about all the reasons why you might feel like a superstar one day, and a trash racoon the next - and things you can do to soften the bumps, too!
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One minute you're flying high. Feeling yourself, knowing that you are a scholar and then the next minute you feel right back at square one. And like, you don't know a single thing. Let's talk about the balance between student and scholar on this week's episode of Yeah.
📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for a brand new summer planning template, all available for you for free. Now. Let's get into it.
One of the trickiest parts about grad school. And a lot of other experiences where we're expected to grow and learn while also doing something. Is that we are usually both the student and an expert. We're at least growing into an expert. And this feeling of being both, it causes major intellectual, emotional, and sometimes even physical whiplash.
One second. You're writing up your research and you need to state your authority and your originality and how brilliant you are. And then the next minute your supervisor is taking pains to remind you that you haven't read every book that they have and their 92 year career. And you, in fact know nothing.
One tradition, at least in a lot of the U S departments that I'm familiar with is to invite a successful candidate back into the room after they have their thesis or dissertation defense by using their title. Can you come back in? Dr. Pepin my advisor said a signal that I had left the room for their deliberation as a student but I was entering back into it as a colleague. And in theory, that transition happened smoothly over the course of my five years in the programs. I started as a student, I went through coursework. I took my exams, I passed it into candidacy. I did my reviews. I went to conferences and slowly and slowly and slowly, I built up that expertise until poof. I defended I was an expert.
I was a colleague. I was a doctor. But emotionally and physically, and even sometimes administratively, I went backwards and forwards all of the time. Sometimes I felt like I was more than capable to teach my undergraduates and being an expert to all of my students write up my research. I felt like I was making original contributions. And then at other times I felt like I couldn't even be trusted to know what email was or how other humans used it.
Yeah. And I want to be clear that I'm not talking about here, the separate, but related issues of imposter syndrome. And the very real feeling that many of us get that the university decides our status by convenience. I will briefly say that it was in my department's best interest to call me a student when they did not want to pay me as an expert. And it was in their best interest to consider me an expert administratively when they wanted labor. Like a class covered or somebody to volunteer at a conference or to give a talk or a guest lecture, then it was fine for me to be an expert because they weren't going to be paying me anything extra. That's the nature of being a student in a program. And it also is one of the reasons that I'm such a big fan of unions for graduate students, but that's a whole other issue.
I want to be clear here, because I am not saying that all of us are manufacturing this whiplash in our heads. There are administrative and systemic reasons why our advisors, our departments, or universities, even the field itself consider us students when it's convenient and they consider us experts when it's convenient.
That changing back and forth can be really disorienting if not dispiriting or even worse. So I just want to name this feeling. It is so hard to flop back and forth between student and expert all of the time. And know that for important structural and systemic reasons, you are never going to be able to think or self care or self confidence or hype yourself out of that switch. Some of it is completely outside of your control.
But the truth is that you can also be both at the same time. In fact, we are often expert and student. teacher and learner and a lot of aspects in our life. We are always learning to do things more efficiently, more effectively, differently, and often we're using those skills in our daily lives, too.
We're learning to write better while we're also producing a lot of writing. We're working on our, improving our focus and our time management. While we also learn more about what makes our brains work and what tools do and don't support them. The important thing here that I really want to drive home in this podcast episode is that your skills have value even if, especially if you are working to improve them. You are not only worthy as a person once you're an expert. You can share what, you know, even if there are other people who do things differently than you do. So much of what makes PhD candidates stand out and why we're recruited into these programs for the first place. is our life experiences, our identities, our previous work experiences, the communities we grew up in the perspectives that we have. All of those things make us experts in our own lives, our own communities, our own spheres of knowledge. But it's so easy to get into the hollowed white halls of academia and forget that any of that matters.
So, if you are waiting to feel proud of yourself until you're an expert with nothing left to learn. You will probably never get the chance to call yourself an expert. And even if you do, if it's going to be at the very end of your career, What would it feel like instead if you gave yourself the chance to be proud of where you are right now?
while also giving yourself space to grow and change. What would it change for you if you gave yourself permission to celebrate how far you already come on this path? While still acknowledging that there's more to go. Yeah, it is so destabilizing to be in an environment that depends on distinctions between experts and novices, for promotion advancement and in a lot of cases for even praise and feedback. But don't let the ego games of academia convince you that you're still a scrawny student at the whims of your teacher in every facet of your life. And to that end, here are three different things that you can try over the next week, or maybe even further along, that might help you feel into the ways in which you are already capable. You're already an expert.
You are already a person who can learn and celebrate what you've learned at the same time. So the first thing to try is owning your expertise. You might find that you are an expert in all kinds of things. You maybe are an expert in how to cook a fantastic set of pancakes for breakfast, or you're an expert in using the autoclave machine in your lab.
Maybe you are an expert in a particular method or a piece of software, maybe you are the grad student that everyone goes to to figure out how to get their canvas sites to work. In what ways is your expertise already being drawn on as a resource in your department, in your human life, in your communities?
And what would it feel like to make a list of all of those things that you're already really good at? Our brains naturally focus on the stuff that we wish we were better at already. Like the fact that I am not as good at Excel as I want to be, or I can't code an R yet, or I'm still taking this course to improve my language skills. Everybody's got those things and yeah, it's healthy to keep growing and striving and always improving our skills.
To a point. But if we never stop and name, the fact that we have already improved ourselves, we have already grown and changed and learned things. Then it can feel like you're caught on that. Never ending hamster wheel of just never being good enough. So take a moment list those things that you're already an expert at and see if there's any way that you can claim a little bit of that expertise for yourself. And the next week or so.
Option number two that you could try is owning your expertise in non-academic spaces.
Maybe you teach a class at your local yarn shop about how to knit. Because it gives you such a pure amount of pleasure to be an expert in share something that you love. Maybe you go and volunteer at the local museum and you give tours and you feel like, wow, I'm a docent. And I'm teaching these kids things and it feels great. Or maybe you pick the most complicated recipe that you know, how to make you invite all of your friends and you wow them with the fact that you can make souffle's right there on the spot.
You do not only need to be an expert in the thing that you were working on professionally. And sometimes that little bit of mastery feeling in another space can really go a long way.
Last, but not least I would love it. If you experimented with remembering that it is okay to still be learning. And if it feels unsafe or unwelcome or a little bit tender and vulnerable to do that at work.
Why not still learn in another space. That's completely separate. I love learning new hobbies for this. I think that. Taking on hobbies during my PhD was one of the reasons why I finished it was so great for me to go to a yoga class and work on a new pose. And fall down a bunch and you don't mess it up a bunch and mix up my left and right.
A thing that I'm notorious for doing. And remember that it was okay to play. It was okay to fall down. It was okay to not be good at something yet. That was such a liberating feeling when I felt like every other aspect of my life was such high stakes. I encouraged you to find someplace where it feels a little bit more comfortable to not be good at something.
Maybe you take a pottery class or you watch a bunch of YouTube videos and teach yourself how to watercolor. The sky's the limit, but giving yourself that chance to practice learning in another space. Might help you feel a little bit more comfortable doing it in your professional life too.
But anyway, you shake it. Grad school is one long apprenticeship in which your expert in student status in theory progresses in a linear line, but most of the time bounces up and down sometimes a million times a day. And anyone's nervous system is going to get kicked up by that. Just remember that part of that is how the system is designed.
And there's also a lot of space to give yourself support. As you move through the ups and the downs on the path to becoming a doctor.
And if you are struggling with the ups and downs of revision, make sure that you check out the show notes. I am hosting a free webinar on June 20th, all about taking confusing feedback and turning it into an actual plan to edit and revise your writing. I'm hosting the amazing Dr. Bailey Lang to give this workshop. And I'm so excited to have her and all of you join us.
More links are at the bottom sign up it's completely free and it will also be recorded and transcribed afterwards. In case you can't make it live. Otherwise, I will see you around the neighborhood. Bye. Great.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!