So I just had my first week as a PhD student and I was way too obvious with how overwhelmed I was. Somewhere between asking about deadlines and milestones that did not exist yet, a colleague told me I was thinking about the ‘traditional PhD.’ Well, what is the ‘traditional PhD?’ It’s about having a specific topic from the beginning and spending the whole PhD working exclusively on that topic until it becomes a dissertation. And that’s the kind of PhD I was preparing myself for before flying to Canada.
But as the week wound down and I moved toward the long weekend, I was finally able to breathe knowing that this time, I have the freedom to explore what I’d like to do for my PhD dissertation, as long as it follows my area of specialization, explore projects, write papers about them, and then, for the dissertation, sew all the papers together into one coherent story.
That’s what I am here for: to tell a story.
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