The Project
One of the more useful pieces of advice I've received since starting out as a doctoral student was to treat the PhD as a project like any other, to be managed effectively through careful planning and goal-setting, through monitoring and reviewing progress at frequent intervals, and through focusing on one's wider community of 'stakeholders' (supervisor, examiners, archivists, peers etc). Now, if this is all sounding a bit too McKinseyite for your liking, then I sympathise. PhDs, after all, are a creative, dynamic and open-ended process - you never know where the content of your archives will take you. I'm also pretty sure that if you referred to your final examiners as 'clients' they'd fail you on principle. Nonetheless, as someone who did a fair amount of project management in a previous life, I've found that some of the skills I picked up have been extremely useful - for example, building and updating bibliographies, planning archive visits (more variables involved that you might expect), and, of course simple time management (if you're full-time, you have three years of empty space to fill...). The School of Advanced Study (where the IHR and hence the History Lab is based) is quite good at providing training in these skills, but I'm curious to know what other institutions offer. Any thoughts on managing PhDs as projects?
posted by Helen @ 9:03 AM
2 Comments:
At 11:04 AM,
Kate said…
Having just come out of two major projects that ran at the same time (full time PhD in three years + two year project to renovate archives where I work + teaching + life etc = headache), I can safely say I'm quite happy at the moment to avoid thinking of anything that might involve "project management"...
Having said that (ignore the lack of enthusiasm above, I just need a holiday!) not everyone's enamoured of management speak, but this is a good, common sense approach... plan it, review it, think about it, talk about it, get on with it, file bits in places you know you'll find them easily. Keep an eye on the broader picture. Be realistic, work at a pace that suits you and your commitments. Learn to spot when fellow postgrad 'experts' are talking rubbish about how much they've done/how painful their upgrade was/how they always work 12 hr days etc etc etc - might be true for some, but in many cases it's an attempt to panic others or to find out what a 'normal' workload is, and of course, the sad truth is that there isn't one.
One tip that I would add, as someone who had an alternate existence throughout the PhD as a part-time archivist, is that you should "share the love" with the archivists in your life. Firstly, archivists inhabit a very small world and being a pain in the bum will get your name known very quickly in ways you won't want... Secondly, archivists are often underpaid, underestimated, overworked and with minimal budgets, which is likely to account for any crankiness you encounter! They will be suspicious if you turn up with bouquets of flowers and boxes of chocolate, but treat them well, and you could set yourself up with an excellent working relationship for life, especially if you use smaller or specialist archives. It's not so much about access to the archives, but about the "value-added" stuff, like asking you if you'd like to join their user groups (want more sockets for laptops? here's how you get them), keeping you posted about other people working in your area, writing copyright/reproduction permission letters, keeping you up to date on new accessions... Specialists also probably know tons more about the documents than you do (at least at the beginning), and their advice can be just as valuable as your supervisor's. So, how do you keep them sweet? Take time to read their website carefully (you'd be surprised how many people don't), and use web resources; be polite but friendly; if you email/phone, be clear but succinct about what you are looking for; and of course, don't forget to include them in your eventual PhD acknowledgements!!!
At 7:15 AM,
Rachel said…
The problem with detailed project management for a PhD is that it's very hard to have a realistic estimate of how long any particular stage will take you. So the project timetable, one of the key parts, will either need to be rewritten very frequently or will become completely outdated very quickly and probably very depressing (when you see you were supposed to finish bit X three months ago). I had a rough timetable at least for the last few years of my part-time thesis and also an immediate list of next things to do/read, but I didn't try and lay out in detail how I got between one and the other (which project management would have required me to do).
Post a Comment
<< Home