Focus
The rocky road to a PhD
In December 2002 I was ecstatic to hear the news that I had been awarded a scholarship for a PhD project in Australia at Monash. It sounded like my dream project. A couple of weeks later though, five months before I was due to arrive from Germany, my supervisor informed me that the project was cancelled due to lack of funding. Little was I to know that this was just the start to what was to prove to be, a very rocky road.
The second project offered sounded interesting enough, so my partner and I packed our bags and arrived in Melbourne in June 2003. After a week of settling in, I attended the first meeting with my supervisor to be informed that the second choice project was also cancelled, once more due to a lack of funding.
Being unfamiliar with the Australian system, and not sure of my options, I found myself roped into project number three! It was my supervisor’s idea and something a previous PhD student had briefly attempted (unsuccessfully that is). The topic wasn’t exactly my area of expertise, and in hindsight I realise it wasn’t viable from the start, but I was on a learning curve with the new topic and too ambitious to admit failure too quickly. Matters weren’t helped by a supervisor with little knowledge or interest in the project and no one else in the department working on related topics.
How naïve I was. I realise now that for a PhD you not only need a passion for your work, but a supervisor who has the necessary funding and a feasible concept. Most importantly, the supervisor should be enthusiastic about the topic themselves, so they can motivate you during your down times.
Nine months in I finally found the courage to pull out of the project. I had a talk with the MPA and the departmental postgraduate coordinator. With a new awareness of my options I set about finding myself a project that suited my background and interests and with better supervision – the search would take two months and led me to a different faculty.
In a work of fiction this is where the ‘happy ending’ is slotted in, but real life often plays a different hand. Although essentially happy with the project and my new supervisors, there have been hiccups. I was told that important data I required was already available, when actually it was still in the process of being collected. Communication wasn’t optimal – I had to chase down every new sample that came in.
There were also issues with a lack of equipment (and even space). To make things worse, related external research, beyond my or Monash’s control, failed to produce the expected results. However this was offset by my new faculty being able to top up my funding, allowing me to extend my research time to make up for the wasted first eleven months.
After this experience if I had to decide on a PhD I would probably choose to do a follow up project from someone else, where the equipment and expertise is already there, rather than trying to push through with completely new research. Perhaps not groundbreaking, but at least achievable.
