Beverley Jennings is doing a part-time PhD with the Institute of Education at the University of Reading whilst also working part-time as a secondary school English teacher. She can be found on twitter @bjm_teacher
A common metaphor for PhD study is that it is a journey and for a long time this felt true for me. A major feature of my journey, with all its twists and turns, mountains and valleys, swamps and deserts, has been the company of my fellow travellers. We were like pilgrims, a disparate group thrown together onto the same path with a common goal. But, as a part-time student whose full-time companions have now completed their journeys, thinking about my PhD in this way was starting to make me feel like I had been left behind. I found myself in need of a new metaphor to make sense of this feeling of dissonance and I am claiming the carousel.
I started my part-time PhD in September 2018. As part of the welcome and induction activities at my university all the new starters, both full-time and part-time, met on campus and were encouraged to get to know and support each other. To be honest, apart from the fact that I was only studying two days a week, I didn’t really feel that much different to the full-timers. In the first year we helped each other through two research methods courses, grappling with ontology, epistemology, and statistics. In the second year we clambered over the obstacle of confirmation of registration and then parted ways to start collecting our data. I may have passed these milestones a few months behind the full-timers, but I still very much felt like we were a group.
This year though, the inevitable has happened. Those full-time students who started with me in 2018 have now finished. Theses have been submitted, vivas completed, and graduations celebrated. It has been an enormous privilege to have travelled alongside my full-time colleagues and to see their successes, but it also didn’t feel like it made sense that they had finished without me. I had always felt as if we were journeying together, so how could I not have arrived at the destination with them? How did I manage to fall behind when we have been alongside each other the whole way?
So, I am throwing away the journey metaphor and reaching instead for the carousel. The part-time PhD experience can then be thought of as a fun and thrilling ride that I joined at the same time as my full-time companions. When we started there were already some riders on board and more have joined us since. The PhD carousel has its ups and downs, but we rode side by side and have laughed, cried and screamed together. The ones who have now left can still cheer and wave from outside and I still have companions, both old and new, with whom to enjoy every remaining rotation. In this metaphor I am no longer left behind, as a part-time student I am just enjoying the ride for a little bit longer.
Thriving Part-Time 