How Things Work

Over Christmas several people asked me what exactly it was I was doing.  They didn't mean it in an existential fashion or indeed even in a way that would interrogate my dissertation's raison d'être.  Rather, they were wondering what the structure of the PhD is, what is involved in it, and how one goes about completing it on a day-to-day level.  That's what this post aims to answer.

Here in the UK the PhD is a three year programme that is based entirely in research.  American PhDs, on the other hand, continue to have a classroom component after which a student would sit exams and then begin his/her research.  Here we dive right in.  So I literally spend most of my days in the library or in various coffee shops around Belfast.  That might be a later post.

At the end of first year, you have what is called differentiation.  This process sounds more intimidating than it is meant to be.  Essentially it is nothing more than a progress report.  The School of English wants to make sure that I have completed work that satisfies their expectations of a first-year PhD student.  To that end, I must submit a minimum of 10,000 words to two different internal readers.  In a panel-style session, they will ask me questions about my research, my supervision; they will also point out areas where they think it needs improvement, suggest potential revisions, theories, and angles that I might have missed.

Once you pass differentiation, you are officially labelled a fully-fledged PhD student.  You earn two more years of research and writing.  You also earn the privilege of serving as a tutor on an undergraduate course.  The way university courses are set up over here is remarkably different from a traditional American university's English class.  We have both a lecture and a tutorial component.  The lecture is simply that: a lecture, in which the professor speaks as if he/she is at a conference.  This lecture sets the agenda for the tutorial, which resembles an American classroom more.  That's where I come in.  I get to help flush out the discussion, answer questions, and help guide students through the course.

The exciting thing is that I will only have to teach courses that are pertinent to my area.  This means, most likely, I'll end up as a tutor on the Irish Literature module, a second year course that runs the gamut.  We could cover anything from Maria Edgeworth to Colm Toibin.  It's a challenge to add that reading load onto my research load, but post-doctoral fellowships essentially require, or at least expect, to see teaching on your CV.

I don't want anyone to think that I'd be a tutor if it weren't for those requirements; I have, since high school, known I wanted to teach.  It's just that my academic interests have progressed so that it makes more sense to pursue teaching at the university level.  But that does not change the fact that I want to teach.  I've had too many great teachers in my life to give up on that dream.