You’ve made it here! To the terminal end of the ivory tower’s offerings, you have just started, or are about to start, a PhD. But you, my friend, are also about to learn much more than you’ve possibly bargained for in embarking on this terminal degree. As someone looking back (a privileged place to be), can I be indulgent and share one of the non-academic learnings from the PhD process with you?

PhDs are, by nature, very lonely places. You know something that potentially no one else in the whole world does. You definitely know something that looks like no one else has written down. This can be emancipation, vocational awe and terror all in one. What if you get it wrong? That’s a big question, especially since you’re a first-generation student too, it doesn’t feel comfortable to challenge the dogma and received knowledge that you’re the first to receive in your family.

But what if you get it right? What if you change how we work as a society? Or maybe you just make it incrementally, almost imperceptibly better or easier for the next person. I think that this is research, it’s almost always not big breakthroughs for a population (although this does happen). More often than not, your contribution will be a tiny sentence on the next page of the metaphorical book of all knowledge. But what won’t be seen is that sentence being backed up by probably 400 pages or more of thinking. Thinking that came from lost sleep, uncontrollable ennui, the anxiety, the paranoia. In the face of those forces, maybe one tiny sentence doesn’t feel enough of an output given the pressure to represent the body without organs, that is, the cohort of first-generation students at large. It took a long time to feel ok with this tiny sentence representing the achievement of all my “potential”.

Maybe, though, like most things in research, a bit of reframing and rearranging can soften the tone. Perhaps doing research and producing knowledge of all varieties is a bit like parenting. Most often, you’ll never live to see what it became. Did it live up to the potential you saw? How about what everyone else saw? If it didn’t, this is ok, all you can do is try to set it up for the best opportunities. But sometimes we all get it wrong, and being able to see why to do it differently next time makes sense. Just take care in attributing personal failures in the process.

So, fellow first-generation student, I’m afraid that, like all research, there are more questions than answers. How do you soften the tone? Is one sentence ever really enough? Why does the bar look so much higher? How does one remember all the names of the philosophers and what they thought anyway? Why must we write when it seems like we are in desperate need of a conversation instead of a drawn-out sparring match?

Yours in the best of faith,

A peer

REF: W-17062025-05