Leading up to my first week of school I spent hours Googling, trying to find an answer regarding what my first few days or weeks as a doctoral student were going to be like.

I didn’t find much.

A few posts, largely from scientists (a massive amount of information out there is geared towards STEM students), but nothing to give me a clue about what my days as a drama student were going to be like.

I sort of get this now because everyone’s days are different, especially in the UK where the whole process is a bit less structured than the US.

But I can still tell you about mine.

So to put it in some context – I started as a remote student at a UK institution as a Drama MPhil to PhD student, which means I starts in the MPhil program and somewhere along the way I’ll turn in some writing and do a mini-viva voce and, if I don’t suck, I will transfer into the PhD program.

If you’re interested in what I did in the year leading up to starting my doctorate (which is still what I’m going to call it despite being a lowly pretransfer MPhil right now), you can read that post here.

I’m going to pick up on literally the first week. The papers are all signed. The contract start date was February 7^th. My contract said a full week of work is 35 hours a week. This is pretty much all the information I had going into this week.

Here is what I did on Day 1:

I completed my online registration. It took about an hour and there were several things wrong with it (like having my gender listed as Male). Things that aren’t a big deal but probably need to be fixed.

I sent in a query about how to get those things fixed.

A very common theme so far has been that my department is great but administrative things from the university are glacially slow.

So at this point I was just stuck until I got a reply.

I then emailed my supervisor to check in and see if I needed to do anything else. He said on his end I wasn’t showing as a supervisee yet, but he was sure it would appear in a day or two and then we would sort our first supervisory meeting.

I spent about three hours trying to read through all the workbooks and registration material and put together some kind of coherent list of things it looked I like would need to do.

Going into this process, I knew that the school had a few things I had to do in addition to my thesis, but during this process I learned a few things was kind of laughable and there is actually a whole system that my school calls Strands of requirements you have to be compliant with.

I’ll level with you. The Strands did not make a lot of sense on Day 1 and a fair amount of confusion was compounded because the school is in the middle of switching over the system it uses to have postgrads track these requirements. The same system that they are switching over also houses a bunch of online trainings.

Because of this, I thought I had registered for the system correctly but in reality, had registered for the old system… this misstep actually lost me some time sorting out a fairly important task I didn’t find out about until the end of the week.

Then I rounded out the day by reading a journal article and filing it in my document tracking spreadsheet and writing an annotated bibliography entry for it.

I did a lot of the administrative portion of this from 6 AM – 9:30 AM, then I went to work from 10 AM – 5 PM and finished up the day from about 6 PM to 10 PM.

Day 2:

If you’re reading this because you are also a theatre person – day two and day three of starting this program were also tech on the show I was working on that week.

I knew I wasn’t going to get a lot of school work done on these days.

I checked on my registration and found that everything had been corrected. So I finished that, which unlocked the portal to pay the rest of my tuition.

If you pay your tuition in full, you get a 2.5% discount (not huge but I’m not turning my nose up at a few hundred pounds). However the registration system was not setup for people starting at weird times of the year (I started about three weeks after the top of the regular term), so it said the time had passed. I sent off yet another query to see if I paid today or tomorrow if it could still apply.

…again you will notice a theme of getting a little done, hitting an administrative wall, and finishing the task the next day (or later due to further administrative delays).

During our dinner break of tech, I finally received a key document from the university related to my visa process and was able to finish that application between dinner and with about another hour of work once I got home in the evening.

Day 3:

I wake up to an email from my advisor (who is still not officially my advisor, but we both know he is actually my advisor) encouraging me and the two other PhD students in the program to submit a proposal to organize the Liberal Arts and Sciences Postgraduate Symposium in June.

And the proposal was due on Day 5.

I kind of thought it was a joke.

He didn’t.

One of my cohort begged off doing it because she already had three big things going on in June. My other cohort jumped right on it and quickly replied with a rough draft of a full proposal that totally served his research purposes but not really mine (because what even are mine?!?! I mean, I know but I don’t really know but I kind of know and are we really doing this on day three!!!?).

Now clearly organizing a Symposium feels super doable to me, but if we get selected we are both also supposed to present a paper.

This makes me feel nauseous but it’s kind of what I’m there to do, so… I stared down his email in crazy early morning Eastern time zone before day two of tech and tried to figure out a way to smoosh my topic somehow into his topic.

I sigh and reply that sure we can submit that together.

Once we expressed interest, our supervisor reached out to see if the deadline could be extended and then Other Cohort and I made a plan to chat. Deadline got extended (thank goodness) and we make a plan to Zoom and review our proposal at the end of week two.

I sigh with relief because it feels like I have some time to really think about this (which funnily enough both is and is not a thing while working on a doctorate apparently).

Anyway, I also ask my advisor if he can see that he’s my advisor yet. He says no. I sigh again over this mystery (which I later learn does relate a bit to registering in the old tracking system and not the new one).

This takes up a large portion of my morning and then I head back to the theatre for ten hours of tech that do not go smoothly (this is not related to school in any way, merely some added color that I was enjoying a particularly rough tech that day too) and then our opening show.

During dinner I manage to finish paying my tuition with my exciting 2.5% discount added.

When I got home that night, I worked on an online course in the old registration system for about an hour (a very exciting course on information security) and went to bed. 

Day 4:

Life is a little calmer now that the show is open. I sleep in a little bit, until like 7:30 am.

Sidenote: I think sleep is really important. I think people who brag about barely getting any sleep are insane and also not balancing their schedules very well if that’s happening to them on a regular basis. I think it’s a life fail, not a point of pride.

I also feel like I have to defend getting enough sleep as a smart move as opposed to a lazy one from years in the entertainment industry where sleep deprivation is like a super messed up badge of honor – that generally leads to accidents, short tempers, and other fails.

I double check all on the initial online registration is done. I finish the information security modules.

I spend about an hour reviewing our Symposium proposal and trying to brainstorm exactly how I’m going to write a paper somehow connected to one of these topics. I make a list of possible ideas. They are all garbage.

This is my first introduction to the first idea is always garbage but you can’t get to the next idea without the first one, so just shut up and do it and keep moving.

I work a two and a half hour shift digital workshop producing.

I read two journal articles and catalogue and write up the annotated bibliography for them.

I go run the second show at the theatre.

I get home and work on the next online module for an hour and a half, equally riveting and about the GDPR.

Day 5:

I read journal articles and catalogue them for a few hours in the morning. Then I spend some time transferring over notes I was loosely keeping in a bunch of random places while working on my applications and proposal into my document tracking spreadsheet.

I check in with my advisor to see if he’s my advisor yet.

He’s not. This was worrying.

I start rereading the handbook to see if I skipped something because I am convinced I probably have. I review the myriad of random registration emails I’ve gotten from different departments and people and finally find a random attached PDF indicating I should register for an entirely different tracking system than the one I had registered in back on Monday.

I go to try to register on the new system and a box you have to tick is that you are in physical possession of your ID card, which I am not. And by not ticking it, I can’t submit the registration form.

So again, I send out an email about it and wait.

With access to this new system though, I find some clearer answers about what these mystery Strand things might be and update my homemade checklist of things I probably need to do.

I turn all this random information into a Gantt chart for my PhD timeline. I do this just to try to sort it all out for myself, but it turns out that I needed one for my official proposal form due in a few weeks, so that wound up pretty cool.

Around dinner time, I head out to the theater for the next show.

Day 6:

I read for about three hours in the morning and catalogue whenever I finish an article.

Go to the theatre and call another show.

Day 7:

Same as day six.

I also went to the matinee of my show, which was the last performance, and a pretty fun Super Bowl Party.

—-

Honestly, if I had to guess, I probably didn’t quite hit 35 hours in week one. I got stuck on quite a few administrative things. I would’ve really liked to have sorted setting up a meeting with my supervisory team.

It felt like a ridiculously muddled week.

I think if I had been on campus, at the actual start of the semester, the week really would’ve revolved around a set number of orientation activities with some reading time each day too.

As the weeks have gone on, I’ve found they seem to break loosely down to 20 hours of reading and writing for my thesis and about 15 hours of administrative/Strand activities. And it isn’t totally exact, but it is close. I also usually manage to do all of that during the week and use Saturday or Sunday to read ahead (or catch up if something on my to-do list didn’t get done).

I also take about 30 minutes every Sunday night to map out the following week and what my goals for each day are, but that took me about three weeks to figure out I really needed to do that – and that I felt better waking up on Monday to a plan rather than sorting my plan first thing on Monday, which is a totally valid approach to.

And that is a recap of my super exciting life right now.