Rellie Goddard
I have spent the last two weeks residing in the wonderful city of Durham where I was lucky enough to spend four years of my life completing first a BSc and then an MRes. Now living in Oxford and working in an entirely different area of structural geology, it would be a fair question to ask why I was located so far away from my usual home of the Oxford Earth Sciences department basement. Indeed, the beginning of January brings some important deadlines for second year PhD students – including the feared transfer of status interview which I am yet to complete. Although being called both “flower” and “pet” in the same sentence is a pull in itself, my real excuse to return to the North was to complete some experiments related to the final months of my MRes project.
The question is – is this work a valid use of my time? Although extremely interesting, these experiments will take no place in my PhD thesis. They are an isolated project which will require additional work when back in Oxford, consuming either my personal or PhD time. I have been told by many people that I shouldn’t be going, that I’m being paid to do a PhD and that’s all I should commit to. Forget outreach, forget demonstrating or teaching – unless you are directly getting something out of it, then don’t waste your time.
But I politely disagree.
As young career scientists we are essentially at the whims of our superiors. Not quite to the extent of ‘when they say “jump” we say “how high?”’, but along the lines of ‘if you scratch my back then I’ll scratch yours’. I am an advocate of this mantra. One just has to look back at the classic film ‘Pay it Forward’ to see the effects of giving a helping hand to someone who needs one. As I’ve learned concepts and procedures during the first year of my PhD, my supervisors have asked me to step in and help out – which seems to me to be the natural order of things.
But there is a danger; what may well indeed be a great career opportunity to you is also free labour for those above you. The temptation to just do a little more to give your project the extra edge is a hard one to ignore; “If I did one more experiment… if I only read one more paper… if I only went to one more conference…”. Final year PhD students are particularly susceptible to this and I too was drawn into temptation at the end of my research masters (case and point; I’m back now). My old supervisor once described me as having completed half a PhD within a year but this was very much at the expense of my happiness and mental health. Only now, a year on, do I truly love research in the way that I used to.
For those of you mad enough to do a PhD I have some advice: knowing when to let go is important, but knowing when to say yes is also important. Doing favours for people, going the extra mile, helping someone else, all these things may lead to connections and conversations that help you further down the line. Finishing on time is important, both financially and mentally, but so is taking opportunities, meeting people and networking. My returning to Durham may be partly from nostalgia – but is it such a bad thing to be strengthening relationships with academics at institutions other than my own? I’ve been able to maintain an understanding outside my research field, present my current work at a lunchtime seminar and (hopefully) will get a paper out of the experiments I’ve conducted here.
So yes, I may have some emotional reasons pulling me back to Durham; there are certainly only a few places that I would spend two weeks living in thermals for! There’s a part of me that finds it hard to let go, from the place, the people, and the unanswered questions of my Research Masters. But, at the end of the day, research is fun, so what’s so wrong with that?
“I am a first year PhD student in the Earth Sciences Department researching the partition of stress in multi-mineral rocks. Other than my PhD topic, my interests lie in large scale structural geology, particularly in large magnitude earthquakes and their corresponding faults.”
EVIDENTLY SCIENTIFICAL 
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