Worn - reflections on the life of a Danish ph.d. student

I have been pondering why I feel so stressed currently (hence the title of this post). Part of it is obviously due to the advanced procrastination, Torill talks about (i.e. events in life as such moving, illness, relationship problems, deaths in the family etc which inevitably slows down your work - and rightly should do), which I am suffering from right now, but part of it is also, I find, an effect of the way the ph.d.education is conceived here in Denmark and especially here at the IT University. Here I'd like to explain why:

The Basics
As ph.d students on state scholarships, in Denmark we are allocated 3 years to do our ph.d. That is equal to 36 months salary - a salary which is notably higher than the Danish student grants, but still on a minimum level compared to what you would get paid if you got a job in industry or a public institution. It is enough to upgrade your living but not enough to allow you to go on expensive holidays and live a glamours life style - or just work half time. And the amount of money you get, if you go on leave, is ridiculous, so for many that is not an option, and it is, it should be noted, strictly prohibited to work while on leave. Someone just told me that you have to sign a paper, in which you promise not to work AT ALL on your project, if you do it. So in practice, there is not many ways you can extend your study time, unless you start to teach a lot when you run out of money, in which case it oftens take people years to actually complete their thesis because they have so little time to work on it.

During those 3 years, it is expected that
a) you place 840 hours of work in your institution (this is what you are paid for too),
b) that you follow courses amounting to credits worth ½ year (or another 840 hours) study time
c) that you spend sometime (preferably ½ year or more) at another institution in order to "familiarise yourself with another research environment"

Practices
Regarding requirement A, these 840 "on duty" hours can in principle be used for all kind of matters: teaching, supervising, researching,organising seminars etc - but according to our contract, NOT on adminstrative matters. Many institutions choose to adminster the requirement so in fact most of the time are left to research, providing the ph.d.student at some point teaches a con amore course on their topic of research. However, the rules have been interpreted differently here at ITU. The first year or so of my study time, the message was, that 420 hours should be used to teaching, the rest you could use in agreement with the head of your research department (who in general wants you to do research ;)). However, one year into my project period, the institution revised this decision, and decided to ask the ph.d.students to teach min. 560 hours (more or less equivalent to 2 courses) because, as a new institution, it was in dire need of teachers. This is one of the reasons why I find myself teaching now, this late in my project, because I still have some stupid 160 hours to account for. I am also supervising 2 master theses so I am completely sure I cannot be forced or ask to supervise or teach more when autumn comes. It should be added that as ph.d.s here we are asked to "produce" a certain amount of students exams per term for our department, in order to ensure the department continued funding. So if we do not fullfill our termly requirement (for instance if we have already done our duty work), it means that another colleague in the department would have to work even harder, so the overall goal of department, exam production wise, is fullfilled. It can be difficult to be cold and just disregard the problems lack of teaching and supervising will cause the department, especially if you want to continue working in the same department after your ph.d.project is completed.

Regarding requirement B - following courses ourselves, of course we should follow courses since we, formally, enrolled in a research education. However, it is a widespread and commonly acknowledged problem that many ph.d.students in RL have problems hunting down relevant courses enough to fullfill the ½ year requirement. I have taken a course in Basic Programming, in Virtual Environments, I have organised and followed a study group on Virtual Environments and Systems (at a time when there was absolute NO relevant courses for me around), and now this term to round this up, I have taken a course in Theory of Science and Project Management. All together the courses comes close to the goal. And they are more or less all relevantl, so I shouldnt complain, I guess. But I know that many of my younger colleagues are now going through the same problems of not being able to find relevant courses, one major problem being that so far the IT University have not been able to offer many courses (1!) of relevance to phd.students with a Humanistic background. Not that they dont want to, we just need to organise them ourselves - and where do we get the hours to do that?

Regarding requirement C, it is a highly relevant requirement. Problem is, that whether you go away for a shorter or longer time, you still need to do a lot of footwork and deal with a lot of practical details, when organising your stay abroad, such as applying for extra funding on basis of a detailed budget, establishing contacts, finding a place to live etc. In the end, most students (from what i have heard) get a lot out of their stay abroad, but often spend substantial time on organising the stay, getting settled etc. I chose to go to wonderful Bergen, where I knew some people already, and Hilde kindly offered me a place to stay, so I have spent less time on organising my stay than many colleagues going to the US. But however much time we spend of practicalities, of course those hours dont count anywhere! And if your stay is short, you might end up not getting that much efficient time out of it. However, some people just cant go for longer stays, perhaps because they have a family or other personal reasons to stay home, so they just have to accept the disadvantages of shorter stays abroad.

Informal requirements
So far I have just mentioned the formal requirements - but there are also a lot of informal requirements. I once heard a senior lecturer say, that a good ph.d.student never should work less than 60-80 hours a week - dedication to your work is definitely a part of the general "discouse on ph.d.student's"! And fact is, most ph.d.students I know, definitely work more than the formal Danish work week of 38 hours. They work in evenings, they work in weekends, they work in holidays - and of couse we never get overtime payment! Why do we feel the need to work so much then? Well, perhaps part of it is that many of us are haunted by the big C.V monster. In order to be known, in order to gain the respect and recognition of the international research society and in this way stand a chance of getting a job and a tenure track position once the project is completed, you need to present papers at conferences, you need to write articles to get something on your publication list (in Denmark you have to list minimum 6 publications in order to be considered for a "adjunktur" - the academic position available to you as finished ph.d.). Of course, papers and articles should reflect the work, you are doing on your project, but sometimes you get sidetracked, or find yourself in the ackward position that because of all the work you do to fullfill formal requirements etc, you dont actually have that many results or coherent thoughts to present, so you end up coming up with a topic for a paper or presentation, which is slightly of the track, but at least fun to work with! And then you find yourself suddenly spending a solid number of days researching and writing about stuff, which might not be pertinent to your ph.d.work. Then there is the question of reusability: can you actually use your papers and articles as part of your thesis? I know I cannot because I want and need to write a coherent piece of work (so what I may have written is in heavy need of a rewrite in order to fit into the thesis) - so to a certain extent, all this writing counts as extra work, not as an intrinsic part of thesis work.
Add to this, btw, the matter of organising seminars and conferences (I spent some 220 hours organising the CGDT conference) - an exellent way of networking, establishing contacts, making your name know etc - but such a time consumer!

Then, in the case of ITU; there is the matter of meetings. For most of the time I have worked here, I have attended an average minimum of 2 department meetings a month (duration of each approx 2 hours). This amounts to a total (so far) of min 120 hours spent on department meetings alone. Add to this staff meetings (which I have stopped attending). the monthly meetings for teaching staff at DKM (they offen lasted 3-4 hours, and I have stopped attending them too), "marketing meetings" where we present our work to outsiders or politicians (there has been quite a few of them too, in order to secure funding and spreading the name of ITU). Then there is the ph.d.studyboard meetings (I was stupid enough to sign up for that when I started because there were no students representative and I want to have a say in the outlining of the ph.d.study programme, which Im proud to say, were finally agreed upon and legalised this summer, only 2 years after I started....), also on a monthly basis - my estimate is that many ph.d.students here are engaged in some form of commitee of sorts, so I am not extraordinary in this respect. Let's say that all in all, I have spent 100 hours attending those meetings. That is min. 220 hours (or half a term) spent on meetings alone!

So how much time do I actually have to research? Well, with time spent meeting formal requirements (teaching, supervising, following courses, planning stay abroad) and informal requirments (meetings, paper preparation, organising seminars etc), I would estimate that in fact I, for instance, have almost only 1 years actual time to spend on writing and researching the actual project. In practice, this is rarely distributed so that you actually have 1-1½ years doing nothing else than writing. Rather, you do a little bit of research "on the line" while you do a little bit of this and that (a course here, some supervising there) - so in the end, you end up with something like 12 months or less in the end where you can focus completely on your work.

And finally I'm there! Yesterday was my last class and today is my last course attendance day. But I am worn, admittedly. And for good reason. Like a lot of other fellow students at this part of their project, I surmise. Worn, not torn (I still love my work and I want to complete it), but just a little more frail, somewhat more susceptible to the workings of life itself, than many other people. I chose this lifestyle willingly, but I honestly believe, that institutional and political decisions and changes could be made, so being a ph.d.student in Denmark - and at ITU - could be less of strain and make more sense on an overall level.

What do YOU think? What is your discoursive experience? Surely, I cant be the only one feeling like this...

# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:58