By the time you are reading this, I have just finished defending my PhD. What a wonderful thought that is as I can currently feel the nervous butterflies flutter in my stomach. After 5 years of working on my PhD, I got to submit it to the exam committee. Although that in and of itself is a huge accomplishment, I could not help but feel more nervous than happy at the time. For those of you who do not know, you submit your PhD 5 weeks before the defense. Once submitted, you try to find ways to keep yourself busy, prepare yourself as much as possible for potential questions and reflect on the past years in which you wrote your work.
It is during these 5 weeks that your nerves try to get the better hand, and no matter how much you try to relax, you cannot help but feel tense. This is probably a good thing, as you would not care much about your research project if you were not a bit nervous defending it in front of experts in the field. Especially to the external examiner – who you may have chosen yourself, but who is also still one of the leading academics in your research topic.
There are two things that have helped me the most in the past 5 weeks – reminding myself why I started this project and my supervisor. With so many things going on in our lives, it can be easy to sometimes forget why exactly we are doing the projects we are working on. The different aspects of a PhD, the editing, personal life events, and more all cloud the bigger picture of why we choose our research. Whether it is because it holds personal meaning to you or whether you have a brilliant mind for it – we all do our graduate work because we want to improve something. In the past weeks, I’ve gone on multiple hikes through and outside of the city to remind myself that it is the animals around us that inspired me. It is because I fundamentally believe that they deserve a better life, that I started my project, and it will be for them that I shall defend it.
The other support that I had during the past 5 weeks was my supervisor. Understanding that I can be a nervous nelly, we met up to discuss exactly how the process goes on the day off, what to expect, and how best to approach things. Through these conversations, I was reminded again why a good relationship with your supervisor is necessary to succeed in your graduate career, and I advise anyone coming up to the final stage of their graduate path to seek out their supervisor or someone who they feel comfortable talking to about the process. No matter the outcome of my defense, or yours for that matter, the most important thing to remember is that none of us would be in this place without ourselves. We would have never been here without the effort we put in and the sacrifices we made. Remember this when you stand in front of your exam board and know that you can be proud of what you have accomplished.