My PhD Journey - Gina

My idea for my research proposal sort of felt like it landed in my lap, but really it was the cumulative effect of lots of different interconnected issues all taking my interest over the course of my undergraduate degree. In my second year of my undergraduate (Integrated Masters in Sustainability and Environmental Management) I took a class on Sustainable Economics, which introduced me to the ideas around Ecological Economics and how to create an economy that fairly and equally meets all of our social needs without transgressing what the planet can sustain. We discussed a few different policies as part of this, including working time reduction. I found this particularly interesting, but it wasn’t until I took a class on Work and the Environment during my year abroad in Canada at McMaster University that I started connecting the dots on issues. During this class, we talked about the ecological impacts of different types of work; how the type and amount of available work will likely enormously change in a future socially-ecologically sustainable and just society; and the role of workers and trade unions in climate action, as well as worker liberation. It suddenly felt like there were lots of clear connections between climate change and action, work and working time (including reducing and redistributing working time), and workers and unions. You’ve probably already started (even at a very basic level!!) to develop a proposal in your head if you’ve got to the point of reading this blog! 

Once these ideas around climate, working time and trade unions were lodged in my head, I spent some time reading about what Ecological Economics had to say about trade unions and working time: after doing some preliminary reading via Scopus and Google Scholar, I found the answer was … not much. So I started noting down some thoughts and what I knew so far, and soon started mindmapping things out: what did I think were the issues at hand here? How were these issues connected? What was missing? What were some of the broader debates and assumptions in my field, and how did these link to my interest? Having a background in the topic definitely helped me, but equally my background was confined to Ecological Economics - I had very little training/studies in Employment Relations scholarship, so spending some time engaging with that literature hugely helped me too. 

Having spent some time forming my research ideas and proposal, and looking for potential supervisors in the School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability, I reached out to a potential supervisor (Professor Milena Buechs) for a chat and her thoughts on the proposal that was beginning to take shape in my head. She agreed, provisionally, to supervise me if I applied for an academic position at the University. We then co-developed the proposal together: I continued reading in the field, formulating research questions and a potential methodological approach; once this was ready, I sent it to Professor Buechs for her input. She was incredibly supportive and helpful, and gave me lots of direction for how to improve my proposal, and how to narrow the scope of my project. 

Something I really struggled with - and still sometimes struggle with during my PhD! - was the question of whether my research proposal was ‘finished’. The reality is: your research proposal is never really ‘finished’, and it will never be perfect. There will always be things you could tweak or want to change about it. We often say in my office ‘a good PhD is a done PhD’, and I think you can really say that at almost every stage of the research process, even the whole way through to and past publication. I think what matters most is creating a proposal that is well-researched, coherent, clear, important, and interesting. 

• Well-researched: read deeply and widely on your topic, **and ****the methods you are proposing you use. 

• Coherent: if your research interest focuses on a specific place or group or topic, make sure the methods you’re using are aligned with that! If you spend all of your literature review talking about how important it is to deeply and richly understand people’s experiences of an issue (e.g.), you’ll probably want to be talking about qualitative methods somewhere in your methods section. 

• Clear: make sure you proof it! Read it out loud, and/or get someone else to read it for you. 

• Important: why does this research need doing? Why does it matter? Not only is this vital for your potential supervisors/host university to know, but it’s also probably going to serve as a nice reminder to you when academic imposter syndrome sets in. 

• Interesting: this is more of a personal one, but you’ve got to believe what you’re doing is interesting as well as important, otherwise you’ll probably get tired of working on it pretty quickly. 

I’ve been at Leeds since 2020 - studying an Integrated Masters in Sustainability and Environmental Management from 2020-2024, and then beginning my PhD in October 2024 - so I found the transition from my offer to starting overall pretty smooth (minus a few hiccups around funding on the way!). I received my academic offer in late November/early December of 2023, and then received confirmation I’d been successful in my funding application in mid-April 2024. I didn’t really have to think about PhD-related things until the September of that year (other than ecstatically celebrating for the rest of the time!). Around the September of that year, I started receiving emails about where my office would be in the School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability, and introductory sessions to the School and PhD life. At this point, it all started to suddenly feel quite real, but in the best way. 

I’m funded by the White Rose Doctoral Training Program, on their 3.75 PGCert program. This is because when I applied for my PhD, I didn’t have 60 credits worth of research methods modules at Masters Level; the PGCert gives you an additional funded 3 months to undertake additional research method training, alongside starting your PhD. So, for the first six months of my PhD, I spent half my time reading as much as I could in my two fields of interest (Ecological Economics and Employment Relations) on my topics of interest (work, working time reduction, and trade unions), and the other half undertaking a selection of research methods classes (Research Strategy and Design; Working Beyond Disciplines; and Qualitative Research Methods). This gave me time to cement my research skills, whilst dedicating a lot of my time to really getting into the nitty gritty literature of my field. 

As others have written about in their blogs, you might think you’ll start your PhD with a crystal clear sense of what you’re going to do and what your research questions are. If you’re high-strung and Type A like me, you will probably be surprised to learn that that pretty quickly goes out the window. By the time I actually came to start my PhD, it was over a year since I’d written my research proposal, and my ideas about the field and the questions I needed to be asking had already changed enormously, before I’d even started to dig into the literature. I’m now 1.5 years into my PhD, and my ideas are still shifting around the edges now. But, you come to learn that this is all part of the process. By the six month mark, I had a much clearer idea of what my research would/could look like, and how I’d go about achieving this. 

At the end of my first year, I’d attended a few conferences (one at Leeds, and one in Oslo, Norway), and had undertaken some demonstrating in the School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability. Attending the International Society for Ecological Economics conference in Oslo had given me a bit of a kickstart to work on the first paper that would come out of my PhD, as it had been announced there would be a Special Issue on Work in the discipline, and I was pretty keen to submit to that. So, I’d also made headway on a lot of my first paper. I’d also taken a month to suspend my PhD so I could work on a paid Research Assistant position I’d seen advertised. In my first year alone, there were so many different opportunities I could engage in on top of and as part of my PhD, and looking back now they played such a huge role in my personal and professional development. 

I’ve benefitted from a lot of different sources of support during my PhD so far. I feel really lucky to have a fantastic working relationship with both of my supervisors, who have been able to offer me advice for adjusting to PhD life, maintaining a healthy work-life balance, as well as how to make the most of my PhD. I’ve attended training offered by the University Library on using SPSS and NVivo, as well as training and support sessions offered within my School on settling into the PhD, how to write your First Formal Progress Review, submitting an ethics application, and many more. My Doctoral Training Program also offer a variety of different training sessions, and I’ve attended quite a few of these. There’s also a lot of other sources of support for PhD, Early Career Researchers and even lecturers and Professors in the School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability: I’m part of a research group called Econopol (Economic and Political Dimensions of Sustainability), where we get together once a month to discuss and present our research, and we often discuss issues we’re facing in our research. I feel incredibly lucky to be part of such a welcoming and supportive research community. 

I think something I wish I had known before I started my PhD is that feeling wobbly and uncertain and like you’re an imposter is a totally normal feeling, not just in the beginning, but the whole way through. We often say in my office that the PhD works in peaks and troughs in terms of your workload - you’ll probably have periods where you feel like you’re spinning a hundred plates, and then others where things are pretty quiet and you can afford to take it a bit slower and recover from those busy periods. I think it’s also true that you have peaks and troughs in your confidence the whole way through: you don’t just suddenly reach a point where you feel like you know enough, because you just learn more and more that there’s so much to learn and know. I think that can actually be a pretty wonderful thing if you learn to embrace it. Doing a PhD is a really incredible opportunity and privilege to learn, discover, and contribute to knowledge and policy, and I think the best way to do it is to embrace the uncertainty, and peaks and troughs in confidence, workload and all of it. 

Maybe in a few years time you’ll be looking back at everything you’ve accomplished so far during your PhD and realise how much you’ve grown and loved it.