The result

Well we did it. Go team! I was semi-officially awarded my PhD (I need some signatures to make it official, official). But it’s not the end, not quite. There’s still some work to be done and I want to make sure I hit all the boxes. In the Marines we always ended hard training with a strong finish, I’m hoping to channel some of that into the end of this journey. So a brief update, then I’m going to sleep for a few … years.

Well the cat’s out of the bag. I don’t typically like to announce that I blog, but I promised myself if I ever finished my PhD, I would be sure to share this little project of mine. Similar to the book chapter I wrote (available here!) I decided I should go ahead and share, even if it is a bit scary. So I shared all the hard stuff, including the fact that I struggle with my mental health and I touched on the whole suicide attempt bit, if only briefly. It can be hard for people to talk about, but sometimes I feel like it’s even harder for people to hear, so I mentioned it and move on like it wasn’t a huge deal, mostly because I don’t think it is. It’s something that happened, we all struggle.

Anyway, after what felt like hours of deliberation after I left the room, school-PI flagged me back over, and along with the committee members that were there, I was told I was now a PhD. I’m not going to lie; I cried a bit. It’s been a long journey from start to now (not really finished, so I can’t say that…), and I’m still a bit anxious about the whole situation. I mean, I know I did it, but it still feels like someone will pop up any second and tell me. Just kidding! I guess that’s the fun of living with my brain. I’m exhausted, and it’s still stressing me out.

The good news is that I will get a bit of a break, I THINK…? 

There’s still work to be done. There are dissertation edits to be made, some small analyses that need to be done, and a bit of reorganizing that I want to do. I mean, the best dissertation is a finished one, so I’m not going to get hung up on making it perfect, but I do want to put something out that I’m proud of. Once that’s done and the form saying I passed is submitted, then I can safely sleep for a decade or two, or maybe just devolve into slime mold; I hear that’s a good option these days.

Mostly, I’m just grateful to be on this side of it because it felt like I would never make it. Although I do feel like I got hit by a truck, then backed over by a school bus, then … well, you get the idea. In fact, this post was supposed to come yesterday afternoon or evening, but I couldn’t find the energy to finish it off, so here we are the day after, and I’m trying to wrap it up now. So since I am somewhat confused about where I was going with this, let’s just talk now.

Generally speaking, I feel okay. I definitely won’t be getting all (any) of the edits I need to do started. Instead, I’m helping one of the summer interns finish their poster, and then I will spend the rest of my weekend trying to stay awake until a reasonable time to fall asleep. I guess I’m just getting old or something, the military does age you quite a bit. I’ve got the problems of someone in their 80s, and it’s not fun. Which is to say, a nice relaxing time on the couch is basically the best thing I can do for myself at the moment, so I’m going to enjoy it.

So… after 15 years of being a student I now have my B.S., my M.S., and my Ph.D., guess I should probably go off to medical school or something and get one more just for fun and collect the whole set. I’m kidding, I definitely do NOT have the grades or the years of life left for that. To think, there was a time where I thought I would never go to college, much less do a whole PhD.

Some parting thoughts I still plan to formally close the 365 days of academia project with a post dedicated to it. Four years is a long time to end on such an unceremonious note, so this isn’t the official ending for it. I think feeling stuck is a part of the PhD journey in general. A lot of my posts are centered around feeling stuck, inadequate, or just confused, and I think that a lot of people doing the whole PhD route feel something similar. I wish it wasn’t like that, but so it goes. Getting a PhD is a team effort and I don’t think that’s talked about a lot. I was lucky to have a good team, including all of you, so thank you all.

It was an experience and now I get to look forward to what comes next. Which, thanks to the 365 days of academia project, I’ll probably be writing about. But that’s a story for another post. For now I’m going to take a minute to enjoy the view from the finish line and maybe tomorrow I will think about the next adventures.