PhD Memorandums

On Passing My Upgrade

I wanted to call this blog ‘PhD Diaries’, but that title is the intellectual property of an academic far more rigorous and organised than I.

I passed my upgrade. Look, from the email I got afterwards, it is official they can’t take it back now.

For anyone reading this who hasn’t had the pleasure, a PhD upgrade (sometimes called a confirmation or transfer viva, depending on where you are) is the point somewhere in year one or two (if you are studying full time) where you have to convince a panel of academics that your project is actually a PhD, and not just a very expensive, very stressful hobby. You submit a chunk of written work, 25k in my case, before sitting in front of people who know your field better than you do, and defend it. Pass, and you’re formally confirmed as a PhD candidate. Fail, or ‘refer,’ and you get sent away to fix things and try again. To then ultimately try to pass, or, as is perfectly possible, fail, and be told you are a no-good waste-of-space bum who won’t get a shot at the PhD big leagues. It’s less dramatic than the final viva, but it’s the first time anyone official checks whether you’re actually going somewhere.

Preparing my submission became a huge stalling point for me. It slowed my momentum and progress to a crawl for several months. With my process of muddling through a first draft without a plan to discover the ending and then working backwards to make it all make sense, producing a coherent section to submit before finishing the whole thing first became a nightmare.

But in March I did manage to meet my deadline.

The panel consisted of two academics I knew, who had taught me at various points during my BA and MA. Both perfectly pleasant, laughing, joking. And both, in the space of an hour, quietly dismantled my assumptions, arguments, formatting decisions, and the question of whether you need to include the full date in MHRA references.

‘Why have you done this?’ is a fair, reasonable, entirely professional question. It is also the exact question guaranteed to make you feel like you’ve been quietly building a house on sand for the last year.

‘Why didn’t you think of this?’ is worse, mostly because the honest answer is usually just ‘I don’t know, I didn’t,’ which is not the sort of thing you say to the two people deciding whether your project is a PhD. I didn’t mention George MacDonald because, before you brought him up, I didn’t know he existed. That’s why.

I found myself doing that thing where you justify a decision with far more conviction than you actually felt when you made it. Somewhere in my head, a small voice was going ‘you definitely did not think that hard about this at the time,’ while the rest of me frantically laid the track of argument millimetres ahead of the steam train of my academic career.

Also, frankly, as a man, I have a genetic phobia of being questioned at all about anything and the whole thing seems very unfair.

The setting did not help. It was one of the hottest days of the year, I was doing the whole thing over Teams, and I hadn’t been able to book any time off. So while trying to sound like a credible, confident researcher, I was also quietly wiggling the trackpad of my work laptop every so often so my status wouldn’t flip to ‘away’. By the end I was dripping in sweat.

Passing is, obviously, an enormous relief, though if I’m honest, most of that relief is less ‘look what I achieved’ and more ‘thank god I don’t have to redo any of this.’ Not a victory, just the avoidance of defeat.

The upgrade is, after all, not the destination. Somewhere behind me now are all the lessons, lectures, essays, exam halls, feedback, late nights and early mornings. Years of it, of school, stacked one on top of the other. Ahead of me now, there’s nothing left in that queue. No more modules. No more milestones. No more fancy bits of paper, bar one. Just the end of the PhD, waiting.

I think I should at least try to hold onto this particular feeling while I’m still in it, because it’s a strange one to describe and I suspect it won’t last. Not quite the middle of something and not quite the end, hovering in that odd space where you’re neither one thing nor the other. And it manages to feel like two contradictory things at once. Some days it feels like it will never end, like there will always be another chapter, another round of comments, another version of the document with ‘FINAL’ and then ‘FINAL_2’ in the filename. Other days it feels like it’s already slipping away far too quickly, like I blinked and the years condensed down into this one afternoon of sweating through a Teams call. Soon it will all be over. And then what will I have?