Doctorb

Last month I submitted the amended version of my thesis, meaning that after I sprint across the stage at Marvel Stadium and execute an exquisite flying kick to the Vice-Chancellor’s bonneted head, I’ll be a doctor. I haven’t looked it up but I assume this is the procedure.

I hate to make this all about me,¹He says on his personal website at bradleyjdixon.me. but now that I’ve reached this milestone it feels appropriate to survey the ups and downs of the journey and make a few observations. I realise how utterly boring this will be to anyone who’s not me, but I also know that when my brain has turned to mush in 50 5 years I’ll want to look back on this time and remember more than just a faint grey haze. So please excuse me while I get embarrassingly earnest for a second.

Ups: The people. It’s a cliche to say it, but it’s true. I researched under the supervision of two of the best people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, and every positive thing I’ve experienced in the course of what I jokingly refer to as my academic “career” can be traced directly to my decision to work with them. Supervision is hard work at the best of times, and often made even harder by factors outside the supervisor’s direct control, so it’s surprisingly rare to have supervisors who are genuinely attuned to the challenges of postgraduate study. (I’ve confirmed this in dozens of conversations with other PhD candidates and researchers.) It’s even more rare to have supervisors whose mentorship extends beyond the immediate concern of your doctoral research or thesis and who train you for every aspect of life in academia, such as navigating the more byzantine areas of university bureaucracy and academic publishing. Completing a thesis is hard, but the task is made vastly more achievable if you have the good sense to win the supervisor lottery.

Downs: Basically everything else. Enforced precarity. Wage theft. Poverty-level scholarship rates. Decimated campus culture. An engorged managerial/consultant class whose methods to increase “efficiency” make being a student an increasingly abject experience. Feeling unwelcome in campus facilities designed for the neurotypical. The spiritual exhaustion of representing an institution whose strategic initiatives, industry partnerships, and day-to-day management and operations seem to conflict with its stated commitments to fight the effects of climate change and actively oppose genocide. Of course I am the first person to ever notice these problems with the transactional, neoliberal, corporatised university system.

I have a velvet bonnet. Let me tell you how to live your life

Now that it’s over I am of course overjoyed to have completed my PhD, though I can’t exactly say I would recommend postgraduate study to anyone else. Sadly the cushy life of a study influencer is not in the cards for me.

I do have one genuine study hack to share though, just in case there are any future candidates who found this post by searching for “phd +depression +diarrhea”. (Hi!)

The best advice I have to offer anyone working on a postgraduate thesis — and I am being completely serious here — is to format your thesis so it looks nice.

The formatting of your thesis should not, in a truly equitable world, make any difference to your result. But we live in a boring dystopia and I know from experience that it absolutely does.

My academic work, as far as I can tell, is nothing special. I’m not trying to project false modesty here; I know I’m a good writer and I believe in the novelty of my research, but I’m not special, at least compared to other postgraduate students. Despite this, I have consistently received glowing feedback on my work, nearly all of which has explicitly mentioned how “professional”, “meticulous”, and “authoritative” my work looks.

This can be ascribed almost entirely to the fact that I use InDesign to typeset my work before submission. Nothing fancy or complicated, just consistent margins, typography, and a few stylistic flourishes I copied from academic books like inserting generous amounts of space at the beginning of chapters. All beginner-level InDesign functions.

For my thesis, as a little end-of-PhD treat for myself, I splurged on Matthew Butterik‘s beautiful Equity and Concourse fonts, though I’m not sure they had much to do with the feedback I received.²A friend, when I excitedly showed them my thesis and its new font, noted that it “looks the same as Times New Roman.” A similar result could be achieved with free alternatives from Google Fonts.

My sense is that formatting your thesis like this, in the way a professionally typeset book or journal article is presented, cues examiners to unconsciously read your work as they would a book or journal article, imbued with a certain amount of authority. I’m not saying a pretty font is all you need — a poorly written thesis will still get a poor result — but professional presentation, I think, reflects a certain care and attention in the preparation of your work that puts examiners at ease. This is something the default Word template and the lowly, pathetic Calibri simply cannot do.

That’s the best — really the only — advice I have to offer. I’m working on making a clean version of my InDesign template that I’ll put up here for anyone who wants to use it, hopefully soon.

Word frequency highlights

Lastly, one thing I really enjoyed about writing my thesis was looking at the word frequency table generated by Scrivener. It’s wild that fully five per cent of my thesis is just the word “the”!

Anyway, here are some fun frequencies for the word nerds:

Studying comedy is fun.

Footnotes

• 1
  He says on his personal website at bradleyjdixon.me.
• 2
  A friend, when I excitedly showed them my thesis and its new font, noted that it “looks the same as Times New Roman.”