Do you have four or five half-finished academic articles on your desk but would rather start a sixth than submit one? Do you often think that if you just carry out one more experiment then your work will be good enough to write up - but it never is?
Perhaps it seems that you spend all day working, but have nothing to show for it, or that you are just too busy to focus properly on your research?
If so then you may be a victim of "self-sabotage", according to the Times Higher Ed Supplement.
"Perfectionism, over-committing and procrastination are rife among PhD students and can stop talented high achievers from completing their theses on time or at all, according to Hugh Kearns, head of the staff development and training unit at Flinders University in Australia.
And because the stakes for academics only get higher after gaining a doctorate, self-sabotage can be a career-long problem.
The nature of the PhD encourages isolation, prompting anxiety to grow alongside a certain degree of perfectionism, Mr Kearns told the UK Higher Education Researchers' Development conference this week. Over-committing is a frequent response to this fear, giving students an excuse for failure.
For others, the knowledge that the thesis can never be perfect is so crippling that they can develop what he has jokingly termed "read-itis" or "experiment itis".
Supervisors should be careful not to let students go unsupported for long periods of time on the assumption that they'll get in touch if there is a problem. "That's the last time they're going to come to you," Mr Kearns said.
He also urged supervisors to "give that normalising effect, and explain where the standard is" since many dedicated PhD students end up writing as if for a Nobel Prize. He reminds students at his workshops: "If you hand in a thesis it's very likely you will be successful."
Mr Kearns is speaking in UCD on 4th Octocer on both time management for PhD students and the "seven secrets of successful PhD students": http://www.ucd.ie/graduatestudies/transferableskills/transferableskills_workshops_odgspdt.htm
There is a workshop on the "seven secrets" for PhD superviosrs on the 5th October.
5 comments:
Interesting stuff, how about suffering from blogitis- i.e. self-distraction from a specific work focus through the online publication and self-validation of broad and tangental research interests.
You got me!
Why are there always "Seven secrets of.." and not 6 or 8 ? This must hark back to some pagan superstition or is a prime number fetish?
Recipe for getting into seventh heaven?: "Among the Hebrews, every seventh year was sabbatical, and seven times seven years was the jubilee. The three great Jewish feasts lasted seven days; and between the first and second were seven weeks. Levitical purifications lasted seven days; Balaam would have seven alters, and sacrificed on them seven bullocks and seven rams"
From a cynical psych point of view the fascination with the number seven could be due to it's location as the mean number of items a person can remember i.e. the magic number 7 (+or-2).
If only I was guaranteed a sabbatical every 7 years...
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