Life has been running at a million miles per hour lately and I’ve been feeling a bit manic trying to stay on top of both my professional and personal life. I’ll back up a few weeks and explain. Early December: I was headed back to the US for a couple weeks before Christmas to spend some much-needed time off with my family, and was determined to check a couple major things off my to-do list. First, I wanted to finish title and abstract screening for my systematic review. With less than half of 5,300 records that needed screened completed and a couple weeks to go, it was a daunting task and one I spent a few hours every day on. The second was to set up interviews with key stakeholders. The purpose of this step of my research is to talk to gestational diabetes experts in order to understand what they think the barriers and solutions to physical activity are in women who have had a diagnosis of gestational diabetes. Thanks to a few incredible mentors – who have been extremely helpful in providing contacts and interview space – I was ready to set up interviews and train in qualitative methods. Mid-December: With my to-do completed (or so I thought) I went home for Christmas and got to spend time with friends, family, and pets (including the two kittens my parents got before I arrived! See pet spam below). However, a couple days into my trip, I received an email (Mistake #1: checking email when on leave) from a Research Governance Officer working in a faction of NHS ethics. The email said I that didn’t have the correct ethical approval to conduct my stakeholder interviews… Cue the panic. After some frantic back and forth with my supervisors and research in the depths of the NHS ethics web… I realised my mistake. While I was correct in thinking I didn’t need full NHS REC ethical approval as I wasn’t working with patients, I did need a subset of ethical approval: NHS R&D Ethics. This level of approval applies to staff and other lower-risk research. After much discussion, I decided to leave it alone for my time off and work on it when I got back to work in early January. In hindsight, perhaps not the best idea for me. I’m not the type of person who is able to shrug my shoulders and relax when I know a huge amount of work lies in the future. I worried (extensively) about it for most of the time I was home and until I returned to work - much to the chagrin of my family and partner. Part of the problem was that I didn’t try to forget about it and relax… With experience being the best teacher, I’ve come up with some tips and hints about how to Not be a PhD student over holiday:
Guilt about not doing research can feel so pervasive during our day-to-day life as PhD students, maybe what taking a holiday is really about is allowing ourselves to escape from that guilt. Not feeling guilty about working if we want to, but more importantly, not feeling guilty about not working. While I wasn’t too successful about taking time off during my first real break of my PhD, I know that the next time I will do better. My partner and I have plans to visit southern African this autumn, which will certainly give me another shot at this balancing act PhD students are all too familiar with.
Until next time! Audrey
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Author. About.Audrey Buelo. PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. (Mostly) professional and research-related musings - with the odd cat picture. Archives
April 2019
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