PhD is just a bumpy road, sooner or later I’ll be there

I knew that doing a PhD is about ups and downs, but it’s a kind of special fun to discover the bumpy road as you go along. This time it’s about mixed feelings of discovering a good paper…

I’m reading A Confessional Account of an Ethnography About Knowledge Work by Ulrike Schultze (spotted it some time ago, but got a version only yesterday) and my feelings go everywhere between:

• gut feeling of finding one of “the papers” that can make core foundations of my research
• thinking “why the hell I didn’t find the paper a year ago?”
• admiration of research done by someone else and a way of presenting it
• loosing confidence thinking “I will never be able to do it that good”
• happy insights and “aha!” moments – “now I know what to do!”
• getting a bit down understanding how much time doing it will take
• trying to get myself together “it’s just a bumpy road, sooner or later I’ll be there”…

And I’m still in the middle of reading it :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/07/23.html#a1299; comments are here.

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Tagged as: knowledge networker, PhD