My experience of starting an LIS PhD

I gave a short talk this week at a CILIP Library & Information Research Group (LIRG) event, on “Routes and experiences of doing an LIS* PhD“. There were several other speakers there, all far more experienced and knowledgeable than me! The aim of my talk was simply to share a little of what my experience has been so far, to hopefully help others who are considering a PhD, or at the start of this journey themselves.

*Note for non-library folks reading: LIS = Library and Information Science.

Before the event I had asked on Twitter and Mastodon if anyone had any particular questions they would like answering in a session like this. I got a surprising amount of responses, including from people who weren’t able to attend and wanted to know if it would be recorded. The event wasn’t recorded, so I said I would post some version of my talk here. So here, more or less, is what I said…

I’m Laura, a subject librarian at the University of Huddersfield, and as of April this year, also a part-time PhD student at the University of Sheffield. My research is into the information behaviour of women engineering students. 

I’ve worked in libraries since 2007, starting with a graduate traineeship in a law library, followed by my Masters at City University London in 2008-09. I worked in law libraries for a while, then moved to a role in the charity sector, and then to my current role at the University of Huddersfield in 2014.

So it’s been a fair old gap between my Masters and my PhD! A question that comes up a lot is: why did I want to do this, and why now? It was something I’d been considering for a long time. I have a lot of friends and colleagues who either have or are pursuing PhDs, and in my role at Huddersfield I support PhD students amongst all other levels of study. So having that vantage point first of all gave me research envy: I was forever talking to people doing incredibly interesting research! And secondly, it made me start to think: I could do that…

I’d always imagined that a PhD was something only the cleverest of the clever could do, and certainly wasn’t for mere mortals like me. Talking to others who were going through the process themselves or had recently done so started to demystify it for me. It still seemed very challenging, but no longer felt completely out of my reach, so long as I was able to put the work in.

What I didn’t have at first was a research topic. That changed when I was involved in some UX research at Huddersfield, investigating how computing undergraduates in particular used the library and other support services, and how they went about seeking help at various points in their assignments. And this was fascinating, and started off the spark of an idea that there could be a bigger topic here that might work for a PhD.

I should explain here: my role as a subject librarian at Huddersfield involves me supporting students from the School of Computing & Engineering. As a woman, I’m always extremely conscious that when I teach information literacy to students from this School, frequently I am the only or one of the few women in the room. And in observing the few women students I did see, I got interested in the ways they talked about their research topics, or sought help from me or other librarians. So that sparked an idea: could I look into the information behaviour of minoritised genders in a very masculinised environment such as an engineering classroom? So my research topic was informed both by my own values, my feminism, and also my professional experience as a librarian and what I had observed in that role.

That idea developed gradually, it didn’t pop into my head fully formed! So I had plenty of time while I was considering whether I wanted to apply for a PhD programme to consider my next steps. Being a librarian, obviously my first step was to find out as much as I could! I spent a lot of time on Google and on YouTube, looking up advice on how to draft a proposal and how to choose an advisor. I also talked to lots of people. Particular thanks are due here to Bryony Ramsden, Richie Dockery, Jane Secker and Alison Hicks, who all generously gave their time and invaluable advice. Jane in particular said something that stayed with me: that people who get PhDs aren’t necessarily the cleverest, but they are the most stubborn. I’ve shared that with a few fellow PhD researchers I’ve met and I think most find it as reassuring as I did!

Of all things, the covid lockdown gave me the push to actually get moving with this! Like many people, I suddenly had lots more time and space to think and reflect, and consider what I wanted to be spending my time on. It also helped with the financial side: I knew I would have to self-fund, and the money I saved from not commuting or travelling during lockdown is basically financing my PhD. (Kirsty Wallis also mentioned money saved from commuting as funding for her PhD in her talk at this event, which is rather a damning indictment of public transport in the UK when you think about it…)

I’d read conflicting advice on whether you should draft a full proposal before or after contacting potential supervisors. I decided to do it first, largely to see if the vague ideas I had at this early stage would actually make a coherent research proposal. I ran it by a few people for feedback, some of those mentioned earlier and also Charles Oppenheim, who when I tweeted that I was writing a PhD proposal messaged me to offer to look it over if I wanted an external opinion. I am extremely grateful to Charles for this professional generosity, and for the constructive feedback and encouragement he sent me in response.

In the meantime, I was also looking at where I could apply and who I could approach as potential supervisors. I did some research into library schools around the country with PhD programmes, and looked at their departmental web pages and researcher profiles. From this I drew up a list of people with similar research interests who might be potential supervisors. I ended up contacting two people, at different institutions, for an informal chat about my research ideas and about their PhD programmes. For various reasons I decided on Sheffield, and have ended up with the dream team of Sheila Webber and Pam McKinney as my supervisors.

Not much to say from there: I applied to Sheffield, and was accepted for a place starting October 2021. Unfortunately a spanner in the works arrived in the form of covid: I got ill in June 2021, and developed long covid. By October I was still experiencing severe brain fog as well as various other physically-limiting symptoms, so made the difficult decision to defer my start date to April 2022. Luckily for me, my long covid turned out to be shorter than most, so by spring 2022 I was pretty well recovered and ready to start my PhD that April.

So how has my experience been so far? First of all, I am loving it. It’s one of the most challenging but rewarding things I’ve ever done. But it is certainly challenging, particularly to do part-time alongside working.

I have recently decided to reduce my working hours. Starting in April, I began my PhD journey during the quietest part of the year for an academic library, so was able to spend some work time on PhD work. But I always knew that when the autumn term came around I would have less time to spend on study. So from September, I have dropped to 0.8 FTE, meaning I now work four days a week instead of five.

I’m managing my time so far by being extremely strict around boundaries. I have set days and times when I study, and I stick to those. That means saying no to social and family stuff sometimes, so I’ve talked to all those nearest and dearest to me to help them understand why I’m making the choices that I am. 

I also want to acknowledge my own privilege here: I don’t have caring responsibilities, I have a well-paying, permanent job, I could afford to reduce my hours, and I can choose what time I dedicate to studying without having to work around other people’s needs. I know people who are doing part-time PhDs while also working full time and also raising a young family, for example, and I am full of awe for how they make that work. So I don’t really have any advice for anyone doing the PhD on “hard mode”, so to speak, other than that I think you have to decide what to prioritise and stick to that.

I am fully self-funding, and again I am aware of the financial privilege in that being an option for me. But although my employer isn’t funding me, they are supportive and willing to give me the flexibility to pursue this while working. While I don’t have any official research time from work, my line manager is happy for me to do things like attend online CPD training or research group meetings during work time, so long as they don’t conflict with any specific work requirements.

So that’s my experience so far! I am now seven months into the process, which as I am part-time equates to around three and a half months of full-time progress. What I’ve found most challenging so far is probably understanding research methodologies. Although this was something I covered in my Masters, that was a long time ago, and the practitioner research I’ve been involved in most recently did not have the kind of robust research design that is expected at PhD level! But my supervisors have been great in helping me identify what I need in order to develop, and I am slowly getting there.

My top tips for anyone considering or just starting a PhD would be:

• Take your time, do some research into who is working/publishing in your field and who you could potentially approach for supervision.
• Ask for help! The great thing about librarians is, we love to help. There are lots of librarian-researchers out there who are always generous with their time and advice. Including myself: if anyone is considering applying for a PhD and wants to chat about it, please do give me a shout!
• Spend some time before you start getting a workflow set up. Decide when and where you will work on your PhD, and find out what options are available to you for flexible working, for example.