Those first few months in your doctoral programme …

Susie West, the Society’s Education Officer, lends a guiding hand to those starting out on their doctorates in a pandemic year.

Model of the British Library ,St Pancras (1982–97), by Colin St John Wilson and Mary Jane Long. Photograph by Mike Peel.

Welcome, new doctoral candidates, wherever you are: raring to get stuck into your research after patient months of working on your proposal and working out how to get funded. Somehow, you got to this point: registered, set up with supervisions, and gearing up to engage with … well, what?

Firstly, congratulations on getting to this point in 2020. I think September is a really useful ‘reset’ point after the UK lockdown experience; we know so much more about the challenges of living through a pandemic, and we can be fairly realistic about what will be possible in the next few months. It is a chance to start the plan of action that you have nurtured up to this point, but we also know that ‘action’ is going to feel a bit different.

When you registered with your university, whether you have joined somewhere new or continued onwards from your master’s work, you joined a department/school and you will be thinking about the immediate contacts you’ll make there. Let me outline a little of the infrastructure you don’t get to see, but which is working away on your behalf. I’m doing this because we all need to understand where the connections are for us in an online and distanced environment: your work is your own, but you are not alone.

When I am not being the SAHGB Education Officer, I am the Postgraduate Convenor (PGC) for the department of art history at the Open University (OU). I met with the current group of department PhD candidates recently, in their informal online café, and we talked about the nature of support on offer from the university. Essentially, you should use your supervisor(s) as the bridge between you and your university; if everything goes super-smoothly, you won’t notice who else is working on your behalf. But sometimes, and particularly as doctoral timetables need updating to work around pandemic impacts, you will plug in to other support. UK universities share very similar approaches to organising doctoral research, although the detail varies; we all want you to progress, stay within the timetable, and emerge successfully. Support divides into academic, which is about how your intended research is working out and what you need in order to achieve it, and pastoral, which will be familiar at any level of study and goes beyond the immediate relationship with your supervisor(s) towards specific health and welfare support. I’m going to stay with academic support.

Your supervisors are not left alone in this process, so if you need their advice about academic support, they can tap into the next level of advice if necessary, and that comes at department/school level: as a PGC, I will field questions, unearth guidelines and flourish forms, as best I can. In turn, I am supported by a faculty-level group of my peers and a Director of Research Students, and we are very exercised by the immediate challenges of impacts and possibilities for research. We are looking at how best to document, if we can’t solve, the impact of the pandemic on research timetables. At the OU, we do love a form so we devised a new one last Spring to capture unintended slow down/study breaks as a direct result of COVID-19 (no fieldwork, no archives, no library visits). We aren’t keen on undocumented, retrospective claims for interruptions, so a timely form is the answer to ‘banking’ time that might be needed as an extension at the end of a doctoral programme. Bear this in mind for your own faculty’s expectations.

You may already be aware of the UK Research and Innovation response to supporting funded studentships (through the AHRC regional consortia), announced earlier this year; in essence, the message is that extensions to final-year research are necessary for almost all students, and public funding support has been possible for most students from their funders to enable these extensions. The problem is one of time and of money; an extension of time for your studies is possible for many reasons, but getting funding for that extension as a direct result of COVID-19 is variable depending on your sources. Some universities have decided on blanket ‘six-month extension’ policies for doctorates due to complete now, and have waived the fees that are chargeable for exceeding the agreed three-year (full-time) research period. It is a highly variable landscape across the HE sector, but one that you should keep an eye on as your own university policy develops across the next three years, and your timetable rolls out.

University postgraduate induction processes are happening now; for the OU this is entirely online this year, so I don’t get to have lunch with our new candidates. As a first year student, you are strongly encouraged to participate in formal skills training provided by your university, and that’s probably been converted to an online experience too. Many architectural history candidates have been working in professional practice, and you might feel pretty well equipped in terms of the skills you expect to draw on to achieve your research. Do bear in mind that the thesis itself is a very specific form of production, with long-form writing that you may not have needed to do for years, and the demands of forming a critical response to your reading. Now more than ever, get involved with what is on offer, join the online groups, and meet your peer group; you will need to know that you have other humans out there when you become immersed in your project.

Architectural history doctoral theses are hugely diverse, some requiring detailed knowledge of single buildings, others drawing on literary approaches or exploring the architectural nature of material and visual culture. What you all share in the first year is the need to produce a literature review, and this is often the basis for an internal review that confirms your progression (a quality-assurance process for you and your university). For this, you need the resources of all the online reading you can get, and some strategic forays into whatever time-limited library visits you can make. Front-load your academic year with this reading, and don’t feel too bad about not being able to get out and about before Christmas: desk research is your job now. Whatever you go on to do with your doctorate, you will never have so much reading time again. Enjoy it.

@UCLWritingLab is a good source of interesting tweets and retweets, and the latest UK public funding position on doctoral support can be found at https://www.ukri.org/research/coronavirus/guidance-for-the-research-and-innovation-communities1/.