Thread by @postcyborg

Work day so good my thoughts smoothly transitioned into supervillain speeches about how all the people who failed me and gatekept me out of the PhD track are going to realize the error of their ways in a flash of humility and shame when they read what I’m cooking

I basically made significant conceptual and logical-organizational progress on my argument in the span of a day after literally no movement for the better part of this year and series of humiliating rejections that forced me to start from scratch (illegitimate, negligent advice

that I can safely say in retrospect basically amount to sabotage). Now the current form reflects parts of my original idea and impetus that I spent years on (and which various parties for various reasons served as obstacles for), parts of the “new direction” I was nudged onto

earlier this year due to recklessly bad, borderline cruel last minute “advice” (I was not given a choice) right before my qualifying exams, and then a few ideas I’ve contemplated since that serve as bridges between the two corpses of projects I’ve been forced to abandon.

I fear I’m being cryptic so I’ll just work out what I mean: I came to the UK to do a MA then PhD, both fully funded; during my MA I augmented my PhD project based on a years worth of studies and my presumed PhD advisor did not like my development of the proposal;

I know she didn’t like it bc her strategy was to dismiss everything I wrote for the first 18 months of the PhD - she did not, however, ever explicitly articulate what her problems were nor did she ever engage with anything I submitted or spoke of in good faith;

this obviously led to an impasse so, very belatedly and reluctantly, I made motions to switch supervisors halfway thru my PhD - *right before* my regularly scheduled qualifying exam; I was not then prepared to do the exam (which is basically a new, more detailed research proposal

judged by a defense committee) since I effectively received NO SUPERVISION for almost two years; I was allowed to postpone my exam by six months in order to use that time finding a new supervisor and working with them to refine what I had (the conceptually incoherent series of

drafts based off my first supervisor’s bad faith guidance + a mass of notes, drafts, hunches, and stray thoughts of my real, but suppressed, idea); six months would have been ample time had I immediately gotten a new supervisor but for mysterious reasons my department wasted 5/6

of these months, which was objectively unnecessary bc I had a specific professor in mind, already spoke with him semi-regularly, and when I was eventually given the greenlight to ask him he immediately agreed - it was a pointless waste of time (there are many more details abt why

this happened but I’m summarizing); therefore, I had just over ONE MONTH to corral 1.5 years of deliberately sabotaged submitted work + deliberately suppressed unsupervised work into a passable upgrade - not to mention that at this point I had been out of commission from regular

working/studying for a full year (unrelated mental health break plus the half-year limbo); I did my best and turned in a thorough, valiant effort at synthesizing it all; my new supervisor, in our first ever meeting a mere TEN DAYS before this exam was supposed to take place, told

me that what I was proposing was overly ambitious and impractical - his main point was that it wasn’t developed enough to conceivably complete in the time I had remaining; this is an important caveat: in the British PhD system they have very strict timeframes, everyone must

finish within 3 years and, given that I was 6 months behind, the criterion for me would be whether I could complete what I proposed to do in less than a year; in short, the awful, fateful advice I was given, and stupidly took after putting up a perfunctory fight, was to give up

the primary line of inquiry that had animated my entire project from my MA but which had been rendered effectively taboo by my first supervisor (though she only admitted this at the end, she had fundamental disagreements, though she had not read any of the relevant texts) to the

point where I preferred to try again with a new supervisor, and find a different case study/methodology, TEN DAYS PRIOR TO MY UPGRADE; this was my first ever official supervisory meeting with him, where I submitted what amounted to the culmination of almost three years of toil

and struggle against active sabotage, and he insisted I just drop it in favor of some undefined new direction, solely bc of the completely arbitrary timeframe imposed by the British university system; to be clear, neither the ambitious scope nor my half-year lag would even

register as issues at all at universities in other countries, it’s completely institutionally constructed; *some* of the issue had to do with how uneven it was, some parts having received lots of attention but little direction, others the exact inverse - but as I explained this

was not my choice and the very fact I had switched supervisors should have meant that my specific mitigating circumstances would be taken into account here; I only took this shitty advice bc I figured I’d just return to the core ideas later once I got over this formality - play

the game convincingly and then do what I want later (UK PhDs have exactly 2 desires that matter, the midway upgrade and the final submission); however, there is no game that can be convincingly played in ten days, I simply submitted a rambling, error-ridden recap of the project

I spent 3ish years on, without the careful composition and with the most fundamental concepts forcefully excised, leaving a husk just as empty as the rudderless project my first supervisor tried to foist onto me, only with much worse prose; after roundly failing the ritual

I learned the hard way that, for admin purposes, the upgrade IS NOT a mere formality - I got one more chance, with a five week gap; well, 5 weeks is better than 10 days but it’s still not great, so naturally I just had a panic attack for ~4 weeks (memory of this time runs

together); I should add that the stakes were very high for me: a second failure would lose my funding and sole source of income, I’d have to pay prohibitively expensive tuition to finish, I cannot legally work >20hrs/wk on my visa (and for “good” reason: writing a dissertation is

already a full-time job!), ultimately I’d have to drop out and therefore lose my visa, leave my friends, lover, life behind; imagine spending between 2-3 years fighting to study something you believe is worthwhile only to end up getting deported - failure was not an option;

so in just over a week I developed a WHOLE NEW PROJECT; it had maximal thematic overlap with my old project in order to use my existing work as much as possible but it had a new case study, methodology, and really a different topic and general idea than the first version despite

being adjacent; first project was about imperialism, global production networks, labor struggles, and Chinese development, second was about the US-China “chip war”; I seriously knew nothing about the latter but managed to formulate an interesting research question anyway;

anyway, though what I managed to do was develop an interesting angle and hypothesis, this is far from a proper upgrade so obviously I still failed; brain shut down from sleep deprivation, panicked and deleted most of my document, submitted just 25% of what I supposed to submit;

my “strategy” (desperate cope) was to submit the central element, the research design, the elusive thing the committee wanted me to focus in, and beg them to let me explain the other sections verbally - I could speak about it but simply did not have enough time to write it; my

hope was that, given my circumstances and the stakes, the committee would be somewhat flexible; so long as I have a compelling project they could overlook the missing formalities and rough state - obviously this was wrong; I should add that despite insisting I work my ass off til

the bitter end coming up with something new rather than merely try to work with the project I had, new supervisor did not help, offer to help, or generally put any time into it beyond meeting with me a handful of times - figuring it difficult methodological problems was my

responsibility; mind you, the original thing he insisted I change was to drop the methodology I had come up with - a labor of passion and years - mostly bc he thought it was too complicated (for him) bc it involves basic linear algebra; I’m not exaggerating his main criticism was

that it was very technical so I needed to be proficient in it in order to convince an upgrade committee that I could complete it within 1 year; doesn’t matter that I would have been proficient in it by then had I not been forced to waste my time instead or that it isn’t actually

very hard, he’s just intimidated by math (as relayed to my by one of his colleagues, who didn’t know this context when they mentioned it); what I’m trying to convey is the issue is he was sort of the wrong guy, I only folded bc after a year on leave I wasn’t feeling confident and

as I said at that point in time I figured I’d just cede the battle and Trojan horse everything I want in later; anyway so I came up with a whole new research design entirely without his input after he shot the first one down; after all this (pointless!) stress and work, I was not

recommended for the upgrade; my funding/stipend was immediately terminated and I became homeless (still am technically); turns out there’s a loophole too complicated to explain that has allowed me to waive the remaining tuition I would’ve owed - so I didn’t have to drop out -

but due to various clerical errors the university keeps trying to charge my random but exorbitant sums that I am STILL (6 months later) fighting off; I am barred from getting a PhD at the end of it all but I can complete a dissertation and earn an MPhil (a SECOND master’s in the

same discipline from the same department, YAY) which is basically have over as far as any (probably purely illusory anyway) academic career is concerned; in fact I strain to think what use an MPhil has, I call it an MFail bc it basically signifies exactly one thing;

it is still 75% of the word count of PhD dissertation, only it’s capped with no extensions after 3 years - currently I have 2 months, 3 weeks left - so I actually have significantly more to write in a shorter span of time than any PhD ever would (outside of incompetence);

however, my visa relies on me finishing it - even though I already got one degree here, by starting and failing a different degree I’d be ineligible for the 2 year postgrad extension, in other words if I drop out I’d have to leave the country in 60 days, no path for future visas,

if I stick it out then I can stay till the end of 2025 (till my due date) then optionally extend it till 2028; this is the ONLY reason I am doing it, I’d drop out if I could, I’d have dropped out every minute since April if I’d had the choice; has my “supervisor” reached out to

me since early June? NO; if I’m gonna finish this thing then it’s going to be purely from my own efforts, what MEAGER support I’ve received up to now has been entirely NEGATED by the utter failure to advocate for me or help me develop something in the moments when it rly counted;

luckily, after all that, I am still passionate about what I’m working on, it’s hard to access most of the time bc I either feel an overwhelming need to avoid it - too painful - or if I do force myself, I rediscover all the reasons I had for different choices that were shot down

so I just get angry and bitter rather than jubilant; but I’m simply going to fall off I don’t start hustling now, no one is going to help me, so I’m just forcing myself to stare at the vast boneyard of notes, books, drafts, data, etc until something comes out (figuratively

speaking, I have a better work process than described and an outline to follow that I’ve been developing on the intermittent days when I can actually concentrate these past few months); I am forced to live in a squat - while I love living in the squat and feel genuinely blessed,

it is nonetheless true that this is out of necessity bc I am homeless (living in London w/o a living wage rate income? not a concern for my former funders who didn’t hesitate a second pulling the plug on my sole ability to pay rent); moreover, it’s not exactly a calm environment

to perform intellectual labor in, though I do my best (and everyone is very respectful); my method the last few weeks has been to physically cut up my notes and glue them into big sheets of butcher paper and I have been literally drafting everything through the arrangement of

constituent fragments, not sure its efficacy but it’s the ONLY thing that has broken a many month deadlock of writers block; currently I am trying to write three chapters that will be standalone journal articles, each reflecting different portions of my two versions of the

dissertation, so it’s a cumulative effort; the most infuriating thing is there is a through line connecting all these pieces, which I can articulate both theoretically and empirically, but it’s so elaborate (again, a total of almost 4 years of work, albeit uneven/discontinuous)