First off, yes it has been a while since my last blog. But until the last few weeks, nothing was really happening. At least not with my PhD or African adventures. But that has all changed exceptionally fast. So, I thought I’d use this blog to update everyone on the PhD and job front.

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Firstly, I have officially resubmitted my PhD. I spent four long and torturous months waiting for my PhD to be reviewed. Ok, so perhaps the month in Spain wasn’t long or torturous, but I swear the other three were. I spent the majority of those months, even some of my travelling month, flipping between elation at being so close to the end and then having severe bouts of imposter syndrome*. Unfortunately, like many PhD students I have spent the last 4 years thinking that one day I would wake up and the world would realise that I wasn’t actually supposed to be doing a PhD, that it was all an accident (or worse, a cruel joke) and that I was a fraud. And for some reason, I decided that it was my thesis examiners who were going to find me out, not the countless academics who had reviewed elements of my project over the last three plus years. Anyway, all that worry was for nothing as when I finally got my thesis reviews back, they were positive. The reason the reviews took so long was to do with a paperwork nightmare that occurred before my examiners were even sent my thesis. So I was thankful that both examiners finished their reviews by the due dates, otherwise who knows when I would have gotten it back.

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*You can read more about imposter syndrome here - perhaps my referencing a Wikipedia page isn’t really helping my ‘I’m a real scientist’ case, but after four years of reading scientific journals, I am relishing the prospect of reading the occasional wiki entry.  

Once I had my thesis and the comments back, it was back into PhD mode (a mode I had almost completely forgotten how to get back into). I had changes to make, like pretty much any other PhD student, but all of the comments were positive and quite minor. My examiners did a great job of the review*. They were super detailed, kind while still being constructive, and I was happy to do almost everything they suggested because I could see how it would make my thesis, and pending publications, better. I say ‘almost everything’ because as is always the case, the examiners don’t know all the ins and outs of the PhD (no-one does but the student, or at least we hope the student does!) and the study population. So there were some points that were less appropriate for my study than they would have been to other wildebeest or behavioural studies. Anyway, after about three weeks I resubmitted my PhD and I now await my UQ reviewer to sign-off on it and then I will be conferred (A.K.A Doctor Bec). Until then it is just another waiting game, but one with significantly less feelings of fraud thanks to the little bit of confidence that I gained from my thesis reviews.

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*I promise the reviewers haven’t paid me for this review of their reviews

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In the meantime, I’m not spending my time how I expected. I envisaged this time would be one when my already busy schedule of job applications would become even busier. I thought I would be applying to more jobs than I could count, just in the attempt to get one. This is because, unfortunately, PhD students have a very difficult time being employed after completion. And those with jobs are on short contracts that are dependent on funding from funding agencies that don’t even fund 20% of the projects that request funding*. So it was to my delight that I signed a contract (admittedly one that has a somewhat funding dependent salary) before I’d resubmitted my PhD. I got a job on the Kafue Conservation Project, which is a project run by Game Rangers International. I’ll be based in Kafue National Park, in central Zambia, and will find myself living in yet another tent. Kafue life will be a lot different to Etosha, I imagine. For starters my tent will be on a deck and have a thatched roof, so I will be really moving up in the world. On the other hand, there is no power in camp, except for a couple of solar panels that work to run lights and a fridge. There’s also no oven. So I think life is about to get a whole lot simpler! Except perhaps while cooking, when I attempt to turn oven-baked dishes into stove-top wonders. There’s lots more info and photos (sorry this blog has been so photo-free) to come in the next couple of months about finishing my PhD, my new job and a special project I’ve been working on…

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*I actually read an interesting article on this topic in Nature today. I’d like to think that citing Nature has restored some faith that the Wikipedia reference destroyed earlier!