Project hunting: a year of rotations and reflections
Jasmine Lee shares her journey through the first year of the PhD, navigating rotation projects & deciding on a research focus.
For those of us who’ve flat hunted in London before, I think we can all agree it is an absolute pain. Endless refreshing and scrolling through listings, viewing mould-covered, pest-infested flats… With every door that we walk through, we try to imagine: Could this be my new home? Can I imagine my existence here - sleeping, eating, working, living here?
When I walked into the offices for each of my rotation projects*, I had an eerily similar feeling. Not in the sense of “can I sleep here?” – although I did assess how comfortable the sofa booths (if any) were – but in the nagging uncertainty of whether this is the right place for me.
*In the first year of our mental health sciences PhD, we do three rotation projects with different supervisors across three themes: mechanism, population and intervention.
It’s a tricky business, finding three projects/supervisors out of a massive list of 100+ projects. We are incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to explore our interests before pinning down a project, to dip our toes into various fields of research and test out the waters.
But these are murky waters, because with each project I’ve come to realise the fields’ limitations, or that I’m not passionate enough about the work, or I just don’t enjoy the lab. As with everything else in life, like looking for an ‘adequate’ flat in London, it’s about weighing up our options and making a decision anyway.
Many of us started the PhD with vague ideas, whether it’s inflammation and depression or trauma and resilience, but the rotation projects have broadened our horizons such that we are now more ‘confused’ in terms of research interests – which I’m told is a good thing! It means we’re more open to interdisciplinarity in research and learning from different fields. The more I delve into the nitty gritty of cognitive models and innovative interventions, the more I step back to ask the bigger, more fundamental questions of, what is mental health? What does it mean to have a psychiatric illness? These are questions we spend a lot of time battling with as a cohort, and I’m grateful to have like-minded peers to reflect on research and its implications together. (We’ve even attended sociology and anthropology events; at this rate we’ll all be social scientists by the end of the PhD.)
We’re almost a year in now, and my research interests have evolved quite a bit since starting in September. Over the months I’ve considered numerous paths: Will I work on large language models and mental health at MIT? Or do ethnography in early support hubs for research with the Department of Health and Social Care? Or look at self-diagnoses of young people on social media? Or confront inequalities in global mental health?
One day, after a clinical placement, a psychiatrist offered a piece of wisdom following my ramble about not having chosen a research project yet. As I was leaving they turned to me and said,
“No matter what you choose, just know that you’ll make it a good project anyway.”
This struck me. As a cohort we’ve been chatting and fretting about making the right choice, but at the end of the day, I know whatever I choose I’ll just plough on and make the most out of it. Of course there’s always another research idea that could’ve been cool for a PhD, but it’s just one of many pieces of work I do in a lifetime anyway, and who says I can’t revisit these other fun ideas in the future?
Besides, PhD projects evolve throughout time and the submitted proposal rarely looks anything like what it’ll be in the thesis. A lot of people start by choosing one empirical project and then go with the flow as new ideas emerge. After all, how is anyone supposed to identify a ‘gap’ in research without first understanding the field?
As of today I still don’t know what my project will look like, but I do know after a lot of soul-searching and mind-mapping, that there are research topics and social justice issues that I’ve been passionate about for a while.
In a few years’ time I’ll probably look back at my proposal and laugh at its nonsense, but that’s part of the process. Just as this first year of rotation projects has given me new skills and redefined my aspirations, the coming years will also be filled with continuous discoveries and (a lot of) challenges. As they say, the point of a PhD is to build researchers, not just research projects.
At least I don’t have to brave bidding wars for a PhD project like Londoners do for mouldy flats, right?