What do you do?

Joshua Hughes is an AHRC funded PhD student in Law at Lancaster University. In his guest post today, he reflects on what doing a PhD actually means and considers two contrasting perceptions from the “outside looking in”, concluding that perhaps people who are within academia should not necessarily be narrowly defined in terms of their job/pathway. If you would like to see more of what Joshua writes about, go and check out his blog: https://lawofkillerrobots.wordpress.com/ and follow him on Twitter at: @JoshGHughes 

Over Christmas I was visiting my hometown. On two separate nights out I met some friends of friends who asked me the typical question when meeting someone new: ‘What do you do?’ When I replied, ‘I’m doing a PhD’ a couple of people asked me the same question: ‘What’s a PhD?’ These separate conversations then went down very different routes after I explained what it actually involves.

The first went down the line of ‘wow, you must be so smart. I couldn’t even imagine doing that.’ I don’t really know why this is. I’m in the second year of my PhD and have never thought that I am especially intelligent. Maybe doing well at undergrad and during a masters means that you hang around with other high achievers, and so doing a PhD doesn’t seem unusual – perhaps the adage that ‘you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with’ holds true.

However, I think anybody could do a PhD, in the same way that most runners will say anyone can do a marathon. I think a lot of the time people don’t even realise that they are limiting themselves. I remember being at school and only a handful of people in my year were seriously considering jobs that even required a degree. One of them wanted a job that might have required a doctorate: a marine biologist. I think most people still limit themselves because they don’t think they can do something that takes some intelligence – like I said, I don’t think I’m that intelligent, I’m just a hard worker.

But then again, we’re all hard workers, and everybody explores ideas that they are interested in. One of the hardest workers I know is my barber. Every time I have my haircut he talks at length about lots of ideas he’s been thinking about, which are often brilliant insights. So if everyone is exploring ideas they are interested in, perhaps it’s more that academics’ ideas are built upon a base of knowledge that takes a long time to collect that makes it seem like a PhD is unobtainable for most people. Plus, there is the aspect that the academy seems like somewhere people don’t belong if they’re from a disadvantaged background. But, talking to lots of PhD students, I think this is changing now.

The second response to telling someone I do a PhD was ‘that’s all we need, another student who thinks he’s an expert.’ I guess this is partly due to the Michael Gove inspired Brexit-backlash against experts. Which I get, I mean if you’re a Mail or Express reader who gets told daily that a liberal elite of graduate ‘experts’ are out on some great project and don’t care about you, you’d hate them too. But I think it also plays into an anti-intellectualism that sounds exactly the same as it did in school. Remember when mediocrity was cool?

I think this anti-intellectualism is partly due to a hangover from the idea that academics (and perhaps by extension, ‘experts’) are still enclosed in the ivory tower of the academy, and don’t understand the general public. Perhaps this is slightly true, after all there isn’t much cross-over between the minutiae an academic considers in their research and what you might talk about in the pub (unless maybe if it is a campus bar). However, everyone is an expert at their own work role; is there really any cross-over with between pub-talk and the intricacies of selling insurance, health and safety policy, or plumbing? No, there isn’t really. So, if our expertise at work aren’t helping us socialise, what to do?

When socialising, we don’t approach it with the same way we do at work, so why should we answer the sociable question of ‘What do you do?’ with the work answer of our job/study? Maybe we should consider Tim Ferris’ idea that we are actually far more than our job, so why not answer with the thing we enjoy doing the most? Whether windsurfing, car racing, painting, or reading, we make connections with people based on commonalities, so why not present that first? At the very least, it might avoid the preconception that you are a lofty and arrogant academic!