I’ve started my PhD! 📚
It still feels a bit surreal to call myself a PhD student, but I can assure you it’s true. I will be spending the next four years investigating the cognitive and neural mechanisms underpinning performance under pressure. Last week, I spent two days at the John MacIntyre Conference Centre in Edinburgh being officially inducted into the programme, alongside around 60 other new PhD students from a variety of universities across eastern Scotland, all funded by the same organisation.
Where do you start when undertaking a PhD? How do you fill your day? How do you stay motivated? How often should you meet with your supervisor? These piece-of-string style questions were aplenty last week; none have concrete answers. What I do know is that I am excited to spend the next four years focused on something that really interests me - when will I ever again have so much time to freely explore one topic? Probably never! I hope the initial excitement will be enduring.
The stars aligned for me with this PhD project. Yes, it’s cheesy, but hear me out. After I left school, I studied for a degree in dance performance. The professional dance training environment was unlike anything I’d experienced before, and unlike anything I’ve experienced since. The physical and mental toll it took on myself and my peers was pretty staggering. I was only 18 years old when I started there - fresh from high school and not lived away from home before. The degree programme was the toughest thing I’ve ever done, but the people I met and experiences I had as a result changed the course of my life forever. While in my third year, I became really interested in performance anxiety. It wasn’t something we ever learned about on the degree programme, but the mental side of performance contributed massively to our experiences. Why did some people thrive under the pressure of performing, and why did some crumble? After completing the degree programme, I took a couple of years out to work before returning to university full time, this time studying sport science and psychology. I felt like I needed to pursue my interest in performance anxiety by taking it one step further and studying it academically in the form of a psychology degree (with sport science and my passion for human movement bolted onto the side). Following that, it was a Masters degree in the psychology of sport. During that year-long programme, I saw a PhD project advertised which was to investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms underpinning performance under pressure. It was meant to be. My experience in performing arts, sport, and psychology all coming together to inform this PhD. And here I am. A successful, albeit pretty stressful, interview process later and I’m three weeks in.
Watch this space 👀
