Trust me, I’m a doctor

On Monday I passed my PhD viva. This thesis has been a long time cooking – I began on Jan 7th 2013, took a year out due to ill health, had two changes of thesis title and lost three supervisors along the way. At times I thought I would never finish, that my research was not serious enough, that I was not cut out to be an academic. I’ve been through redundancy and two job changes, I’ve got married and moved house. And, despite a pandemic, I finished. Somehow, over the last few months, I have cobbled together enough words of sufficient quality to be able to call myself a doctor. I have a few small revisions to make (including far too many typos!), and then I can work out what I want to do with all this research.

But for now, as I want to thank the community that made it possible. Thank you CLMOOC for all the fun and inspiration. As soon as my revisions are approved I’ll share a copy of my thesis with anyone who is interested.