Dr Natalia Petrovskaia

The interview (English)

Why did you start a PhD? How did you know it was the right choice?

I think because I was very keen on finding out more and basically keeping on studying, essentially. There was still so much to learn, and doing research is a continuation of the learning process, to a great extent. For me, I never really doubted about wanting to do it. Partially because it was more a case of going out on an adventure of discovery. I was focused on learning and discovering more, as well as being able to look at genuine manuscripts and potentially reading texts that had not been translated. For my PhD research I ended up going through very long texts in Latin and Welsh that had not been translated at the time, and a very long text in Welsh that had not been translated at the time. It was an opportunity that I just really wanted to take! Obtaining a PhD was a possibility that just felt right and natural to me.

I don’t think the question of whether it was ‘the right choice’ ever occurred to me. When I started my PhD, around 2008, The discussion was less centered on questions like “is this the right choice for you?” or “How do you make choices in order to achieve balance in your life?” It was more a case of “Is this interesting?”, “Do I want to do it?” and “Will I get the funding to do it?” In general, obtaining a PhD was mostly based on gut feeling and enthusiasm, as opposed to worrying about what the implications were (at least that I was aware of). Obviously at the time we were all worrying about what would happen after we got our PhDs, because this was in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis.

How did you find your PhD-position?

It was pretty different from the Netherlands. I studied in the UK, and did my PhD in the same place where I did my BA and MA, so it really was momentum and continuity for me. It was less of an active choice, and more just continuing with what I had been doing, just on a different level. It is always a career choice, but for me it was also a continuation. 

I obtained my PhD where I already lived and studied, and I even stayed in the same department. I did my BA, MA and PhD at Cambridge, in the department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, where I was on the Welsh side of Celtic. In my case it was really less about finding a position, because the way PhDs there work is that you apply to be a PhD student, and then you apply for funding that would cover the expenses of being a student. I also applied for funding from Cambridge, which I got, and the university paid my fees and a stipend. In the UK system, if you apply as a student, you get an offer of a position, which is a separate issue because you also have to get funding. It wasn’t easy, but finding the position wasn’t the main focus. 

In my experience, two factors dictate where you do your PhD. Firstly, funding; where can you find a place that is funded, either because you get a scholarship or there is an actual big project which would pay your salary. Secondly, the supervisor. The reason why I stayed at Cambridge is because I wanted to study with that particular person, Paul Russell. The funding is the practical consideration, whereas the supervisor is the motivational consideration.

What were your three main activities during your PhD?

Write, read and think. I was told to start writing from day one. The UK system is slightly different from the Dutch system; there is no obligation to do any teaching, give presentations or publish articles. These were all things recommended to do if you wanted a job afterwards, but the only requirement for the PhD was that you wrote your thesis. Your supervisor would support you in writing that thesis, by giving you advice and suggestions as to what to read. The reading differed between stages of the PhD writing process. If you’re a medievalist you have to alternate between reading the primary sources and the secondary literature, but also theory. My thesis originally had the word ‘East’ in the title, not ‘Orient’, and I introduced the concept of the ‘Orient’ because I used Edward Said’s Orientalism as my framework. And that was one of the books I went and read. I distinctly remembered, somewhat after the first few pages, Said stated that ‘This does not apply to the middle ages’, so I thought: “Great, now I can do my own thing!” I ended up referring to that in the beginning and then developing my own framework.

A lot of the work I did on my thesis was not included in the final product. This is inevitable: you really have to do the extra work, including reading things you are never going to use completely, just to think about them and explain why you are not using them. It’s like an iceberg, with a small tip that is visible and a lot more that stays underwater. However, that bit of the iceberg that no one sees, it stays useful and you can keep coming back to it. I have been revisiting that stuff and using it in other ways. For example, if a student is writing on something, I can recommend to them all the reading that did not work out for me, but which might be relevant to them. Writing a PhD is building toward this particular product, but if you are thinking of doing an academic career, there’s a lot of stuff that you are accumulating that is going to be the basis of things you cannot possibly predict. It’s a process and it’s building a base. I am currently following a course on supervising PhD students, and there’s a focus on ‘forming the researcher’. While this is important, looking back, in my opinion a PhD track is also about ‘forming the researcher’s walking encyclopaedia database’. 

A lot of what you end up doing for a PhD is similar to a BA or a master’s, but on a different level. It is expanding a subject that interests you into something that takes over your life for three to four years. It’s similar, but almost as if you’re looking at an UltraHD screen; there’s more detail, it’s brighter, there’s more going on, which is also the reason that it can be a little overwhelming.

What was your relation to your PhD supervisor like?

It was fantastic! I really look back with incredible gratitude to him, for how he basically managed the whole thing, how he did it. I think I had a fantastic supervisor who knew exactly how to strike the balance between letting you do your thing, but also (to use another sea-related metaphor) stopping you from jumping off the edge into the ocean and drowning because you cannot swim yet, even though you think you can. He also knew exactly when you could swim, and then went ‘now go and swim’. And that was just the perfect balance and it worked for me. 

Every supervisor has a very different style, a very personal style, that’s very very different. That is why your choice of supervisor is really important, it really matters that your interests coincide enough for the conversations to be interesting for both of you. Personality is massively important, so it's a good idea to get to know that person beforehand. It’s much harder when you do not know who that supervisor is as a person.

If you think you might be moving to a different country or a particular university for your PhD, try to either go there for your Master’s degree or get that person to be your external examiner for your Master’s thesis, because they will then give comments on your material from which you can actually gather a bit more about their personality. Alternatively, try to meet them at a conference or another similar event where you can speak with them. Just make sure you have some experience with someone who could be your supervisor, because they can be fantastic people who you just do not match with. If it’s someone all the way across the world whom you have never met but who is doing amazing research, then there’s no way of finding out how your personalities match; a lot of it is luck, like with colleagues. That’s perfectly fine, but it's really important to know, and knowing that beforehand will be a favour to the both of you. It is absolutely worth it to find out whether their style would work for you and whether your style works for them. 

How did you handle the pressure of the workload for such a prolonged period of time?

I find this question on the one hand very understandable, but on the other hand I have difficulty answering it, because I didn’t think of the workload as pressure: for me it was the reverse. I already knew what I was going to write about. I had chosen my topic myself, which is also the difference between working on someone else’s project and being a student in the UK with your own funding. When you apply for funding it is a scholarship, you’re a student, not an employee. But it’s your own project that you apply with, which has the advantage that if you are really passionate about it, you’ve chosen it. This can also backfire, if midway through your research, you realise you hate the topic and you feel guilty for having picked it yourself. Being able to choose your own topic is great, but it also comes with responsibility. The fact that you’re really tied to this thing you have to sit through, and the job uncertainty that happens afterwards can make it really difficult if you lack the motivation. You’re writing a book about a subject, going from knowing very little about when you start to become the expert on your topic, which is probably the biggest, scariest, gloomiest thing about it.

Working on someone else’s project can also be a great experience. A lot of the details that you would have to figure out for yourselves, have already been worked out by somebody who has already done this before. Similarly, your supervisor can help you figure out what is actually doable, so I did not have that much pressure. I really found it quite reassuring and relaxing that I had three years for my project, with enough time to work on my thesis, and to read, and write at a steady pace without having to worry about having to immediately do everything perfectly.  I had the space to write something that was very drafty and I could come back to it again and again, which is something that I still really enjoy. I like having this block of time where I can really sort things out at my own pace and I can get my work done in a relaxed state, as opposed to feeling constant pressure.

That’s not to say I didn't have some sort of stress, but it was a different type of stress. We also had a word maximum, so for me the problem was less the producing of words than the cutting of words. So if you’re chatting it is going to be that you make sure that you respect the word count maximum of the thesis.  It was a case of ‘how do I fit everything that I want into this thesis’, instead of a ‘how do I fill up this gigantic thesis’. I constantly kept discovering new topics that were extremely interesting and I wanted to explore, but were not relevant to my thesis. My supervisor used the metaphor of ‘going down rabbit holes’, where he would encourage me to continue digging, but stop me from going too far down and losing track of my project. That is where your supervisor is really important, to keep you focused, but also allow you to be enthusiastic. 

Did your PhD affect your mental health? If so, how?

I do actually wonder if it had any effect at all, one way or the other. I don’t think it was the PhD itself that had any kind of big effect on my mental health or personality. It really depends on what the circumstances are when you’re doing your PhD, because for me I suspect the reason why it did not have that big of an effect is that I was part of a very good, very small, and very tight graduate student community with PhD students that were all in the same boat. All of them were extremely enthusiastic, mostly their theses. The community also regularly met, the staff was also a community and these communities would sometimes both come together to discuss things informally. Most of the time our conversations were about random topics related to medieval history or literature that were not very serious and could go completely crazy and wacky, but our discussions could also lead to interesting new ideas. I had a supporting network that was not focused on making sure everything was okay, but it did function that way, by giving you the space to talk about other things. I think that had a good effect on my mental health – basically it made everyone more stable.

I think the really big thing is also if anyone was stressed about anything, you could discuss it, but it never became the dominant thing, it could be sort of in the background. I had friends who had theses about science, which also became a support network, in a very informal way. There’s also a lot of formal support, a lot of things that are present, but I have a feeling that informal group, that community, really does help you not worry about mental health as much. It is a little bit like defaulting to a healthy diet, when you first have to really really think about it, or sport, where people who do sports regularly no longer have to force themselves, to make time, it kind of more naturally happens. When you try to get into that habit it’s hard, but once you have found that rhythm, it happens naturally and it makes you happy. However, I am not a psychologist and I am absolutely talking out of my hat here.

How easy was it to find a job or a postdoc after you did your PhD?

That is where the stress truly begins! You don’t actually know what you’re going to do until you know. One of the things you end up doing after your PhD is writing applications for research fellowships which is what everyone else is doing so there will be one place and then more than 300 applicants from all conceivable field of research. I ended up going to Italy for a year with a scholarship, after which I got a job at Utrecht University. The scholarship was a regular thing, you could go if you got through the selection process. But the job opportunity, that’s really contingent on there being a place available;  they usually advertise it after someone leaves. It was really stressful, because in some cases you won’t even know if you have the job the month that you’re supposed to start. From personal experience, it can be particularly stressful if you have to move countries as a PhD student or Post-Doc, especially for a person like me who likes to read and collect physical books! 

I said earlier that I had no stress because of the PhD; let me clarify by saying that writing the PhD itself didn’t cause me a lot of stress. Knowing what you’re going to do after you have gotten a PhD, when you’ve finished your degree and your funding runs out, and you no longer have your student status and institutional access to digital resources and libraries? That’s a bigger and more interesting question. What do you do then? You get very, very familiar with funding bodies, with websites advertising academic jobs, and you will have a folder of about a hundred different versions of your next research proposal, your cv and your statement of who you are and what you do. I don't even want to give you the number of how many applications I wrote.

That’s one of the most stressful things about the process, actually; what to do after getting your degree. Because when you think about getting a PhD, you may imagine the final year or six months will consist of you writing it up, polishing it and sorting out that everything is submittable. Actually, what you do beside that is desperately submitting a ton of applications for your next job. That’s what might cause stress, because there’s uncertainty, which always causes stress. That’s when you really need your support network, because you’re all in the same boat and you can swap horror stories. 

Should you do a PhD directly after your studies, or would you recommend having some experience in the work field as well? Would it be useful to develop certain skills first?

Depends on your personality. I would be hesitant to give advice because I went directly through, and I didn’t know whether going directly through gives you an advantage, because the way applying for funding works at the moment is calculated by the years after you’ve finished your PhD, not your physical age. Which means that if you go all the way straight through, you might be applying for grants  alongside people who before their PhD had a successful career in publishing, or did other things that could have helped them along. You all have the same postdoc experience, but actually having experience outside might help some people, though I can’t speak from personal experience.

It may be a good idea to develop certain skills before starting your PhD, but it also really depends on what you want to do with your life. If you really enjoy being at university and you really like the academic setting and you know it well, then I don’t really know whether it would help to take a break and do something else first, only to confirm you don’t like it? Maybe you want to discover if you like that as well, but I don’t know. I really don’t have a good answer. My only advice would be to consult with people you trust, who know you, depending on who is in your support network. I would recommend asking teachers who you know and trust, who know you and have a sense of your personality. I think that's the best piece of advice I can give on this one.

If you knew what you were in for, would you do it again?

After a deep sigh: Yes. I think I would do it again even if I didn’t know what I was in for: in doing research I find my sense of calm. 

Actually, ask me the question if I would do it again after all the budget cuts have happened and they have closed the Celtic programme. Ask me this time next year, when they have sorted out the new BA programme and figured out whether they are reorganising the universities or not. My answer is, by the way, probably not going to change. Let’s face it.