28/09: I am back in Oxford for my second year as a DPhil student! I didn't want to share the below piece about my Transfer in July in case it became the ultimate in tempting fate and I was thrown outside the city walls the second I tried to return this September, but all is well -- I'm back, I'm still apparently a student, and some undergrads are expecting me to teach them something in two weeks' time.
I remember nervously asking my supervisor about the Transfer of Status in my very first meeting with her, armed with my new purple Pukka pad and neat set of fineliners (I have started each new academic term in the exact same way since about Year Five). “Oh, that’s not until the summer,” she said, “don’t panic about it yet.” Despite the undeniable ominous clang of the “yet” I had rather put the Transfer out of my mind. For those fortunate enough not to know, the Transfer involves a lengthy written submission followed by an interview with two experts in your field who decide whether you’re allowed to advance to second year or not. It’s a nasty blend of fairly impossible to prepare for, yet simultaneously so all-consuming that it feels impossible to do anything else while it looms on the horizon, with the result that I’ve spent a week at my desk, bleary-eyed and faintly panicky but without much work to show for it. I write this at my desk on The Morning Of, having just seen off half a packet of hot buttered Welsh cakes for breakfast (“it’s only like toast,” I said in response to the equal-parts worried and confused look from my boyfriend) and read the newspaper in an attempt to distract myself. At least however my Transfer goes, I reassured myself, everyone in Westminster will surely be having a worse day than me. (My transfer was on 6th July). On paper it’s a useful review exercise, a chance to hear feedback from two leading scholars in your field, an opportunity for a valuable fresh perspective. In reality it’s two experts who might tell me that everything I’ve done over the past year is wrong and that everything I’d planned to do over the next two years is more wrong still. It’s a straightforward(ish) pass-fail thing, the transfer. With “ish” I mean the third possible outcome, which is a tentative pass pending a resubmission and a serious rethink (which would mean Auf Wiedersehen summer holiday, and Hallo heatwave spent hunched over my laptop in a library). *** Reader, I passed! I now write this from Christ Church meadow with a bottle of champagne in the other fist, occasionally shrieking with sudden glee and scaring tourists. I tried desperately to read the room and twig whether things were going my way, but my assessors — while friendly and insightful and all the good things I’d been told they would be — were inscrutable. It gave the whole thing an air of the driving test, where you’re convinced that every minuscule mistake you make has just tipped the scales from “minor fault” to “major fault, dear God, get her off the roads immediately”. I got a couple of dates slightly wrong, and my mouth, apparently unbidden by my brain, made a few completely unjustifiable points, and each time I grimaced and thought “oh Lord, that’s it, that’s the nail in the coffin”. At the very end, in very real danger of leaving the room without any inkling of how I’d done, I managed to ask in a nicely professional way “when I might hear the outcome, please” rather than sobbing out a pathetic, craven “did I do okay?!” plea. And lo! A pass! Some new points to bear in mind going forward, of course, yet nothing that gets hugely in the way of writing my next 20,000-word chapter (or eating double caramel Magnums in the garden with a Mhairi McFarlane book, however I end up spending my summer). 28/09: This is exactly how I ended up spending my summer.
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(Header Photo: Radcliffe Camera, Oxford - Isabel Parkinson 2016)
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