ABSTRACT
Completing a PhD is an isolating and arduous process, where doctoral students' wellbeing is impacted. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the pre-existing feelings of social isolation and lowered productivity resulting in further challenges due to the absence of established social support systems. Higher education is an area of particular interest, specifically in Victoria, Australia, where all students spent most of the years 2020 and 2021 in a lockdown. This chapter presents a reflective autoethnographic account of two doctoral students' experiences of writing their theses during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are two sociological researchers pursuing PhDs who experienced an extended COVID-19 lockdown while studying at Monash University's Faculty of Education in Victoria, Australia. Our chapter identifies how our socio-emotional and academic writing struggles were intertwined and how they affected the overall progress of our doctoral thesis. The emotional aspects included, but were not limited to, fear, anxiety, uncertainty, stress, and a lack of support, which will be the focus of this chapter. We use our accounts to share our coping strategies by acknowledging the effects of these emotional aspects. We achieved this through participating in collegiate virtual writing spaces via Zoom, creating a sense of accountability for writing by employing the Pomodoro technique. Furthermore, social interaction was a significant component of the Zoom sessions;we maintained our digital proximity while we were physically apart. The use of memes, presented an opportunity for us to socialise, joke, and reflect on the positives, thus creating a sense of self-efficacy during this challenging time. Ultimately, these sessions created a space to remind ourselves and each other of the passion behind our doctoral degrees and ascribe somewhat positive meaning to the thoughts and feelings related to the stressful and unexpected COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we offer this chapter to support our fellow doctoral peers in these times of uncertainty across the globe. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.
ABSTRACT
Undertaking a doctoral degree is a challenging but worthwhile endeavour where PhD students invest years of academic, physical, and emotional energy contributing to their specialist field. The emotional toll upon doctoral students' wellbeing has been highlighted in recent years. More recently, another issue has impacted PhD students—the COVID-19 pandemic. While emerging research has highlighted doctoral students' struggles and coping mechanisms, we offer our experience as two PhD students navigating our ways through the unknown terrain of doctoral study as a couple during a pandemic. With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were forced to retreat from our allocated offices at the university and write together within the same vicinity at home during the sudden lockdown. During this time, we found that even though writing a thesis was stressful and our future was uncertain due to the pandemic, we found comfort and solace in each other. Writing together, in isolation, has brought us together. As we are in different disciplines—Medicine and Education, we also learnt how to approach our theses from different perspectives and became more resilient in our development as researchers. We discuss how our research backgrounds influenced the way we experienced academia and what we learnt from each other. We employ Vygotsky's term of perezhivanie to capture our emotional journey and academic development together to represent the unique environmental conditions experienced. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.