Why I’m not cut out to be an academic

Yesterday I created a short and ultra-basic presentation on “What is Research?”. Really, it was about the difference between ‘finding out’ and ‘doing research’.

Today I have been blogging, tweeting and thinking.

The penny has dropped.

I love finding out. I love ideas. I love listening to people who believe completely different things to me. I love picking up facts, information, ideas from spheres of live and academia that are brand new to me, and then I love playing around with them to see what patterns and new ideas they create.

And I really love wrestling with concepts and theories, then holding up lived experiences in one hand and concepts in the other. The fun is seeing what that does to the theory and what I make of (re-) interpreting the lived experience in the light of theory.

What I don’t like is the discipline of paperwork, the discipline of systematically finding out what others have already written on a topic, the discipline of focusing on a topic. In other words, I don’t like the things that turn ‘finding out’ into ‘academic research’.

Don’t get me wrong. I value research. I value disciplined and focused work. I just prefer to let others do it …

I much prefer to use my butterfly brain to visit all their pieces of high quality academic research, alight briefly, pick up ideas and move on to the next high quality blossom. As I do this, I tend to leave behind a little bit of the last few researchers’ pollen – so like to think I contribute to the cross-fertilization of ideas across academic silos.

Here’s the rub. I’m doing a PhD.  it was an MA by Research. You can get away with quite a bit of butterfly brain and avoid staring discipline straight in the eyes too often with an MA. But you can’t for a PhD.

Today I realise I am facing 22 months where I need to learn to be highly disciplined for 39 hours a week and stop ‘playing with ideas’. In some ways, it is just what I need - to give my brain a bit of a rest from fluttering around, cross-pollinating and creating ideas.  In other ways, I’m not sure how I feel about sticking to one thing just when I’ve been having so much fun playing with ideas.

So, 22 months of disciplined research to go. I wonder if I can allow the butterfly out for Gov Camps though ;)