Observations on life as a research student (one month in)

Well, despite what might appear to be the case, Liana and I haven't come to Scotland just to check out a lot of cool castles, play golf, and write blogposts so captivating that the internet itself might blow up.

Nope. Though some of you may have forgotten, I came here to get my PhD! I mentioned a few weeks back that I would post an update of how my work has been going, so I figured I'd better get to it. How is life as a PhD research student?

First off, I must say that this is certainly a different style of school work than I have been used to in the past. Like most things in life, it has its positive and negative aspects. On the good side, I am in complete control of my schedule. No deadlines to get an assignment done by, no exams to study for. I can choose when to work, where to work, what to work on... it's entirely up to me. I'm basically trying to keep (as much as possible) an 8:30/9:00am-5:30/6:00pm schedule, depending on the day. The only immovable time slot of the week is 2:30-4:00 on Thursday afternoons, which is when the Biblical Studies research seminar happens. But I find schedules to be conducive to me actually getting work done, so most of the rest of the days are divided up into blocks in my head anyway.

The morning starts with some work in Hebrew and Greek, and then I read and/or write (whatever needs to get done) until lunch. As often as possible I head home for lunch, which has been one of my favourite parts about living here - getting to spend a half-hour or so with Liana is a great way to break up a work day! After lunch comes German. (Sidenote: I'm learning German for reading comprehension from a grammar written by a woman who possibly [1] was a crazy cat lady; and [2] had something going on with her mailman. This according to a fellow PhD student who took German lessons from her in person.) (Sidenote #2: Some of the practice sentences in this grammar are pretty comical, e.g. "Der Winter schadet den fleißigen Hamster nicht." That little gem has become a motto of our office.) After Deutsch I spend the rest of the day doing more reading/writing.

This first month (and, I anticipate, many of the months to come) has involved a lot of reading. My supervisor (remember, he-who-must-not-be-blogged-about) essentially told me at our first meeting that I need to be very familiar with everything written between 167 BC (the beginning of the Maccabean revolt) and 135 AD (the end of the Bar-Kochba revolt). So, 300 years worth of stuff. NBD, right? Well, thankfully I was already partially aware of this, since much of the Jewish pseudepigrapha and apocrypha was produced during this period, as were the works of Josephus, all of which will be really important for my project. I spent a couple of weeks going through Josephus' Jewish War with my eyes open for any ways in which Josephus addresses the question I am asking, then taking the resultant observations and writing them up into a paper for my supervisor to look over. We had a good chat about it (Great news! I can write a paper in proper English, according to him!) and about the direction this work is heading.

We've met twice now, and both times I've come away feeling a bit dizzied by the approximately 28 different aspects of the project we discussed, but also encouraged. He's been very helpful and responsive with addressing my questions and concerns, but in answering the one problem that's popped into my head he brings up three others that hadn't occurred to me! There are just so many angles to this question I'm exploring that I think it's going to be a bit of a task to (first) choose what to look at next, and (second) figure out how to approach it. I guess that's the nature of this adventure I've embarked on, though. For the foreseeable future (i.e. the next few months at least) the majority of my work is going to consist of doing much the same as I did with the Jewish War with all the other (relevant) primary sources. I think I'm going to come across some pretty cool stuff. Hellooooooo 1 Enoch! (Trust me. Go check out the Animal Apocalypse).

The other great aspect of meeting with my supervisor has been getting to ask him questions that don't specifically relate to my thesis. I'm going to try to take advantage of these opportunities as often as they come up. We had a very interesting discussion about being a Christian scholar working in the secular academy... what a chance to discuss this with a man who has remained thoroughly involved with the church throughout his career as one of the foremost NT scholars in the world!

Alright, well... this post has become longer than I intended it to, so I'm going to cut it off there and leave myself something to say next time. Final thought: I think I'm going to like doing this work, as long as I can stay focused, trust the process, and take it one step at a time. After all, I am doing what I love, exploring a question I am extremely interested in, working with an incredible supervisor. I better appreciate the heck out of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

And just because I didn't want to post to the blog without a photo...
From the top of St Rule's tower!