PhD and Me: The Third Degree

This podcast is sponsored by the Royster Society of Fellows within The Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in the United States in collaboration with other doctoral students at King’s College London (KCL) in the United Kingdom. This is a prestigious, interdisciplinary fellowship program for doctoral students at UNC-Chapel Hill, and provides students with a supportive community for their work, as well as providing opportunities for development, collaboration, and outreach.

The idea for this podcast emerged as part of the Royster Global initiative which started in 2017 and aims to engage doctoral students from across the world in interdisciplinary conversations on cross-cutting issues. In May 2019 the 3^rd conference took place at UNC-Chapel Hill with attendees from King’s College London, Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador, National University of Singapore, and Tubingen University in Germany. The focus of this conference was borders: how borders changed, fortified, weakened, disappeared, or stayed the same within the context of research and universities.

During the conference, PhD students in vastly different fields across different countries realized a resounding, yet simple truth: we all share similar threads in our PhD journeys. Though all of our paths to the final degree are different and difficult, that doesn’t mean we have to get through them alone. We all know the highs of successes and the lows of the challenges. We know the difficulty of balancing our workload while attempting to gain or maintain a healthy lifestyle. We do our best to fight off the monsters of stress and imposters’ syndrome, while attempting to contribute innovative research to our fields. We all ponder similarly vexing questions from ethical concerns in our work, to how to be a better teacher and mentor, to thinking about how to speak to broader audiences beyond our disciplines. We all traverse the world of complex relationships with our advisors, mentors, and professors.  We wanted to build on these conversations and connections, so this podcast does just that. Led by PhD students, we hone in and wrestle with these shared threads of the PhD experience, however difficult they may be.

Listen as we share our experiences getting into and through our doctoral programs, the things that keep us up at night about our work, the higher ed issues that bring us together, and everything in between! Each episode features a rotating panel of Royster fellows, their international collaborators, and guests to discuss wide-ranging issues that matter to us.