The Most Difficult Part of My Doctoral Journey
No, it’s not the workload
This is my fourth year of doctoral studies.
The first three years felt relatively smooth. There were struggles, of course, but I somehow managed to work through them. I completed the assignments, read the literature, refined my research ideas, and moved from one stage to the next.
This year feels different.
There are days when I genuinely question whether I will graduate at all.
I am now writing my thesis, and this is where I feel most vulnerable.
As a practitioner with extensive classroom experience, I am struggling to loosen my grip on a practitioner’s intuition and develop a researcher’s mindset.
Teaching is dynamic and interactive. In the classroom, decisions often need to be made immediately. A teacher notices a student’s hesitation, changes the explanation, adjusts the level of difficulty or introduces another activity.
Experienced educators sometimes call this intuition.
After years of teaching, we develop a sense of what may work, what may go wrong and what learners might need next. This “sixth sense” is valuable because it is built through repeated encounters with real learners in real classrooms.
However, doctoral research has taught me an uncomfortable lesson:
Experience can sharpen our judgement, but it can also hide our assumptions.
I used to think that becoming a researcher meant learning to be objective at all times. I now realise that this is not entirely accurate, particularly in qualitative research.
Researchers are still human. We carry our experiences, beliefs and interpretations into the research process. The goal is not to pretend that these influences do not exist. The goal is to recognise them, question them and explain how they shape our decisions.
That shift has not been easy.
As a practitioner, I may say, “I know this method works because I have seen it work for many years.”
As a researcher, I must ask:
What evidence supports that conclusion?
What exactly do I mean by “works”?
For whom does it work?
Under what circumstances?
Could there be another explanation for what I observed?
These questions sometimes feel like an attack on everything I thought I knew.
But they have also led me directly to my blind spots.
For example, classroom experience can tempt educators to become overly dependent on familiar methods. When students respond positively, we may assume the teaching method caused the improvement. Yet their progress could also be influenced by previous knowledge, parental support, motivation, peer interaction or additional practice outside the classroom.
Research encourages me to pause before making conclusions.
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It pushes me to look for evidence, consider alternative explanations and distinguish between what I observed and what I assumed.
This does not make practitioner intuition useless.
Instead, research disciplines it.
I am beginning to see that the practitioner’s mindset and the researcher’s mindset do not have to compete with each other.
The practitioner notices meaningful problems.
The researcher investigates them systematically.
The practitioner understands the complexity of the classroom.
The researcher helps make that understanding more transparent, evidence-informed and open to challenge.
When these two mindsets are combined, the outcome can be better teaching — not because research provides a perfect answer to every classroom problem, but because it helps educators make more thoughtful decisions.
Another lesson I have learned is that admitting weakness does not slow down learning.
It often accelerates it.
For a long time, I felt that my years of experience should make doctoral study easier. When I struggled, I wondered whether I was intellectually capable enough to complete the journey.
Eventually, I had to admit that experience in practice does not automatically translate into competence in research.
They are related, but they are not identical.
Once I accepted this, I became more willing to ask basic questions, revisit concepts, read more carefully and accept criticism without immediately defending myself.
That humility has helped me learn faster.
For anyone considering a higher degree, it is worth knowing that the journey may challenge more than your academic ability.
It may challenge your professional identity.
You may discover that some of your strongest beliefs are based on assumptions you have never examined. You may feel less confident before you become more capable. You may spend months questioning ideas that once seemed obvious.
It is stressful.
At times, it can be deeply unsettling.
But it is also rewarding.
Higher education does not simply give us more knowledge. At its best, it changes how we think, how we question and how honestly we examine our own limitations.
I am still struggling with my thesis.
I am still learning to think more carefully as a researcher without losing the practical wisdom I developed as an educator.
Perhaps that is the real transformation.
Not becoming a completely different person, but becoming more critical, more reflective and more willing to learn.
And perhaps feeling vulnerable is not evidence that I am failing.
Perhaps it is evidence that I am finally moving beyond what I already know.
