When people dont talk about something that you expect them to have a response to, it always makes me wonder whats stopping them or what their malfunction is. Mine is that I’ve been too busy and generally reluctant to dwell on any sort of failure and have been trooping on!

Heres me ranting about two recent failures (or moves towards success depending how you look at it.)

1. I officially intercalated my PhD which is a fancy way of saying I suspended it until further notice, that further notice expires in Nov 2010, and unless someone convinces me of a reason to do something about it, ill just let it pass.

I was on it for one year which had given me enough time to outline the cool projects I would have liked to work on. Not to blow my own trumpet, but there were many many great exciting things I could have done in a ‘loosely’ academic context and lots of academic outputs.

Id like to think if I managed a book collaboration successfully before doing my PhD Im pretty sure I would have pulled off some nice projects actually doing a PhD.

This is a real shame in some respects and a great opportunity to move on. Why do I want a PhD anyway if Im not in academia?

Well for one, if I ‘ever did’ want to go back into academia, it seems the standard admission to teaching now is to have a PhD or be close to completing one. I don’t think they’d give two monkeys that you taught before. This academic degree inflation was always there and I guess the university I worked for was just immune to it for the brief time that I was there.

Lets also face it, a huge part of it being an academic and wanting a PhD was to say I had a PhD. Now it doesn’t seem so important to me, its not even related to the fact that I dont have any intention to go back to teaching. I just dont think its what I need at all and as an investment.. hmmm.

Although my co-directors in the company we’re all behind me, maybe doing a PhD would have taken away too much attention from doing other interesting things?

In the case of the University I worked for, the kicker was that I was on the Staff PhD doctoral programme which I might have mentioned here before. I did have my reservations at the time, going onto this programme, primarily because If I ever left my teaching role I wouldnt be able to carry on unless I paid for it. There were a few PhD places advertised which I naturally went for, they came with teaching, funding and a fee waiver. I was only interested in the latter and made that categorically clear, just the fee waiver, nothing else, and I can see why that wouldn’t appeal to them, but who knows maybe they didn’t actually like the sound of the proposal.

The final nail in the coffin for the Glitch PhD malarkey however, came from the AHRC. Fail Whale number 2, Earlier this year they voted half in favour and half not in favour on a very extensive and ambitious gaming / glitch related proposal, I submitted with Nullpointer and Mathew Adkins
before I left my teaching post. I wasn’t sure we’d get it and if we had, it might have affected what Im doing now, but then again it seems the reviewer at the AHRC who downvoted us didn’t get it either. The idea was that if we got the AHRC funding, Id suspend the PhD anyway and do a PhD by publication once the project period was over. This AHRC funded project would have been research based for me and far more compatible with my creative director role in the company and may have prompted more game related directions for my company too.

Anyways thats my two fail whales out in the open. I want to move on and with that, this blog will be moving on to documenting the trials and tribulations of a young Creative Director in the Creative Industries.