So, I am considering writing a short book. 😅
I am considering self-publishing a short book about surviving a doctorate, and it is called Show Your Working: An Honest, Practical Guide to Surviving Your PhD. My experience was pretty full on and I hit a lot of barriers and challenges….and I wish there had been something I could read with handy, authentic tips.
If you have been following along, you know I have tried to document my doctorate honestly. The wins, yes, but also the parts we usually keep quiet. The feedback that left me frozen. The job I did not get. The examiners who disagreed with each other so strongly a third had to be brought in. The strange, lonely waiting. Every single time I shared one of those harder posts, people sent me a version of the same message: thank you, nobody told me it was like this, it’s nice to know I’m not alone.
That sentence is the whole reason for the book.
We are so good at sharing the shiny outcomes, and not so good at sharing the messy middle, the rejections, and the results that are not a tidy “pass with no revisions.” I wanted to write the honest map I wish someone had handed me at the very start. Not a list of rules from on high, just one person who has recently walked the road and still has the mud on her boots.
I also bring a slightly unusual angle to it. Before academia I spent twenty years as a classroom teacher and school leader. My whole job was taking something hard and scary and breaking it down so the person in front of me could actually engage with it. It turns out that is exactly the skill set a PhD demands, so the book runs on that teacher’s lens the whole way through. Practical, kind, and refreshingly free of the toxic positivity that somehow makes you feel worse.
Here is a fun part. The book is growing straight out of this blog. Many of the posts you have read here are becoming chapters, expanded and tidied up, and each one finishes with three little features:
• A Teacher’s Note, where I reframe the challenge the way I would scaffold it for a learner.
• A Real Talk box, for the unvarnished truth about how it actually felt.
• A tiny Your One Small Thing action, because momentum beats motivation every time.
I am self-publishing on purpose. It means I get to keep the book honest, affordable, and genuinely useful.
So that is what I am quietly working on behind the scenes. And I would genuinely love your help shaping it.
If you are doing, or have done, a PhD or doctorate: what is the one thing you wish someone had told you? What would you want to see in a book like this? Pop it in the comments or send me a message.
Melissa Smith 