Today was my first real big-girl day at my PhD, which, naturally was very exciting. (A small caveat, technically Friday was my first day, but would you count orientation as a “day at work”? No, me neither. I might write a separate post about that, too)

I’m not sure I had any expectations about what Day One would look like. In retrospect, maybe I should’ve had some, but to be honest I just sort of rocked up and thought “yeah I’ll talk with my supervisor and I guess um, figure out stuff to do?”. It feels almost more daunting after the fact as the impact hits a little bit. It’s always funny being The New Guy, and as a PhD in the summer (before the undergrads and masters students start trickling into the office) I’m also the most junior. I think I wasn’t expecting somehow to still be “The Baby”.

Not that anyone else in the office thinks or projected that onto me; I think it’s just a natural byproduct of entering a space where everyone is already in their routines, you know? They have work to do, projects on the go, cultures to tend to, and I’m sort of just sat trying to get my new email account to work until I could formalise what I’m actually supposed to do with the boss. It’s all well and good having a title, or a plan, but actually getting started working is the funny part.

Then there’s the natural impostor syndrome that accompanies that first “what to do now” talk. Constructing the next three years of your worklife in a two page plan and isolating what to do on day one is scary. There’s lots of cool new stuff for me on the horizon, but “new” is a bit of a double-edged sword. It’s cool, yes, but also I haven’t done that before (or at least not unsupervised or at that level of detail). Am I gonna learn? Are they gonna teach me?? Do they think I already know how to do it??? (Yes, yes and no respectively). It’s just funny talking about things you know in theory, and then realising it’s about to be your turn to do them in practice. I’ve been at the apex of my career, finishing my Masters, applying for a PhD, ooh waow cool, and now I’m realising that trickling over into the very beginning of the next stage highlights that, whoops, there’s still a lot to learn.

But that’s good, I think. I mean, they call ’em PhD students for a reason. For the record, step one of “ok well, what to do first?” is to read a big ‘ol worm textbook. And that feels comforting, it’s nice to be able to acknowledge that, no, I don’t already know this, and also, no, no one expects me to already know this. That’s why I should go read about it.