I'm sitting at my desk at the Open University for the last time. Well technical it's not the last time I will be sitting at a desk at the OU, but it's the last time I sit at my desk. Changes are underway in IET and for the the 'old' batch of research students, this means that we are being relocated. When I come back to the OU in September/October I won't come back to my old desk. I've taken down all my postcards and the hand-made drawings of my nephew and niece. I've cleared away all my personal artefacts, my cup is safely packed away in a bag. Now my desk looks almost identitical to those on either side of me. Slowly, it would seem, the world I knew as the OU is disappearing. Many of my cohort colleagues and friends are no longer students or are in other countries. So unlike when I left in September, this time it feels like it's for real. When I next return nothing will be as it was when I left - of course 'nothing' can be the same - but all resemblances of what it was like to be here will be gone - shattered and fragmented - only available to me through my memories and possibly the odd photo. I feel like I will have to hold the past four years in my memory because there will be nothing tangible or physical left to give it some meaning. It will all be sitting in my head, almost like a construction - real but imaginery too.
I'm glad I'm going home...Only two more sleeps I tell myself. I've started to work actually, in the last dying days of my stay. Working through my data chapters - the ones I need to cull. I'm reworking, reordering, rewriting sections of texts or simply marking up text that needs to be cut or rewritten. The beginning of the very end. It feels good, but also sad. I've been a PhD student for such a long time now, what will I do when I'm no longer that? What new identity will I have to get used to then?
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