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— Written by Reece Barlow

A friend recently sent me a photograph taken in February 2021. The picture features the two of us, smiling awkwardly, standing outside the Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Centre (ISTeC) at Nottingham Trent University. We were both less than four weeks into the start of our PhDs. The initial shock I felt at the sight of my youthful – certainly skinnier – face looking back at me was, almost immediately, swallowed up in a wave of retrospection. That boy in the photograph wanted desperately to be a researcher. Six years later, a little more grown up, he still is, albeit in a very different formulation from what he would have imagined.

Inspired by the photograph, I dug around for some more pictures from that period of my life, which, of course, prompted more reflection on a time which, in hindsight, was not a particularly happy one. I ended up collating some of the pictures into a carousel titled "Things that broke me as a former PhD student" and posted them to Instagram earlier this week. The concluding slide reads:

Gazing at the photo of 24-year-old me standing outside the building which housed my lab, the difference between the kind of research I did then and what I do now was stark.

I am presently 11 months into an independent programme of study in the history of science, the ultimate goal of which is earning a PhD by publication. My research is being conducted without an institutional affiliation, on a part-time basis, without any financial backing. Compare this to my previous research conducted in a molecular biology laboratory, which regularly featured 60-hour work weeks, steady consumption of reagents and materials, and access to equipment worth millions of dollars. It is obvious which of these two scenarios best fits the image of a "researcher" in our collective imagination. And yet, as I said in the closing slide above, I still love research, still am a researcher. Same same, but different. A comment under the post referenced above posed the question, "differently how?" However, an Instagram comment section is not long enough for the kind of response I wish to make. So this letter is dedicated to providing a crude "how-to" guide for my own circumstances that will answer that question.