Jess Lawrence

I am not an average PhD student. I don’t mean that I am exceptional in an academic sense but for reasons that will become clear, I am an unusual creature in the postgraduate landscape of the Faculty, and that is my strength.

I came to my Masters in Classics (at UCL) after nine years out of university trying on different professions for size. I knew I wanted to continue to a PhD but needed time to orient myself; I would need a job in that year between one degree ending and another (hopefully) beginning and so I signed up to Cambridge University’s Temporary Employment Service. The first interview I was sent to was at the Faculty of Classics for the Undergraduate Assistant role and half an hour later TES called saying they hoped I would start in three days’ time. That was my first year in the Faculty: not sitting in the library, not diving into seminars, not refining my topic, but getting involved with the daily practicalities of how the Faculty functions as a unit. I entered my time at the University of Cambridge with an appreciation for all the different ways we members of this system work within it for the advancement of the whole. At the commencement of my PhD, I felt I was bringing an unusual perspective to play.

And then I had a baby.

When I was asked to write this article, it was suggested I talk about the challenges and wins of this time of my life, which in the context of becoming a mother while trying to write a PhD, amused me. It often feels like all challenge, but then it also often feels like all win because when I came to write them down, I realised it was just one list. There should be challenges in your wins and vice versa. We are learning how to learn here and everything I have done extracurricular to my thesis writing feeds directly into that process. I have worked in MOCA on archival research, I’ve given birth to a whole human, I ran the first post-covid CA conference, I have contributed a chapter to a book alongside some of my academic heroes, I have even done voice work to engage the next generation in the wonderful stories that are my daily currency. Every one of these experiences was challenging in a myriad of ways and without that none of them would have been the wins that they were or continue to be; through them I’ve learned leadership, communication, patience, humility, performance, compassion, and rigour. It can seem like you are dedicating yourself to your one tiny area of expertise but through that process we all learn the endlessly expansive, and expanding, nature of knowledge.

I have endless admiration for the intelligence and dedication of my peers who move from BA to MPhil to PhD with such certainty and verve, however in this I am speaking to those who are wondering if they will fit in here, if they will belong, if they have something to offer. It is our diverse experiences and perspectives that are why you should be here. There is a place for all to be supported and flourish within the faculty; if we diversify and enrich our environment, it will respond in kind.I was not the first, and I really hope not the last, pregnant graduate student to be seen slowly pacing the stacks but even so there was something profoundly dissociative about being so far out of waddling step with my peers. At first, I found this alarming but as my daughter grew, I found that in the context of my work she was a crucial facet to the breadth of my ever-developing perspective (note: she is also a crucial facet to my life). Breadth is really one of the most important lessons that you can learn in a PhD, we might trick ourselves into thinking that because we must find our topic and narrow it down and hone it to perfection that that means the same happens to our thinking. In my own thesis, in the space of a few pages I can go from Ovidian scholarship, to Foucault’s theories of embodiment, to Eve in early Judeo-Christian thought, to the anthropology of childbirth (and my PhD is on how the novels of Madeline Miller teach us to be human(e)). A realisation that all postgraduate students need to come to is that it’s a constant shifting of the sand to arrive at a meaningful thesis; we learn flexibility in our thinking even whilst we are winnowing our argument down to fit through any crack of opposition. It is, in fact, rather like having a baby: the world seems to have become very small, perhaps the size of one room or one well-trodden route at dawn, but look up every now and again and you’ll see you are learning to raise the world.

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