Reflections on Taking a Career Break and Getting a PhD at 40

Reflections on Taking a Career Break and Getting a PhD at 40 | brokeGIRLrich

I’m sitting at a coffee shop taking a break from inputting some interview data in a spreadsheet for my thesis and I’m a little stuck on what to write for my blog post this week.

Money has gotten fairly weird for me.

I do not feel remotely where I thought I might be by 40, but also I’m not even sure what that sentence is really supposed to mean.

I sort of skipped the whole settle down, buy a house, have a family thing. And I don’t regret it. But it often feels like I’m doing life without any sort of roadmap because of it.

For instance, I’ve just made my final tuition payment (save a £500 stipend in February for the final year). And my roadmap-less life just let me fund a PhD in a foreign country while only working part-time, and while I’ve grumbled about some elements of my life because of it, that’s kind of wild.

However, that grumbling isn’t crazy either because I’ve just spent the last two years working only part-time and blowing through a lot of my savings. It’s a bit stressful.

And it’s socially compounded by my friends and cousins and family who are all hitting their strides in their careers and not really living the struggle-life anymore.

But I did the struggle-life to myself. And I keep telling myself that I can probably recover from this choice fairly well after graduating, with just a little luck.

Also, as I’m in mostly write up mode of my PhD, I am full mole person, just working from home and a coffee shop, analysing my data and writing up my chapters.

It is… not the most fun time. And the perpetual solitude with only my partner, which I kind of made worse for us by pushing that we save some money and move out of London, is potentially driving me insane.

I forgot how hard it is to make a little life somewhere. I never felt like I had a ton of friends in London, but I could regularly go down to school to the PhD office to work, which rarely had another PhD student in it but there was at least the bustle of the theatre and the undergrads. There was a coffee shop in town I liked. I used to work a part-time job on the weekends. We would go to pub quiz on Monday nights and usually play a game with friends one night every week or two.

I also feel like peak homesick these days. I have been in England way too long. If not for the boyfriend, I would have liked to move home after finishing up TAing in May and finished writing up my PhD at home – and gone back to work full time. But I don’t think I can convince him to move to America in June. We have been discussing that we would probably stay here for three more years, which I’m not really looking forward to because England is fine and all but it’s not home.

But I also feel bad pushing him to move any sooner if I manage to get a job touring or something. I have largely avoided thoughts about the future because I’ve had to survive this degree, but it looms large lately.

Mostly I just wish the digital producing would pick back up to the levels it was during the first year of my PhD, which would pay the bills much better and keep me nice and busy. But by all accounts, that won’t be happening.

So I will just continue to survive and stress about three years of lost good wages, and tuition expenses, and the cost of rent and bills in England, and the depressing wage prospects in this country for any job I might do.

Or the sun will come out again (it does happen once in a while here) and I will shake the funk of the last few days.

And these are today’s reflections on money and being 40 and going back to school and missing my career a lot while I do it and being homesick in a foreign country.

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