Reflecting on: Letting go of my comfortable bioscience identity

It has been a while since posting, and as I am doing final preparations for my EdD vida in 10 days, I was reflecting on how my academic identity has changes over the past few years. I remembered I wrote a post on this a few years back, so I decided to dig it out and have another look. I wrote this in November 2017:

I have now entered the second year of my EdD at Anglia Ruskin University. I have passed two of four assessed papers, and have been lucky enough to have the first one published and the second one accepted for publication pending minor revisions. I'm still not quite sure how that happened.

I have now reached the stage where I have to "properly" start thinking about my research, the methodology and methods I plan to use, and offer some sort of justification for them. This is immensely daunting, and I am still on a very steep learning curve when it comes to social science research, paradigms, ontologies, axiologies and all the other "-ologies" associated with qualitative research. It is scary to think I am supposed to go into stage 2 at the end of September...

On the drive to work yesterday, and again today, I was mulling this position over. It is an odd realisation that I am experiencing feelings of accomplishment in my bioscience "day-job" while at the same time feel like a complete impostor when it comes to my EdD. Someone will soon find out I don't know what I am talking about, right..? How do I reconcile these feelings, and how do I make sure they stay balanced?

I have been thinking about ways of conquering these feelings of inadequacy, and last night I woke up with a light-bulb moment: perhaps it is time to let go of the comfort-blanket offered by my professional identity as a bioscientist, and create a new blanket instead. I am supposed to transition to becoming this hybrid bioscience-education management practictioner-researcher with feet comfortably in two fields. There will probably always be tensions between the two identities, but they should be able to co-exist and each be called upon when required. Creating the new blanket is the process of doing the EdD, and the actual finished product will be the completion of this project in a few year time. I am ok with this.

This timeline also means it is ok to be insecure and uncomfortable for a while. I have been lucky enough that I have landed in a very supportive cohort of EdD students, and have met some great academic staff that are willing and able to advise where necessary. Last but not least, there is the brilliant Twitter EdD community for support. There are some excellent bloggers and tweeters out there doing EdDs who are struggling with similar issues to mine, and together we will get there! #EdD #ARUEdD to the rescue!

I am now at the end of my EdD journey, and the tension between my identities is still there. However, I have learned to manage this, and I truly think the dual identity has made me a better researcher overall. It will without a doubt be a long-term struggle, but I look forward to seeing where it leads!