For whom the Belle tolls

So blogging lady of the night Belle de Jour has outed herself... as a former PhD student. Like many others, I read the media coverage in appalled amazement. How the hell did she find the time? Did she submit her thesis by the deadline? What about the rewrites? Was the quality of her work affected by her other job? And what about the effect of that work on her research project? This is where I have to hold up my hand and declare an interest. I spent four years of my life - and this is not something I'm proud of - as, yes, a PhD student. Even now, the memories fill me with shame. The long hours hunched over a computer, tapping away. The even longer hours trying to look busy while waiting for a simulation to finish running. The clammy, sweaty realisation that I had used the wrong variables and was going to have to start all over again. And the gut-churning day when the computer displayed a black screen with the dispassionate message: "Cannot detect hard drive. Please insert hard drive and press any key to continue" and I hadn't backed up any of the last two years' work. And perhaps worst of all, the self-loathing and bitterness that came from the realisation, about eighteen months in, that I did not want to do this for the rest of my life. The spurious glamour had faded and the fun had gone. But there was no way out. Dependent on the research grant for my survival, I was forced to spend the next two and a half years chained to a battered desk in an overlit, underventilated communal office, putting my soul through all sorts of twisted contortions as I tried to make the person I'd become measure up to the person I could have been had I been able to find the strength to walk away. Today I am rehabillitated, a hard-working, upstanding pillar of the community. But there is always the fear that, one day, my past will catch up with me. Despite the censure heaped upon PhD students, we fulfil a need in society. Someone has to drudge through the dead ends of human endeavour, drawing erroneous conclusions from incomplete data. Without us, there would be no Nobel prizewinners, no medical breakthroughs, no market for black t-shirts emblazoned with the logos of obscure Scandinavian hard rock bands. We live through the agony of peer review of papers cobbled together because our supervisor thinks it's time we published something, anything, through the pity of friends with five figure salaries, and with the almost overpowering temptations of eBay and Facebook. Every day we are forced to face up to our own intellectual inadequacies. We fell into this way of life, seduced by images in the media. We remain there, trapped by the desperate need for cold, hard cash to pay the heating bill. Please don't judge us.