The Balancing Act (aka Struggles of an Interdisciplinary PhD)

I’ve been working on my methodology for the social component of my research (which is, in a nutshell, working in local communities to understand their harvest of agaves and how bat conservation efforts could potentially be incorporated) and I feel like I don’t know what the heck I’m doing. I’ve taken several classes in anthropology and geography on qualitative methods (e.g. interviewing, focus groups, questionnaire surveys, etc.) but I feel that all my in-class training hasn’t truly prepared me for the real world. For example, I’ll be writing something about a method I’m proposing to use, like interviews, and realize I don’t really understand why I’m proposing to use that method or why I’m proposing to ask a certain question. Or I get to a point where I feel like I have an idea of what’s going on in my own mind, and then I get sidetracked with more information and more possibilities of methods to use or questions to ask. I’m finding it hard to keep myself narrowed down, I think because I don’t truly understand how “much” I’m supposed to be doing for a dissertation, how much is too much or not enough, etc. It all seems so interconnected and everything seems important to know and ask about!

I’m also struggling with the tug-of-war between “theory” and “real-world application”. I feel that my research and my interests are much more applied (I want to understand community management and harvest of agaves not so much to inform anthropological theory but to understand how bat conservation efforts could be incorporated), but since I’m doing a PhD my research also must be based in theory. I’m having a hard time balancing these two different components of my research, and understanding how to integrate the two in a way that will pass for a PhD will still having application to conservation efforts in the real world.

However, the other day I did have a realization that I was spending so much time worrying about and trying to plan (before coming here) how many sample nights I need for my bat monitoring, how many people I should interview, etc. to be “rigorous”, but now that I’m here and coordinating with my collaborators I have realized that part of doing this kind of inter/transdisciplinary research is that it’s not always possible to do everything exactly the way you want to in an “ideal world”, and I’m feeling better about doing as much as possible within the limits of my funding, scheduling constraints, etc. Especially this summer when I’m still unsure exactly how (or if) all my plans will work, and especially because of working in a foreign country in another language, I have to be okay with doing as much as I can as well as I can, but not hold myself to some unattainable (and unrealistic) ideal. I think grad students struggle with this feeling a lot (I sure do!) but I’m trying to learn to tamper this feeling with an understanding that when doing your research in situations like this (in a foreign country, not speaking the language fluently, setting schedules and study locations with a small local organization, etc.) an important part of the end goal is not just to earn a degree and write a dissertation, but also to learn how to do the kind of work that we as conservation biologists will be doing the rest of our careers.