How I experienced the Five Stages of Grief while completing my PhD Dissertation
When I was nearing the end of my dissertation data collection in April of 2012, I felt like I had been running a marathon that just wouldn’t end. To add a layer of complexity to the situation, I was also 9 months pregnant with my second daughter and my older daughter was just shy of 3 years old. Needless to say, home life and PhD life were something else indeed! But getting back to the marathon analogy, I remember that my dissertation experience, particularly the data collection phase, left me feeling like I was constantly hitting “the wall.” There came the point where I knew I had just a few more subjects from whom to collect data, but I was so mentally, physically, intellectually, and emotionally tired. My dissertation data collection was very time intensive, both with regard to the time it took to collect data from the subjects themselves, but also the time I had to spend afterwards processing blood samples, running biomarker assays, and analyzing th...