Achieving Your Doctorate While Working in Higher Education

Undertaking a part-time doctorate when you’re working full-time in higher education can be daunting. This guide gives you realistic and reassuring support for the complexities and challenges you might face.

Each chapter helps you map the next step in your doctoral journey, from discovering your motivations and making important decisions about where to study, to preparing for thesis submission and your viva  – and how to navigate the ‘after’ when you’ve completed your doctorate. 

The book:

• Gives you honest, down-to-earth advice about how to navigate professional and personal challenges, such as continuing professional development and maintaining motivation.
• Discusses unique tensions additionally faced by academics studying in their own institution, such as managing supervisory relationships.
• Showcases a diverse range of student experiences, with over 20 case studies of postgraduate researchers.
• Includes practical activities and reflective questions to help you make the right decisions for you.

You can also find templates for helpful techniques, such as doing a SWOT analysis, and a collection of carefully-chosen weblinks to handy resources, such as funding information, on the book′s website. 

This book is a companion for anyone undertaking doctoral research while working in an academic post. 

Merryl Harvey qualified as a nurse in 1982. After qualifying as a midwife in 1984, her area of practice was neonatal intensive care. Merryl’s clinical career culminated in her working as a clinical teacher and this in turn led her to take up a post at Birmingham City University. Initially this was to run the post-registration neonatal intensive care course. In more recent years Merryl was been seconded to work on a number of large-scale, funded research projects which have focused on aspects of parenting and preterm birth. She secured the Bliss Research Fellow post based at the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit (2004–2007). Her MSc explored aspects of the neonatal nurse practitioner role and her PhD explored fathers’ experiences of the birth and immediate care of their baby. Merryl has a strong journal publication history and has co-authored a text on fatherhood in relation to midwifery and neonatal practice (2012). Her co-authored text ‘Achieving Your Doctorate while Working in Higher Education’ is due to be published by Sage in 2021.  Merryl became Professor of Nursing and Family Health at Birmingham City University in 2017. Before her retirement in 2019, Merryl was co-lead of the Family Health Research Cluster and co-lead of the Elizabeth Bryan Multiple Births Centre. Barbara Howard-Hunt is a medical anthropologist who has worked in academia since 1999. Much of her earlier work focused on student progression and academic development where she developed a model of student academic development for the Faculty. Barbara’s PhD, in which she explored the migration experiences of refugee Somali women, was completed in 2012. Barbara has worked extensively with colleagues, both in the UK and abroad, most recently in Zambia and Jamaica, to help them develop academically and professionally. She currently supervises PhD students and has supervised a number of them to completion. She has published on the student experience and on marginalised communities and is currently co-leading on a project concerned with inclusive practices within the Faculty of Health, Education and Life Sciences at Birmingham City University. Barbara has spoken nationally and internationally on the student experience, inclusivity, equality and diversity, and access to health care for marginalised communities. She is a member of the National Counselling Society.