Hello everyone,

My name is Angel and I'm currently a first year interdisciplinary PhD student at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. I'm 25 years old and enrolled at UNB directly after completing my MA. The timetable I received for my program states that the first year should basically just be taking courses. I'm currently taking three courses and will take two more next semester before I begin considering my comprehensive questions. However, there are some first year interdisciplinary students in my classes who state that they have already started writing their proposals and working on thesis chapters. Should I be starting this by now? My supervisor says it's too early but I'm starting to worry as most students seem more advanced, experienced, and older than I am.

Perhaps it's just a lack of confidence, but I'm beginning to worry that I'm not doing enough during my first semester. Any advice?

Hi PaperLantern,


I'm at an Australian institution which runs PhD programs more like UK universities in that we are expected to have formed a proposal (somewhat detailed- with a methodology section) before being considered for admission. So either you have to be working in the same area as you did in Honours/Masters, or you provided a cursory outline of inquiries you'd like to make - a lot of people seem to cross into subject areas they are not familiar with yet with the intention of learning about them while they write their theses.

I did talk to a friend recently who moved from Australia to do his PhD at New York University, which seems to run its program more like your institution. He's just entering his dissertation year and said that he didn't have a proposal until the end of the coursework stage. His topic seemed to largely arise from the courses he took after he started the PhD. I think if you have the luxury of a year or two earmarked for training and building your knowledge base in your chosen disciplines then you should try to learn as much as you can while you don't have to focus on synthesising research and drawing conclusions.

Quite a few people I know who have done PhDs in the Australian format (in which you start writing your thesis from the get go) had to learn rudimentary things about new disciplines their topics inadvertently crossed into while trying to produce work and defend their thesis at presentations.

So I guess if I were you I'd just relax, try to know as much as you can about the subject area and maul over the questions you'd like to pursue towards the end of next semester, and perhaps test a question out through an end of term paper.

All the best! Keep me posted on how you go.

Yue.