“I Don’t Know What My Mummy Does”

Abstract

Explaining to non-academics what being a doctoral student entails can be difficult. What is it that we do all day? What is “research” anyway? And, why does it take such a long time? Explaining this to one’s children is undoubtedly an even more difficult task. So, my approach was to ignore going over the details and simply gloss my disappearing upstairs and sitting at the computer as “Mummy doing some work.” Of course, such a lack of explanation has to be dealt with eventually.