The Upgrade
Before we get started, I have new work out! An excerpt from Aurora appears in Lilith magazine! https://lilith.org/articles/fiction-aurora/ I would be so grateful if you gave it a read.
Onto the newsletter… The PhD programs in the UK function differently than those in the US. You have to have a Masters degree to apply to one. You have to pitch professors a project that is very well thought through, and one has to agree to being your supervisor. It’s only after you find a supervisor that you should apply to a program. Once you’re in, the program is mostly remote and self-driven. I learned all of this last year.
What I learned this year is that PhD programs in the UK also function differently from each other. I’m funded through an organization that works with nine universities, and I get to participate in conferences and workshops with students from all of them. As a group of us approached the end of our first year, some had to hand in extensive literature reviews that reflected the reading that they had done, summarized the articles/books, and highlighted gaps in the research.
My university required something called The Upgrade, which sounds like a term from a sci-fi story (The Turning from my own Clean Air, The Joining from Pluribus, etc.). Here it’s in reference to being upgraded from an MPhil to a PhD. Mostly you are already considered a PhD candidate, but this makes it official. And there is a chance that you can be told that you are not doing PhD-level work. It feels a little scary, like you could stumble and it could take a while to recover as you get back on track. But it also feels like everyone wants you to pass.
The Upgrade is a 15-minute presentation followed by a 45-minute discussion. An internal reviewer, who was previously unfamiliar with your work, poses questions, and you have to explain the choices you’ve made. It’s supposed to resemble your viva, short for viva voce and often referred to as a defense, which takes place at the very end of the degree. At the end of the degree, there are two reviewers, one internal and one external, and they’re given copies of the entire thesis/dissertation. For the upgrade, the reviewer is given your upgrade report.
The upgrade report is comprised of many sections—your abstract, methodology, research framework, anticipated contribution to knowledge, action plan, and then samples of work. For creative writing, many of these sections are a bit complicated, as you have two parts of your thesis that are working in tandem (the creative and the critical). But I’d love to share what each of these things mean, practically, as some of these were terms that I only vaguely understood before this process of writing and revising this upgrade report many times.