Dr Helen Tregidga
PhD, Accounting
Helen Tregidga says she loved doing her PhD at the time. And looking back, she loved it even more.
“I wanted to know what it meant for an organisation to claim to be 'sustainable'. Being able to focus on something you're incredibly interested in full-time, supported by a scholarship and supervisors who are interested in what you're doing – what a luxury! I want to do another one.”
It's a world away from her “great, but busy” transition to life as an academic, with the demands of teaching and pressure to publish upon her. She says she treated her PhD like a job, and conscientiously worked her way through to the end. “I worked on it every day. I didn't want to get into the habit of not doing it.”
The secret, she says, is great supervisors. “You put so much trust in this one relationship. They will tell you when you're ready to submit, and you rely on them not to embarrass you by letting you submit something which is not ready. If you are even considering doing a PhD, start thinking about your supervisor. Ask around, talk to other students. Make sure you are happy.”
Even when Helen's primary supervisor moved away to Christchurch, the pair maintained a good relationship and stayed in close communication. “I had my doubts the distance arrangement would work well, but he was fantastic. He even flew me to Christchurch for a week at one stage.”
While Helen's supervisors guided her through her project, they never pressured her to publish. “Our philosophy was, get the PhD done, publish later. Only if a journal article was directly relevant and helped with writing the PhD did we consider it, and I only did this once.”
Her focus paid off, with Helen winning the praise of an international publishing house with the Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award. And as a young academic with a PhD complete and ripe for generating publications, Helen was snapped up for a lecturing position, and promoted soon afterwards.
“Then, the first article I sent off from the thesis was rejected outright! One minute I'm being told it's an award-winning thesis, then I get a complete rejection.”
You do have to develop a tough skin, says Helen, and to take pride in your achievements.
“I celebrated getting my literature review finished, submitting my first draft, receiving my examiners' reports. They are all significant milestones, and a PhD is a long journey – you need to congratulate yourself every chance you get!”
“When you're at university, it's easy to forget that having a doctorate is a big achievement because so many people in that environment have one. But it is a big deal, it's something relatively few people ever attain and it is something to be truly proud of.”
Helen's thesis has been formally recognised by the Division of Commerce as being of exceptional quality.