It’s never too late to follow your dream (although you may have to make a few adjustments)

This is the (slightly modified) text of a talk I gave at the CHI 2019 Diversity and Inclusion Lunch on Tuesday, 7 May 2019. I have added one paragraph and made minor changes in a few words and phrases, and I’ve spelled out the abbreviations for readers who aren’t in the field; but this is basically what I said. I’ve also added a short epilog at the end.

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Some years ago I moved across the Atlantic to do a PhD. That’s not so unusual, really — but I was 60 years old, and widowed. I definitely wasn’t your typical graduate student.

My age and circumstances, it turned out, brought me both challenges and advantages.

Let me begin with my three main challenges.

Health. Although I started out in fairly good health, while doing my PhD I developed some new issues. The biggest of these was hip arthritis, for which I made many healthcare visits, used walking aids for more than a year, and eventually had hip replacement surgery. These new health issues reduced my stamina and took time away from my research.

Isolation. I was much older than most of my fellow PhD students (most were less than half my age), and I missed having people I could just hang out with. I suspect that my isolation was due partly to my own sense of not quite fitting in, but I still felt sad about it.

Competition. I liked the university environment and considered trying to stay in it. I realized, however, that to do that I would have to compete with 25-year-olds who had 40-year careers ahead of them. They had more energy than I did and were willing to take lower salaries. I didn’t see myself doing well in that race.

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I also found three clear advantages to pursuing this dream later in life.

Finances. I first considered doing a PhD just after I discovered human-computer interaction (HCI) in 1982, at what I’ve come to call the “proto-CHI” conference (Gaithersburg was just up the road from me), but by then I was used to having a full-time salary and I would have had to sacrifice either income or free time. Thirty years later, I had enough resources that I could afford to be a full-time student again.

Experience. To my PhD studies I brought 35 years of practice in user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) consulting and 30 years of involvement with the HCI community. I had co-edited a book on user experience in government systems, attended roughly half of the CHI conferences, reviewed CHI submissions, and served on CHI program committees. I already knew a great many people and some of the ropes.

Topic freedom. I wasn’t aiming to launch an academic career, so I didn’t have to concern myself overmuch with how well my research topic would fly in the larger academic community. Although a few other people were conducting research on related topics in the field (the use of technology in spirituality and religion), I wanted to study subjective transcendent experiences supported by technology. It was definitely not a mainstream topic in HCI circles, and I expected to be thought a little weird. But I was OK with that, as I wasn’t depending on topic acceptance for my professional future. Besides, it was such a niche topic that there was plenty of room for contributing to knowledge.

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To respond to my challenges, I had to make a number of adjustments.

Schedule. My health issues caused me to need two extensions to my deadline. Instead of Nothumbria University’s “standard duration” of three years to complete the research and submit the thesis, I took four and a half. On the other hand, I did get it done.

Career path. Abandoning my thoughts of an academic life, I settled back into being a research-savvy practitioner. Adding a PhD to decades in industry worked for me, and I’m enjoying applying my research knowledge to my practice.

Research dreams. I’m still struggling with my hopes for continuing my research. Although I’ve presented in many CHI venues and have given full papers at other SIGCHI conferences, I have yet to submit a full paper to CHI. Unfortunately, I’m no longer up to travelling much farther than the US east coast, so I may have to rethink that goal, or maybe just postpone it.

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From time to time I hear someone wondering if, at 55 or even at 50, they’re too old to start a PhD. I am here as proof that even 60 and beyond is not too old. You’ll probably have to make an adjustment or two to your approach, your plans, and your expectations, But it’s never too late to follow a dream.

And I’m delighted to say that today I am realizing a dream I’ve had for the last few years — speaking at the CHI Diversity and Inclusion Lunch.

Finally, I confess I haven’t given up on research altogether — I have a three-day workweek and am hoping to use my remaining time to collaborate on HCI research. If anyone is interested, let’s talk!

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Epilog

This talk turned out to be my favorite part of CHI 2019. I confess I was a little embarrassed at the applause I received at several points (I didn’t write the talk to impress people but to encourage them), but for the next two and a half days I was approached by people who had heard my talk and by people who had just heard about it. They all told me how much they loved what I said, many saying that my words had seeded the discussion at their lunch tables. Some of them said they were going to push their mothers to go to graduate school. The word “inspiring” came up several times.

Now, I was proud of the alt.chi talk I had given that morning, the thing that arose from my PhD thesis. I received much praise for that one as well. But this talk touched hearts and minds, and it has the potential to change lives. I find myself profoundly moved by my audience’s response.

And I now have three or four opportunities for doing research. I call that a win all around!

A very intense CHI conference

The CHI 2019 conference ended yesterday. It was the most intense CHI I’ve ever had — I was on stage five times in two days. (In fact, it was the most intense conference experience of any kind that I’ve ever had.) Here’s a brief run-down of my activities.

alt.chi presenting

I started by presenting my alt.chi paper in the 9am session on Tuesday, after getting up at 4:15 that morning and finally finishing my slides about 8:15. (It’s easier for me to get up early than to stay up late.) Several people told me it was really good and said it should have been a full paper. I’m pondering how to enrich it for submission to another SIGCHI conference.

Diversity and Inclusion Lunch

For the past few years, CHI has had a Diversity and Inclusion Lunch on the Tuesday, and this year I spoke about doing a PhD as an older student (I started at 60). I won’t say more about that here because I plan a separate blog post on that talk. I’ll just say that my first draft was six minutes long and I had been told to target 3 minutes. I ended up with about 3.5 (which was fine), but it took a good while to cut it down to that and still convey everything important. That talk, too, wasn’t completely finished until almost the last minute (the night before). It was incredibly well received; see my blog post about that specific talk.

UX Event

I had the role of Industry Liaison for this year’s conference, and the main thing I did for that was to organize and chair a “UX event” on the Tuesday evening to get academics and practitioners exploring together things they could do to help bridge the gap between them. The event started with a talk by Giles Colborne, followed by three brief presentations with ideas for addressing the problem, followed by more than an hour of working together to create bridging ideas and plans for putting them into practice. This effort builds on previous work (mainly at CHI conferences) regarding research-practice interaction. This event was very popular, and we had a fantastically even balance between academics and practitioners. I ascribe much of the academic interest in the event to the REF (Research Excellence Framework), a newish way of evaluating UK universities’ research that includes its impact outside of academia. The event was partially successful — some folks thought it was fabulous and others (including myself) expressed concerns — and I’m still collecting outputs from it and have created a Slack team in hopes of fostering further discussion and bridge building. (If you’d like to join the Slack team, send me your email address; and if I don’t know you, tell me why you want to join and/or what you see yourself contributing.)

Session chairing

On Wednesday I chaired a paper session. I hadn’t had time to read the papers closely (my bad!) but I had at least read the abstracts and I had some idea of what they were about. And of course I paid attention to the presentations. One of a session chair’s most important responsibilities is to keep the session on time: CHI sessions generally have four presentations each, and the presentations are timed to start and end at fixed times (for the last few years they’ve had 20 minutes each, including Q&A), and I had to cut one presenter off before he was finished and hold another back from starting two minutes early. A key person in SIGCHI told me later that I had amazing session-chairing skills (I think he was referring to my timekeeping), which pleased me inordinately.

SIG co-chairing

I collaborated with two people to run a special interest group (SIG) at the conference (and two additional people to write the proposal for it); our SIG was on technology to foster transformative experiences. I was a relatively minor figure in this one, so it wasn’t very stressful for me.

Future possibilities

Several things came out of various discussions.

My PhD supervisor was there for part of the time, and he attended my alt.chi talk (and was one of the people who said it should have been a full paper). We have been invited to write an article for a journal, so we sat down together and worked out a way to approach it. We explained the approach to the journal’s editor, and he agreed in principle. So now we have to write an abstract and get busy on the article.

I suggested to my SIG co-organizers that we explore ideas for collaborating on other research, and we talked for about half an hour about that. There’s an event happening in Milan in about ten days, but unfortunately I can’t go to that because of a work commitment on the same day. I think there’s a lot of potential for that collaboration.

I’ve been invited to Weimar to speak and discuss. I don’t know a great deal about what that’ll turn into, but I trust the person who invited me and I know we’ll work out something good.

And finally, I had lunch on the last day with someone I met at a conference several years ago (while we were both students). He works for a large company that is open to supporting research that might benefit them, and I told him of something I want to know more about (not related to transcendent or transformative experiences, but something else altogether), and he seemed excited about the idea. I’m optimistic on that front as well.

All in all, it was a very good CHI. And I’m very ready to see some castles and abbeys in the Scottish Borders on my way home.

My PhD thesis is now online!

I don’t have much to say with this post, except that I have received word that my thesis has been placed in the Northumbria Research Link. Here’s the link to it. I’d love to know what you think, and if you’re interested in collaborating on future research, please do get in touch.

My job is done.

Yesterday I removed the yellow highlighting from my thesis corrections, filled out the university’s submission form for an electronic thesis, and sent the pair of documents to the Graduate School. With this I have discharged all of my responsibilities to the university regarding my PhD. The Graduate School will send me my parchment (which I will promptly have framed) and will post my thesis at the Northumbria Research Link. They didn’t say how long it will take them to post it, but my parchment will arrive about three months from now and I have about three months to change my subscriptions to a different email address and save any emails I want to keep, before they close my uni email account.

I’m going to miss eduroam the most. (Maybe I can get myself affiliated with another university to conduct further research.)

P.S. I’ve discovered that not all of my PhD-related research work appears on the Northumbria Research Link, so I’m going to look into how to get the rest of it posted.

Finally, you can call me Dr Buie!

Today I received the email from the Graduate School informing me that Northumbria University has awarded me the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. It’s been a very long journey to reach this point (and I’ll have more to say on that later), but I made it, and I’m delighted. When my thesis has been placed in the Northumbria Research library, I’ll post a link to it. Meanwhile, I’m celebrating.

Thesis corrections submitted!

It took me a wee bit longer than I had expected, but last week I finally finished and submitted the corrections to my thesis. They went to the nominated examiner this week, and I hope to be on the agenda for next month’s Research Degrees Committee meeting. I had to restrain myself from adding stuff beyond what was required for the corrections, but I finally decided it would do no good to muddy the waters and risk having my corrections rejected because the addition was seen as a problem. I can always add it into something I write later on.

It feels like an anticlimax.

And now I have to decide what to do with myself on my non-work days.

Official word on my Viva

Today I received the official word from the Northumbria Graduate School on my viva results:

I write to advise you that following your research degree examination, the University’s Research Degrees Committee has approved the outcome of your research degree examination as follows:

Award the degree, subject to corrections being carried out to the satisfaction of a nominated  examiner

A copy of the Examiners’ joint report and recommendation form is attached – section 6 lists the exact requirements which you are now required to meet.

The deadline by which you should submit your corrections/resubmission to The Graduate School is 24/02/2018 at the latest.

Once all of the corrections have been made, please submit to The Graduate School an electronic copy (formatted as a single pdf) of your corrected thesis/portfolio.

It is good practice, and will assist the examiner who reviews the corrections, if you can indicate where in the thesis you have made the corrections; e.g., by providing a separate list showing on which pages of your thesis/portfolio the corrections have been made, or by making the corrections using a different colour of font from that in the main body of your thesis (or portfolio).

This letter came about two weeks before I expected. I still think the bureaucratic process will prevent me from getting the degree before late October, but at least now I can start working on the changes. Two of them will take just a few minutes each; the other two will require some thought. But yee-haa, the end is in sight!

(The only downside is that I will lose access to Eduroam after I lose my Northumbria email account.)

The culmination of almost five years’ work

It’s been almost five years in the making. I landed in the UK on 18 October 2012 to begin working on my PhD, and on 2 August 2017 (yesterday, as I write this) I passed my viva voce examination, the defense of my thesis.

My examiners (one from Northumbria and one from another UK university) were friendly and positive. They had lots of questions, some of which sought clarification on what I had done or what I meant by something I had written and others wanted my thoughts on related but tangential subjects. Evidently my thesis offered much food for thought. I’m very glad of this.

I ended up being given four modifications to make, mostly having the purpose of clarification. In each case they said that our conversation enabled them to understand, but they were concerned that it wouldn’t be clear to someone reading it without having the opportunity to ask me about it. Fair enough, I say.

Three months ago I wrote that there were five possible outcomes of the viva, but things have changed and now Northumbria defines only four. No longer do the examiners decide whether changes are major or minor; they just write them up and the Research Degrees Committee makes that call, also assigning a deadline for completing them. I’m certain mine will be defined as minor, especially because the examiners said they should take me only a couple of days to do.

One of the examiners said to me afterward that he’s read a lot of PhD theses where he kept wishing the writer would just get on with it, but he really enjoyed mine. I loved that.

From what I understand, I’m not supposed to use the title of Dr. until I’ve made the corrections and have received word that they’ve been approved. So don’t call me Dr. Buie quite yet! Soon, however, soon…

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I plan to write a bit of reflection on my PhD process and how I got to where I am, but that will take more time than I have today.

Finally, I’ve submitted my thesis

This will be short, as it’s after midnight, but under the circumstances I thought I’d better post a quick update.

I went to Newcastle to submit my thesis in person on Friday. (I did manage to move to Cambridge in February.) Everything went well, I had a good weekend there, and I’m glad that’s finally behind me.

Here’s what’s next:

• The Graduate School will keep one copy of the thesis and send the other two to the examiners who have been appointed. One of those (the “internal examiner”) is at Northumbria but has not been involved in helping or overseeing my progress. The other (the “external”) is at another UK university.
• In maybe 2-3 weeks, I’ll receive a notification of the possible dates for my viva voce exam — dates roughly 2-3 months from now that all the other parties have indicated they can make — and I’ll be asked to choose one. This exam should be similar to what in the US is called a “defense”.
• We’ll meet for a couple of hours. They’ll ask me questions. I’ll answer as best I can. I’ll leave the room. They’ll decide on the outcome. I’ll come back into the room. They’ll tell me the outcome.
• There are five possible outcomes:
  1. Pass with no corrections.
  2. Pass with corrections required, which I have to complete within six months. My supervisors can sign off on this; the examiners don’t need to review them.
  3. Revise and resubmit (also known as “major corrections”) within a year. This will involve another viva.
  4. Award of a lower degree. (In the case of my research programme it would be a Master of Philosophy.)
  5. Fail.
• I follow up with whatever is required.

I would say that #1 is highly unlikely and that #4 and #5 are not going to happen. I think #2 is more likely than #3, but I wouldn’t rule out either one and I don’t want to second-guess anyone or contaminate the process. So I won’t say anything else about this except the viva date when I have it, until I know the outcome.

More information is here: https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/graduateschool/submittingforexam.pdf

I’ll write a long post soon, about various things.

Surprised…

…that I haven’t dreamed about my PhD before now.

A couple of nights ago I dreamed that I had my viva and they gave me a result of “Second, with distinction”. That doesn’t make any sense, because as far as I know only a bachelor’s degree gets a first, second, etc., and “with distinction” doesn’t apply to a second-class degree anyhow. But that was my dream. It meant, I think, that I’m anxious about how well I’m going to do.

It doesn’t help that I’m having problems with my main laptop. I’m not going to rehash the story here, but Apple still haven’t come up with a diagnosis/solution that make the problem go away. It’s seriously getting in the way of my productivity, and I’m really glad I never got around to selling my old one. It doesn’t have the memory, speed, or storage of the newer one, and it weighs a lot more, but it suffices as an interim solution.