What better way to empty my brain and reflect on my academic journey this year than to do a PhD check-in to close off 2025? This isn’t my last post of the year, but with the last day of 2025 only a few days away, I have many discussions lined up for you all, and the first to be ticked off my list is my PhD Check-in.

I will be making these PhD Check-ins a regular occurrence in 2026, so this is a test to see what I can do with the posts and what to focus on. By summarising all I have done in 2025 (which is a lot, mind you), I can make my 2026 PhD Check-ins concise and specific to my immediate progress. With the expected updates increasing tenfold now that I am in the research and analysis stage of my PhD, I am going to have a lot to talk about in terms of social media research, bookstagram in an academic sense, and many other interesting and complex topics. I will be gathering a lot of data and research on these topics, so I feel this will be a great space to delve into the crux of bookish social media discussions from an academic perspective.

So, what did I get up to in 2025?

Well, it honestly was a year of a lot of admin and planning. I tackled two big applications this year; my ethics application for my PhD research, and my PhD research proposal for candidacy. Both of these took many months of finetuning and combing through words to get the exact phrasing and delivery required, and then many weeks of speech practice for the research proposal. Even then, it was still a bit rocky and the waiting game afterward took way too long, but I got there and am now a PhD candidate. These documents may seem like little things in the grand scheme of things, but I was working on each of them for four months, and in August I did my presentation.

But the research didn’t start once I was approved that day in August. I had to wait for a written confirmation, and that took weeks to arrive. That wait time was a time off from the heavy-duty paperwork and writing, but not from the ideas and plans for my interviews and content analyses. Once I got that email confirmation in September, I was officially allowed to start my research and data collection. Have I, though? No. Not yet.

At this point, I have interviews lined up for January, and several people to contact again in the New Year to lock in a date and time for their interviews. That’s the nature of reaching out to people during the Christmas rush. I knew it would be a waiting game, and in all honesty I was anticipating it, so I haven’t been too worried about it. But what it does mean is that there is a time crunch for data collection. Ideally, I will be done within six months, four would be fantastic. Other researchers are probably reading that and sharing all sorts of thoughts, but my research is not as demanding as other data collections. It really is just me interviewing a bunch of people and getting some social media content to analyse (with permission).

But 2025 has been a rough, busy, and stressful one for the most art. I can almost relate it to the image of a duck paddling across a lake – serene and composed on the surface, absolutely frantic and chaotic underneath. It did feel like thatat times, especially when having my meetings with my supervisor, but it has all turned out for the better. Could I have handled things in a more timely manner? Yes. Would I pressure myself to do so should I have the chance to do it all over again? No. I like where I am at, I know what I am capable of, how I handle stress and workload, and what I can achieve when I am in the zone. I know it is going to be busy for the first half of 2026, but I couldn’t imagine it any other way. I’m finally about to dive into the research i have been thinking about for two years!