Days Between Deadlines
A personal reflection on Emma Experience by current psychiatry PhD student, Farah Hina.
College Portraits Tour
A PhD is often described through milestones and outcomes, but lived from the inside it feels different. It is less about achievement and more about endurance. Days blur into schedules. Weeks are measured by deadlines. You move forward because you have to, not because there is time to pause and ask how it feels to be there.
Somewhere in the middle of that forward motion, Emma Experience quietly arrived. Not as an interruption, but as a soft widening of the space around everything that had begun to feel tight and grey.
Between workshops, the stillness of Scriptorium, conversations that stretched beyond sessions, and moments shared without agenda, something shifted. The pace eased. Breathing felt easier. Below are some moments that stayed:
Learning to Live with Rejection
One career workshop lingered long after it ended. Rejection was spoken about not as a single event, but as something that seeps in slowly. An unanswered application. A closed email. A silence that starts to sound personal.
What stayed was a simple reframing. Rejection is not a verdict on your worth. It is a redirection of your path.
It did not erase disappointment, but it softened it. It made room to carry rejection without letting it rewrite the story you tell yourself about who you are.
Finding People in PhD Life 🤍
A PhD can be lonely in ways that are hard to articulate. You can be constantly busy and still feel unseen. Hours pass with only a screen, your thoughts, and the quiet pressure to keep going.
Emma Experience made something clear. Connection does not arrive on its own. It is built slowly. It begins with small acts. Sitting next to someone. Staying behind after a session. Saying yes when it would be easier to leave early. Over time, those small choices accumulate into something steadier. Familiar faces. Shared understanding. The quiet relief of realising you are not carrying this alone.
Listening to Your Body Clock
Productivity culture offers endless instructions. Wake up early. Do more. Push harder. One session offered an alternative. Listen inward.
Some days, thinking comes easily in the morning, some days, it does not. Some days, progress looks like output, other days it looks like rest. Letting go of borrowed routines makes space for honesty. Guilt softens. Energy stops being something to fight and becomes something to respect.
Living with Imposter Syndrome
Imposter syndrome rarely announces itself loudly. It whispers. It questions. It asks whether you belong here, whether this space was ever meant for you.
Sometimes, the bravest act is not proving yourself, but choosing to stay. Choosing to believe, just slightly more than yesterday, that you are allowed to be where you are.
Learning Beyond the Page
The visit to Parliament stood out not because of formality, but because of presence. Walking through those spaces where decisions are shaped made learning tangible.
But what mattered just as much was the in between. Conversations over food. Laughter. Shared moments that turned unfamiliar people into something warmer and more recognisable. Learning happened there too, quietly, without needing to be named.
Lord Wilson meets Emmanuel students in Westminster Hall
What Holds Us
The college carries its history quietly, shaping daily life as we move through it. Its spaces hold creativity, memory, and shared tradition alongside our work. The art day brought that richness into focus, offering a moment to celebrate the place that supports us as we pass through it.
Closing
Emma Experience became more than a programme. It became a reminder that life alongside a PhD needs room for breath, for connection, for joy, and for rest. Becoming is not only about outcomes. It is about how you carry yourself through the in between.
That gentler shaping is what remains, long after the sessions end.
