It could have been worse! - My journey to completing my PhD Part-time

I had slept an average of five hours in the last few days hoping that I would give one final push towards revising my thesis. I was tired and didn't want anything to do with school. I submitted cringing with the thought that more comments on my thesis will be received and required to be resolved. But as soon as I received the email confirming that both my supervisor and the Head of School approved the final submission of my thesis, I knew my world would never be the same!

WHAT! I finally received the letter that confirmed that, after SIX full revisions of my thesis from both my supervisor and three external examiners,  my thesis was approved to be published?!? 

What a sense of satisfaction but at the same time the realisation that five years have actually gone past and the immediate reflection on whether these years of self-induced stress and constant bargaining for spending time with family and friends, were actually worth it. 

At the same time, I got reminded of the numerous conversations with family and friends that encouraged me to keep going even when it was logical to just give up and focus on something else. Naturally, I listened to the words of the wise women in my life, reminding me that life was all about embracing what challenges you to be better.

Some thoughts flashed me back to the year 2016 when the thought of enrolling on a PhD programme came to mind. I was then the father of a 1-year-old son, a department head with over a dozen reporting to me and had just finished a leadership programme a year before with fresh ideas on how to improve my management career. 

But I was bothered by one question:

What do I REALLY  want to be in the future?

And to be honest: managing people and departments were not on top of my list. I knew I had a make-up for it, but I was not convinced it was either the right time or the right company to pursue such a path. One thing I knew: I loved aerospace and engineering (and at the time I started getting more involved in drones) and I wanted to see if I could grow my technical contribution to the industry. So I decided instead to speak to different people about their experience of doing a PhD and whether they thought I had what it takes. The one shocking statistic revealed itself:

Not ONE knew of anyone who started AND completed their PhD while doing it part-time! Let alone doing it while raising a small family...

The message was clear: I was doomed to quit, let alone actually get close to finishing. But I also knew one universal truth: STARTING costs nothing!

But to START you need a plan of action: a relevant topic, a formulated hypothesis and a sound methodology to achieve the necessary results. I also knew I wanted my research to be useful and practical. 

So how could I leverage my work responsibilities and past experience to complete PhD-level research within a reasonable time period (less than five years)?

I began to formulate a sketch of all the various components/technologies that could be relevant and will have a commercial interest long after my research was over. I then cross-checked those technologies with the various skills I had gathered until now (including in my Master's degree) and the exposure afforded to me at the workplace. 

With that, I was able to develop a research plan that will be a combination of experimental and theoretical research. Moreover, I decided from the onset, that each research milestone will be capped with a conference paper whose content would form part of a chapter in my thesis, thereby reducing the overall time spent writing.

And so the journey began. I remember giving up SO many things along the way: TV binging, TV games, free weekends, time with my wife, time with my son, and time with friends and family. I don't remember a weekend in the last five years that I wasn't busy, stressed or both (unless my wife forced it out of me)! 

I had one particular memory in 2019 when I was in my father's village in Cameroon and I had another episode of  "what am I doing with my life?". The only way I could keep going with my research was by walking or taking a motorbike to a bus depot so I could get consistent power to work on my laptop while trying to decipher some Neural Networks training algorithm. I also remember fondly my supervisor calling and encouraging me to keep going no matter what situation I found myself in.

So what was my PhD research, you may ask? 

In a nutshell, I proposed a new framework for the safe operation of drones which implements a low-cost solution for fault detection and autopilot reconfiguration using artificial intelligence. Some of the outcomes of this research resulted in the birth of UAV4AFRICA. 

What is the biggest lesson you've learnt on this journey?

I'm much stronger than I think. When others take a break and feel the need to "breath" and "relax", your passion and your faith can re-fuel you to keep going and attain new heights. 

So in fact this journey has just begun.