Completing a professional doctorate invites reflection not only on the research itself, but also on the journey of becoming a different kind of scholar. This post continues an article series where professional doctorate graduates reflect on their journeys. Each article offers a candid look back at the challenges, shifts in identity, and lessons learned along the way, providing insight and encouragement for those currently undertaking or considering a professional doctorate.
This second article in the series is written by Dr Mike Scott. Dr Scott is a neurodivergent educator and researcher whose Professional Doctorate in Education at Bournemouth University explored how neurodivergent university educators use Twitter as a digital third space to navigate identity, visibility, and belonging. His work continues to examine inclusive pedagogy, digital agency, and the lived realities of survival professionalism in higher education.
After the Viva: The Silence After the Noise
The morning after the viva was still. My inbox, once a constant pulse of reminders and revisions, was empty. For the first time since October 2021, there were no deadlines pressing against the edges of my day. I had spent nearly four years examining how neurodivergent educators use Twitter as a digital third space to navigate visibility and belonging. Now, in October 2025, I found myself scrolling without aim through LinkedIn, the new refuge for many of us who once thrived on Twitter. As I wrote in my thesis, the platform is no longer the same social medium it once was. Some of us have migrated elsewhere, still searching for the sense of connection that first drew us online.
The doctoral journey had been less a linear climb than a nomadic drift through precarious terrain, punctuated by illness, care responsibilities, and the slow reassembly of identity after each disruption. I had written much about agency under constraint, but living it was a different matter. Each chapter of my thesis was written in short bursts of clarity, between pain management and exhaustion, in the odd hours when cognition and energy briefly aligned. Like many neurodivergent academics, I learned to survive by adapting: through asynchronous study, sensory control, and a form of survival professionalism that masked the cost of endurance behind the polished surface of academic competence.
When I passed my viva, everyone told me to celebrate. I wanted to, but completion did not feel like closure. The doctorate had been my structure, my scaffolding. When it fell away, the quiet that followed was almost disorienting. I had written about digital agency, the ways neurodivergent educators use online networks to craft identity and community, yet I now felt unanchored, hovering between the institutional worlds my research critiqued and the digital spaces that had begun to fracture.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, Twitter had been my academic lifeline. It was where neurodivergent educators shared strategies, disclosed struggles, and found solidarity in a system that often rendered us invisible. That third space, as I described it, blurred boundaries between the professional and the personal, allowing authenticity to coexist with scholarship. But by the time my thesis was finished, that digital refuge had begun to collapse under the weight of commercial takeover and algorithmic decay. Logging in now feels like visiting a half-abandoned building: traces of community remain, but the soundscape has changed.
The silence after the viva mirrored the silence of those spaces. Both carried the same sense of precarity, a reminder that belonging, in academia or online, is often temporary. For many of us, the professional doctorate had been an act of endurance as much as scholarship. We pursued knowledge from positions of instability: fixed-term contracts, chronic illness, under-employment. Completing the thesis does not dissolve these structures; it only clarifies them.
In my own case, the month since completion has been marked by a different kind of uncertainty, one not of research but of livelihood. After years spent theorising professional identity, I find myself without one recognised by the system. The job market for early-career scholars is thin, and for those of us who are neurodivergent or working-class, the barriers multiply. I now navigate what I once analysed, the tension between reflexive agency and structural constraint. The doctorate trained me to identify mechanisms of exclusion; it did not, however, guarantee escape from them.
Graduation itself has brought this into sharper relief. To attend in person would cost around £500, once travel, hotel, and photography are considered, an impossible sum without income or employment. Yet I did not want the achievement to pass unmarked. With the kindness of those who supported me through this journey, it will still be celebrated. My name will be read aloud, and my doctoral award collected on my behalf by Deborah, my Additional Learning Support tutor at Bournemouth University. I will watch remotely via the livestream, a cup of tea in hand, knowing the people who helped me most will be there in my stead. The university will post the certificate and gown so I can have my photographs taken locally. It is a small act of inclusion, but it means a great deal. After everything this journey demanded, to have it honoured in any form feels like recognition.
Without the constant demand to justify my progress, I have begun to reconnect with the reasons I entered this field at all: curiosity, solidarity, and the possibility of change. The Nomadic Educator concept that framed my thesis feels newly personal. It was once a way to theorise fluid, adaptive professional identities; now it describes my own condition, moving between roles, projects, and digital communities, building meaning from motion rather than permanence.
There is, I think, a hidden curriculum to the doctorate that few speak about: learning to tolerate uncertainty. We begin with structure, supervision meetings, submission dates, ethics forms, but end with silence, a kind of epistemic quiet where the self must reconstitute outside the institution. That quiet can feel like loss, but it can also be generative. In the absence of constant measurement, there is room to reflect, to breathe, to reimagine scholarship on our own terms.
The doctorate taught me that knowledge is not only produced in lecture halls or journals, but in the pauses between, in online threads, late-night reflections, and small acts of care between precarious colleagues. These are the third spaces where academic life continues after formal study ends. They are fragile, yes, but also sustaining.
So when I think about life after the viva, I no longer see it as a full stop. It is more of a recalibration, a shift from survival to renewal. The noise of deadlines and feedback has faded, but in its place I hear something quieter and more grounded: a voice that belongs to the same researcher, but one no longer performing for validation. Perhaps that is the real end of the doctorate, not the moment you defend your work, but the moment you finally have time to listen to your own.
Want to read more Looking Back articles? Find them here: The looking back series.