My laptop is shaking unsteadily on an airplane tray as I write this. I have had the brilliant idea to write a column on a flight from Reykjavik to New York. I tell myself that this is the beginning of a long line of new experiences in creative workplaces that await me in the coming months. I need to be open to new work environments to find what works. However, I give up my attempt at airplane writing very quickly, this work environment is not quite what I’m used to and both concentration and ergonomics are lacking.
For me, the biggest difference when I went from master’s to doctoral studies was getting a workplace to go to. From years of sitting in libraries and then suffering from home studies at the dining table during the covid pandemic, I finally came to my first real workplace when I became a PhD student. New exciting things like a work computer, adjustable office chair, coffee machine, storage space, and workplace rules were added to my everyday life.
I loved having an office to go to. To have a large, well-light computer screen at a height-adjustable desk meant that I no longer got backaches, headaches, or neck pain, which I had become accustomed to from all the substandard study places I had had in my student life. Now, a couple of years into my doctoral studies, I have gotten used to the work luxury of having my own office chair that’s always adjusted to my measurements and employer-paid prescription glasses. I have been prancing to the office in the mornings in the joy of sitting in an office and working on the kind of research that I find most engaging in the whole world. With this reflection in mind, I understand why the switch to a shaky airplane tray is drastic and unmanageable.
Now, just as my dedicated open-plan workspace at my home department is to be upgraded to a shared office, I am instead heading to Princeton in the USA as a visiting research fellow at a department where PhD students are not assigned workspaces. Now I am kindly directed to the department’s library because that is where the grad students work.
”I talk to an American PhD student in the natural sciences who tells me that as a philosopher you can work anywhere, you just need your laptop and your head. I don’t want to complain, so I assure him that I will do just fine in a library.”
Once I have arrived at Princeton, I talk to an American PhD student in the natural sciences who tells me that as a philosopher you can work anywhere, you just need your laptop and your head. I don’t want to complain, so I assure him that I will do just fine in a library. Resources abound for me now that I am enrolled in an Ivy League university.
There is no need to feel sorry for me, and I’m sure I will be able to work out of libraries and cafés during this academic year. There are plenty of varied workplaces here that cover almost every need a philosopher could possibly have, I tell myself.
For the researcher who spends long days in a lab or doing fieldwork, the time spent on a laptop may seem like simple tasks that can be done anytime, anywhere. But all of us who have had to sit in front of a laptop for hours on end, day in and day out, know that it doesn’t work anywhere, anytime.
I’m making a new attempt at column writing at my new university library. To write in the reading room at Firestone Library in Princeton reminds me of writing in the reading room at Carolina Rediviva in Uppsala; it is hard, cold, and quiet. It is with excitement and anticipation that I sit here, for a chance to collaborate with researchers who share my view of which research is the most engaging in the whole world. But I’m also office homesick for Uppsala.
”When the study places in the libraries start to leave an ache in my lower back, I console myself with the thought that one day I will be back in my office chair in Uppsala. Maybe someday, a few steps up the career ladder, I can even work from my very own office.”
When the study places in the libraries start to leave an ache in my lower back, I console myself with the thought that one day I will be back in my office chair in Uppsala. Maybe someday, a few steps up the career ladder, I can even work from my very own office.
Until then, I realize that I need to use my scholarship funds to buy an office chair, in order to build my own workspace in my dormitory room, and spend my free time in yoga classes, both to compensate for the library environment I have been relegated to.
