PhD application is so confusing and relies entirely on someone’s ability to keep up with admin, scour inaccessible university websites, and finding the correct supervisory team who have knowledge in the applicants area but also is a good fit with their values.

You need to have a team from a university which will support your research. Then you apply for funding, altering your study and plan so many times for it to fit the bill, you might even have to change the school you’re learning in. A lot of people write, edit rewrite and apply whilst doing their post grad!

Due to funding application guidelines you could end up with a supervisory team which is vaguely attached to your field and possibly wildly different values from one another.

Applying for PhD study is so amazingly inaccessible, not just in the usual ways that education is (racist, classist, misogynistic etc) but also in the need for the applicant to be able to network and keep up with confusing bureaucracy and administration.

Quite frankly, it’s a bloody nightmare and that is why I gave up. I have the drive and knowledge to be amazing an PhD student but there are a million road blocks for applying, including the horror of academic interviews.

And we could do all this work and still not get on. It’s almost as if you need a PhD to get a PhD.

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I appreciate the privilege that I have to be able to complain about this. I am a housed, white, diagnosed, English speaking, middle-class person who has had access to education.

I also appreciate that this post is not for everyone, I just need to put this frustration somewhere as I know lots of ND people who have not been supported through their PhD and suffered poor mental health because of it.

I want autism research to be fronted by Autistic people and we can’t do that if these ridiculous ableist hurdles are thrown our way.