This is a big one! When I first started working on my Comps in October 2025 (I remember starting to read through relevant articles then), it felt like such a huge and daunting feat. Honestly, it still is the most difficult academic exercise I’ve done – I remember waking up at 5am and churning out ideas and thoughts based on what I had read the night before. It was intellectually stimulating and has been one of the most academically rewarding periods of my PhD so far!

It definitely helps to have an organizational tool to map ideas and I know people use various tools (e.g., excel sheets, zotero, powerpoint slides). For me, Obsidian was a life-changer, a great platform to jot down summaries of articles and to memo my thoughts. I love how it allows for hyperlinks to other memos, making it very cohesive. There are probably a lot more functions to it but I stuck to the basics. My favourite function of Obsidian is probably the Canvas Mapping feature where I could map all my ideas out. It was a more ergonomic process of mindmapping than post-it-notes (which I love too), only because I don’t trust my handwriting and I’m not a big fan of clutter.

Still, the actual writing for my Comps (which was a 50 page empirical and theoretical synthesis) was not a stroll in the park for sure. There were times where I had written out chunks of sections and had to print them out to organize/re-organize them, just to fix a single sentence. I’m also ever grateful for the Health Sciences Writing Centre at University of Toronto, particularly Michael Cournoyea, whom I met every other week to chat about my writing. I learnt about embracing my writing voice and am glad this support system exists! I highly recommend using one if your school offers.

Something else I appreciate about the Comps (at least in the format that I had) was the freedom to structure it the way we wanted to. I have come to enjoy writing in the first person, centering myself in my own writing (as I do now) even as I think through academic publications. I’d been ‘trained’ for many years to write in an ‘objective’ way – something I’ve had to unlearn even in qualitative research – and centering my positionality in my writing, which is liberating in many ways.

All of this is to say that I’m extremely grateful for having completed this milestone! Onto the next 🙂