This personal account of a doctoral project on interpreting describes the experience from the supervisee’s viewpoint. The emphasis is on practical issues, such as motivation, initial difficulties (choice of university, supervisor and project), contacts with the supervisor, criticism, involvement of colleagues as subjects, presentation of research in the medium of a foreign language, the relevance of statistics and the importance of time management. Since the impact of discussing such issues in a vacuum would be limited, the introductory section first provides some information about the project and the background against which it was born.