The following is the personal account of a practicing interpreter's work towards a PhD on interpreting. The author describes herself as a skeptic, interested in neuropsychology and cognitive psychology, who sought explanations to phenomena occurring in interpretation in the research work of interpreter colleagues, but found very few convincing, corpus-based findings. Moreover, her personal experience as an interpreter was sometimes at odds with some of the ideas expressed in interpretation literature. Favorable circumstances made her decide to start her own research. The author explains her motivations, retraces the difficulties she encountered, and assesses the outcome of her work.