Meet our July graduates: Michael de Percy and Heba Batainah

Meet Michael de Percy and Heba Batainah, husband and wife PhD students who will graduate together this week. Michael completed his PhD with the School of Politics and International Relations, Heba with the School of Sociology.

What do you do at ANU?

Heba: We’ve just finished our PhDs. We’re graduating next week. Mine was on Islamophobia in Australia. I chose it because it was topical and had never been investigated before.

Michael: I was interested in broadband and why Australia was so bad compared to the rest of the world. My work was initially a comparison between Australian and Canadian broadband but then it developed into a comparison of electronic communication from the time of the telegraph through to the present. I found that the broadband crisis isn’t a crisis at all: we’ve actually been behind Canada ever since the beginning.

What’s your favourite spot on campus?

The fish pond at University House.

We like it because …

Michael: For me it’s the fish. I love goldfish. We have a couple of gold fish tanks at home.

Heba: I also like the fish, but I’m not as obsessed as Michael. I think it’s just a really serene place; it’s both buzzing and relaxing. We also spent a lot of time at University House in the first couple of years of our PhD.

Michael: Towards the end we hardly went anywhere. We just became antisocial hermits.

If we were free for an afternoon we would…                                                         

Heba: We often have afternoons off together. We bike around Canberra and we go bushwalking. We also have a little boat. We capsized once on Lake Burley Griffin.

Michael: That was a disaster.

Heba: We had to get the YMCA to come rescue us.

How did you meet?

Michael: We met during honours at the University of Canberra and got married just after we started our PhDs at the end of 2006.

Heba: We got married in Jordan, where I grew up.

Michael: That was the first time I’d been to Jordon. I am originally from Penrith. I joined the military and came to Duntroon and now I’m a senior lecturer at the University of Canberra.

Who handed in their thesis first?

Heba: We actually finished on the same day.

Michael: I think it was the competition – if one of us had been left behind it would have been devastating.

Heba: I think the marriage would have been over! It was just that important to finish together.

What was it like to be doing your PhDs at the same time?

Heba: You know it really really helps when your partner is doing the same thing as you. So they can –

Michael: Leave you alone!

Heba: – understand your moods; understand why you’re frustrated and why you’re upset. So there was a lot of empathy as a result of doing the same thing. That’s not to say that there weren’t major fights, in terms of ideas, in terms of time, in terms of household chores.

Michael: And I think the difficult thing too was that if one of us hadn’t been doing a PhD we would have had a point of reference to the outside world.

Heba: We really got lost in academic thinking. We were looking at everything philosophically: the news became a philosophical issue, current affairs; anything at all becomes a philosophical issue when you’re doing a PhD. It has changed our relationship.

Michael: I think it’s great. I’m really pleased that we did it.

Heba: It was great to have someone to go on the journey with, because it can be very isolating. I can’t imagine doing it without Michael.