Monday, January 11, 2010

Advice from a Former Student

I've asked a number of my former students to write letters or just helpful suggestions for this blog.  Chris Freer took me up on it.  Some of you may know Chris.  He is a great person.  He finished his dissertation in record time while juggling administrative work at Woodward and being a dad to two (and now three) boys.  Here is what he had to say:

Happy New Year!    

 

A new year and a time for resolutions … lose weight, exercise, organize my life, lower my stress level … and graduate! 

 

Resolve to make 2010 the year that you will graduate!  You may not think this is a reasonable expectation – and depending where you are in your program it may not be – but just entertaining the thought is the first step in achieving your goals. 

 

The following thoughts are suggestions based on my experience. 

 

You don’t have to be perfect…

Remember you are not writing your magnum opus, but rather a really long paper that needs to satisfy five people … the four people on your committee and yourself.  I am not suggesting that you settle for mediocrity, but if you toil for perfection you will never finish.  A year after graduation, I have reread my dissertation a number of times and every time I see things that I would change.  Ultimately, however, you have to remember your motivation ... to graduate.

 

Keep your goal in sight (and on paper)

It is crucial to keep yourself motivated and to keep your eye on the prize.  I know there are times when it does not seem possible or worthwhile, but it is.  One of the single most helpful things I did to keep myself moving was to make a simple excel spread sheet with a timetable of all of my goals. In one column I listed all of the individual goals I needed to achieve: course requirements, the residency requirements, comprehensive exams, prospectus, prospectus defense, IRB, dissertation goals, dissertation defense, and graduation.  Another column listed the semester I planned to take that course or complete that objective.  You can add other information to help you keep track of your “program of study” (credit hours, grades …), but the primary purpose of this document is to keep you on schedule.  Certainly the schedule will change, but having it on paper helps make it real.  I would update my timetable every semester, color-coding what had been achieved and what was yet to come, and I would post it prominently wherever I was doing my work.  This timetable served as an organizational tool, but also as a visible reminder of my goals.

 

Just Write

Just like your goals, with regard to your dissertation, you don’t have anything until you write it down on paper.  You may have all kinds of ideas in your head and you may have worked out all of the details in your mind, but you need to start writing as soon as possible. 

 

This is helpful for a number of reasons, but one important reason is so that you have something to hand to your advisor.  If you just have ideas that you share with them they are not always going to remember what you talked about from one meeting to the next.  Your advisors have numerous advisees and they cannot be expected to keep up with all of the details of your work.  If you hand them something, they can share comments and you have a record of what was communicated and a reference to look back at later.  

 

Another reason it is important to start writing is that you are making progress every time you type out your thoughts.  You may not realize it, but you are getting one step closer to defending every time you put pen to paper.  When you are reading articles relating to your topic or talking about your ideas to colleagues or friends, you need to have a way to write down your thoughts so that you do not lose them.  This is the longest paper you are likely to ever write and you cannot be expected to remember every thought that comes into your mind on a given day.  If you write these thoughts down you are more likely to make progress and keep your momentum going.  Even if what you are writing does not make complete sense, you have a starting point and can go back and refine and organize later.

 

Find Reasons and not Excuses …

The other reality about writing is that there is a litany of excuses not to write.  I don’t have a large enough block of time to dedicate to writing today.  I need to read more.  I need to bounce these ideas off my advisor before I spend time writing … but all of these are just excuses to procrastinate.  Find time in every day to write something.  Even if it is just a half hour or even if you are just scribbling notes down on a legal pad.  There is actually a book I read during capstone titled: Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis.  While fifteen minutes might be impractical, the point is to write every day.  Before you know it you have written a page and that turns into a chapter.

 

Determination…

Life can get in the way of graduate school and pretty soon the distractions become excuses and time gets away from you.  I have a colleague who I took a number of classes with in grad school and he had been in school a lot longer than me, and ultimately his courses began to expire and he never finished.  This is not an uncommon occurrence, in fact, I have heard that less than one-third of the people who finish their coursework for a PhD actually successfully defend a dissertation.   It is not that I am smarter than my friend who did not finish, but I was more determined to not let life get in the way.

 

Compartmentalize

Life for me in graduate school was crazy.  Between the day I started my MEd at UGA and the day I graduated with a PhD from GSU, I had three children.  As if keeping up with three young boys was not enough, like most of you I was working full-time, trying to stay connected with my friends and family, and trying to carve out a little time to be a normal person.  Life does get in the way … having children, getting sick, coaching little league, building tree forts, laundry, and your day job, can all get in the way of writing.  Life does not cease to exist when you are in graduate school and that old Murphy’s Law inevitable takes affect as soon as you think you have blocked off time to work on your writing.  Let’s face it life is already hectic without the extra burden of graduate school. 

 

During my dissertation experience I would find every reason in the world to procrastinate.  If you are anything like me, you might need to have a clear head to be able to write.  Laundry must be done, bills must be paid, and of course your e-mail inbox must be empty … there were times when I would find every excuse in the world to work on something other than my dissertation.  It was like this at Davidson too.  I would need the pressure of a deadline to be productive.  During my undergraduate years I would inevitably wait until the last minute to write a paper or study for an exam and I would stay up all night.  The prospect of an all-nighter is a lot less attractive once you have had kids and my ability to bounce back from sleep deprivation is somewhat less than when I was in my 20s. 

 

I found the best approach to keeping life from getting in the way was to compartmentalize.  When I was writing I did not let anything get in the way and when I was enjoying my family I tried not to think about school.  Of course this I always a challenge, but if you stay disciplined, you can be much more efficient with your writing time and enjoy life as well.   

 

Set Deadlines …

The problem with the dissertation stage is that there are no real deadlines.  Unlike undergraduate or even your graduate course work, you do not have a time table established for you.  Sure there is the ever-expansive seven year window for completing all of your course work before credits start to expire and once you pass prospectus you have a smaller window of two years … but honestly who wants to be in graduate school for a decade? 

 

So I found it imperative to establish deadlines for myself throughout the process.  The deadlines had to be reasonable and to make them real I communicated them with my advisors.  Then I forced myself to meet those deadlines like I would in a regular class.  I created an excel spreadsheet (which started out as another distraction) and in that spreadsheet I listed all of the important hurdles and goals that I had set for myself.  Your goals need to be more specific than “pass prospectus” and “defend dissertation.”  You should break it down by chapter or even sections within your chapters … problem statement, research purpose statement, research questions … these can be topics that will eventually be in your tables of contents or just topics that make sense to you.  The point is to establish realistic benchmarks that you will meet.  These benchmarks are then established within the broader context of your hopefully graduate date. 

 

You can decide when you want to try to graduate and work backwards from that point.  If you are working full-time your dates and goals will be different from a full-time graduate student, but you can expect to spend at least a semester writing and defending your prospectus, a semester doing your research, and a semester writing your actual dissertation.  These are minimums and remember that summer is typically not an option for defending either your prospectus or your dissertation.  Also, don’t forget about IRB approval.  This process takes about a month, but you can be doing this during down times or while you are waiting on feedback from your committee.  I used these time frames as a starting point to create a schedule and then I broke down each task by specific goals and established realistic deadlines to keep me moving forward.  I then communicated these deadlines to my committee to make the deadlines more real.  

 

Of course life is going to get in the way and you can adapt your time frame accordingly, but at least you have a starting point.  I mentioned a tree fort earlier and this was my most egregious distraction during the dissertation journey, but I had promised my boys I would build them a tree fort and sometimes life gets in the way!

 

 Stay engaged with others

Finally, another important aspect of the post-comp stage is to stay engaged with people who are in your situation.  The prospectus and dissertation phase can be quite lonely.  You no longer have the camaraderie of your peers on a regular basis once your coursework is completed.  It is important to find ways to stay connected to your committee, professors, and cohort.  Set up lunch dates or meet at the coffee shop to bounce ideas off of your colleagues.  Make yourself go to campus to work in the library – even if it is just to be surrounded by academia.  Attend conferences whenever possible and present your research whenever the possibility arises.  The reality of your dissertation work is that, outside of your committee and spouse, very few people outside of the grad school realm really want to discuss your research in great depth.   It is important to find a sounding board and maintain your support network within the grad school community.  This won’t happen if you do not work at it … make it part of your plan.

 

 

Remember, attaining the PhD is more about determination than smarts! 

 

“Life is like a bicycle.

To keep your balance you must keep moving.”

-Albert Einstein

 

Good Luck with the journey and keep moving!

Passive Voice

Oh you horrendous fiend of the dissertation!

You reveal the timidity of the author.

You revel in awkward prose and gain strength in run-on sentences.

How can students overcome you?


Dewey once remarked that the "packing box" buildings

Reveal the flaws of the architects who designed them,

And these buildings cannot be remedied

Until the architects first correct themselves.


And so you stand condemned, passive voice.

Students cannot merely revise their work

To remove you from their dissertations.

First they must find themselves.


With boldness, students must proclaim their own voices,

They must gain confidence through painstaking reading and thinking.

Their voices thus become testimony to their growth

And the ultimate outcome of their doctoral endeavors.