10 Dissertation Tips from Sitting On 300+ Dissertation Committees

Today I want to talk about what I'm going to call 10 tips for helping you on your journey of your dissertation. I just want to go through some ideas and reflections I've had from 20 years plus of working with doctoral students. So to just jump right in, number one, your committee. Understanding how to work with your committee, how to select your committee, how to give them what they are looking for, what they need to help you find, finish to pass you is incredibly important. And I guess ultimately, if you get the right to choose and the ability to choose your committee members, please make sure that your committee members can work well together. Don't just find people based on their expertise or their interests and try to smush them together. Because the last thing you want is your dissertation to be an ideological battleground where members are trying to basically show each other how important they are. You want people who understand the role as a committee member and understand they are there to help you finish. There's a lot more that can be said about that, but in 10 tips we're just going to have a little bit on each topic. So the second one I'm going to just call Know the journey. And by that I mean understand what your specific school requirements are. Understand the dates. For example, I talked to someone a few months ago and they said, I'm going to defend my dissertation next semester and I'm going to finish and graduate next semester. And I asked them a simple question. Does your university allow you to defend, defend your proposal and defend your dissertation in the same semester? Many don't. And that person checked and found out their university would not allow that to happen. So the more you understand things like that, when the IRB has to be turned in, how long they take all of those administravia type things, the better off you're going to be. Another example is if you say I'm going to graduate in June, walk in the June graduation. What's the university's deadline for allowing you to do that? It could be April 15, it might be as late as early May, but it is not typically June 1st for a June 10th graduation. Understanding that can save you a lot of time and maybe even a lot of money. Moving on to number three. When you're writing a dissertation, doing research, you you need data, whether it's stock market data or teachers to interview. Do you have access to that data? I've seen too many people have proposals defended and then go see, geez, can I get the data and then find out after months of delays and months of trying that they don't actually have access to data and that can cause all kinds of stress. And having to go back to your committee and maybe to the IRB and get different approvals and slows you down and can be kind of defeating. So if you're thinking about things like this ahead of time, the process moves much more quickly. Number four, I'm going to broadly call support. Do you have support in your life for this process? Do you have academic support? Meaning do you have your chair and your committee support you? Are they there to answer your questions? Do they actually answer your questions outside of school? Do you have a support network? This is a very long and lonely journey. Sometimes you want to make sure that there are people who understand what you're going through and are there to listen. So if your chair, your committee are there in name only, let's say, and aren't providing much support or the support they offer doesn't seem to be helping you to move forward. You have a couple of options. One, you can ask for new chair and or committee members. That's a process. Depends on your school. Some may or may not even allow it. Certainty you face is will the new chair and or committee agree to go along with what you're doing? If not, do you then have to modify things or there are outside support coaches who are available to do things like that? My only caveat for that is find a coach who's been through it many, many, many times. Not just written a dissertation, but one who has supported many people. Because there's all kinds of different ways that you've never thought of that can come up and you want someone who's seen just about all of them and can help you strategize a way through and support things. The fifth point is learn the academic language. You quite literally, literally are learning a new language. Most of us have English as a first language, but even if it's a second language or third language or fifth language, it's not an academic writing language. So we have to learn how to to express ourselves academically. Probably the simplest advice to this is write like the people in the articles that you're reading. Now. What that means is if you're making a statement, back it up, have a citation. If you're talking about a methodology, every single step, don't leave anything out. I say this multiple times a week. Be boring. By that I mean if you have a problem statement, a purpose, you're going to say them over and over again. And don't fall into the trap of saying, gosh, I remember High school English. And I need to say this a different way in order to keep it interesting. Every time you try to make it interesting and insert different words, we've got new meanings. And your committee can just go, warning, look out. Oh my God. Different words. What are they doing? So just repeat the same problem statement, the same purpose, the same research questions over and over again. You're going to finish much faster. Tip number six kind of goes along with number five. You're going to be asked to follow a certain style. APA is a very popular one. Chicago Manual of Style. This gets to the academic writing, but it also gets to things like citations. How do I do an in text citation? Is there a comma? Do I use all the names of people? Is there when I get to references, how do I do the references? Where do I put a semicolon? Where do I put the volume number? All of these things. You're going to be asked to do that for every single reference. Your spacing requirements, how you're going to space. Now, the one caveat to this is there are schools that say, for example, we follow apa, however, have some slight differences to apa. So while yes, understand the style you're going to use, but also understand how your school interprets this step number seven or point number seven. I mentioned that earlier, this can be a lonely journey. Self discipline is pretty important. It's quite interesting to me about 2% of the US population has a doctorate. It's also about 2% of the US population that has completed a marathon. And to me that it's not the same 2%. Okay. There's some overlap. To me that means people who can carry out a long term goal and be disciplined to continue to show up. Because it's very few people who can sit down and say, you know, today I'm going to write an entire dissertation. And it's very few people who can wake up and say, you know, I'm going to run a marathon today without ever doing any preparation. So it's being showing up over and over again. Even when you're not making a lot of progress, you're putting in the work, have that self discipline to get there kind of contrary or opposite maybe of self discipline. Remember your why now? I sometimes jokingly say, in all the years I've talked to people, I've never met anybody whose lifetime goal it is to be a doctoral student. But I met a lot of people who want to be a doctor. Why do you want to be a doctor? Keep that in mind. Is it I want to go change the world. I want to become a professor. I promised my grandmother. I want to show up that fourth grade teacher who told me I'd never amount to anything. I've actually heard that one a number of times. But remember that, in fact, you might even want to post that one, why am I doing this? And that can keep you going many times. Number nine, quite simply, I call this doable. Is your dissertation doable? There's lots of ideas out there that may be really interesting to research, but if you want to see, you know, hey, what's the impact of changing the lunch program for fourth graders and their blood pressure when they're 50? Do you want to be paying tuition for the next 40 some years in order to do this study? Do you want to follow these people for the next 40 some years? Yeah, it might be really interesting. But is it doable within the confines of budget and university timelines and everything else to complete this study and get you finished, to become a doctor. So always keep that in mind. And hopefully your chair will be saying, not a bad idea, but it's going to take you 10 years to collect that data. Do you want to do that? And that's when the, you know, warning lights go off and you say, no, I'm going to go back and find another idea because you want to finish this. Point number 10. Good enough is good enough. Now, what that means is there are a lot of people who try for perfection. You aren't the holder of perfection. It's your committee. You want to get them product early and often. Get them a product and let them tell you. Yeah, because you don't know what perfect is. You've never done this before. Okay? And what you want is something good enough. There is no such thing as a dissertation accepted with a gold star. It's accepted. They don't ask. Wow, you know, did you barely make it through? Did you write the best dissertation ever? Yeah, some schools have dissertation awards, but those aren't, you know, aren't seen by the rest of the world. You want to get through. And the little secret, look, if six people outside your committee read your dissertation, that might be a best seller. You want something good enough again, going back to your lifetime goal isn't to be a doctoral student. You want to get through, become a doctor, and in my mind, go change the world. Now, I said I'd give you 10 tips. I'm going to give you one more. A bonus. 11. Self care. Long journey, long hours. Remember to take care of yourself, schedule time in for yourself and your family. If you have a family or loved ones, you want to reach the end and still be alive. You want to be able to enjoy and celebrate what you've accomplished. So take care of yourself along the way, and I really hope you get there quickly and I wish you lots of luck.