Dr. Steve Tippins gives seven strategies for dissertation defense success: dress business-casual, tailor your presentation to what your committee has read, give complete answers to questions, admit uncertainty by framing it as future research, prepare backup slides for tough questions, and know your institution's deadline to avoid missing graduation.
Today I want to talk about 7 tips or ideas that can help you pass your dissertation defense. This can also apply to other defenses you may have along the way, but predominantly I'm going to talk about and concentrate on final dissertation defense. The first point I want to make is to be professional. Doctoral programs can be informal. You can be walking around in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, or you may be off campus all the time and no one ever gets to see you. When you come up for your defense, you want to dress appropriately, business casual, something like that. You want to address all your committee members by their earned titles, Dr. So-and-so, and you want to keep a level of formality involved unless they tell you otherwise. Show them respect by default. The second point, and this might sound strange, but it's Be prepared. And by that, what I'm going to concentrate on here is you've had this committee for a while. They've read drafts of your document. So you kind of know what certain members of the committee may be interested in. So make sure you include that type of material in your defense, because otherwise it will engender questions if they don't see it. Third point, speaking of questions, is when they ask them, make sure you answer them. And, you know, not just yes, no, but fully answer the question. And if you have any doubt whatsoever that you didn't fully get there, you can say, Did I fully answer your question, or would you like to know more? Because you don't want to leave the room at the end with them saying, well, they didn't really answer my question. You want to have them feeling you were there present and involved in actually fully answering questions. And the fourth point, sometimes you'll get probing questions from committee members, and the ultimate answer is you don't know, and it's okay to say, "I don't know." Sometimes they're gonna ask you questions beyond the scope of your research in a number of different ways, and you can acknowledge it's a really interesting question. However, this research was limited to X, Y, and Z. Therefore, conclusions about J, that you're asking about are not possible here. However, I think that's a really good point and should be taken up in future research. So it's showing I know the boundaries of what I did. I'm validating the question and saying, yes, it should be looked into in the future. It's really helpful, and this is the fifth point, is to know what they're evaluating when you go in. Don't waste time trying to memorize everything from your dissertation or put it all on slides. 'cause now we've got a 6, 7-hour defense. Know what they're looking at. And it's typically 3 types of things. They wanna know how you made your decisions to do the methodology, find the right population, things like that. The second thing they wanna know is, are your results a meaningful contribution? How do they fit in with the existing literature as well as the future? What should be done based upon these results? Yeah. —And the third thing they're looking for is, in this presentation, in the research you've done, are you ready to stand as a peer? Are you ready to come in and— many times I say— get the union card, be allowed in to say, "Yes, we believe that you're ready to go out on your own and do research on your own." The sixth point: there may be questions you're fearing or questions that are going to be hard. Preempt the questions. Put that in your defense. Have slides to talk about it so that it kind of disarms them a little bit. Oh, okay, they've got that. Great, good. I don't have to worry as much. I've even seen some people suggest that you have even extra slides in the back beyond your references and things like that. So just in case an even really more obscure or whatever question you think might come but may not be part of the defense. You're ready to say, "Oh yes, let me just flip ahead 6 slides here," and then you can talk about that. But just be ready to think about the types of questions that are coming. And 7, and this is kind of tangential to passing your defense, but it's important: understand and know your university dates and deadlines. For example, in the spring semester term, many people want to graduate, and there may be a graduation in late May. However, you can't just defend May 20th and walk across stage. Every university I'm familiar with has a deadline of some sort. For example, it's typically mid-ish April to have your final defense completed. Okay? That means you don't wanna schedule your defense for April 17th if the university deadline is the 15th, because no matter what happens, they say it's the greatest dissertation that's ever been done. Yeah. You're graduating in the next term, and it may even include paying extra tuition. So understanding those dates can be highly important in passing when you want to pass. And as always, if you're looking for help on this journey, click the link below to join our free Dissertation Help Community. Thank you.
