Finish Your Dissertation Faster with This Seven Tips

Today I want to talk to you about some insider secrets that are going to be valuable for you in your doctoral program. I'm Dr. Steve Tippins, Ph.D. I've been in academia for 35 years, and I've served on over 300 dissertation committees. What follows is a list of 7 points that can be valuable for you to understand in navigating your doctoral program and finishing as quickly and efficiently as possible. First, it's not always the smartest person who finishes their dissertation or their degree, but it's the one who adapts to the system and understands that system and pays attention to detail. I've seen lots of people who are really, really smart but who can't adapt to the system, and I've seen people who just keep plugging at it who get through and become a doctor. Second, a doctoral program can take some time. So when you're working on your dissertation, for example, I've seen people who have very high IQs and GRE scores and all that type of stuff, not get through because they want it to be fast. They want the idea to come to them quickly. But the person who perseveres and stays with it and keeps looking at the literature and finding things other people don't find just by sheer presence, that's the person who gets through and then becomes a doctor and gets that good job. The world is going to change around you. By that, I mean, you're kind of isolated in a doctoral program and you might be in there for 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 years.. And the world that you entered the program in has changed a great deal and even faster and faster now. So pay attention to what's happening outside of your program, because when you finish, that's the world you have to finish in. It's not the world that you entered the program in. So if you entered a program thinking, wow, there are, you know, 4 academic jobs for everybody who's graduating. And it's now 7 years later and there's one job for everybody who's graduating, or maybe even less. You have to be prepared for that world, not the world that you started in. There are no academic emergencies. And that's my third point. Most things don't have to be tackled right away. I remember getting calls from students with questions. Twice this has happened to me at 2 o'clock in the morning. They dialed wrong or they dialed me earlier or they were calling about something and they thought it was normal. I let them know that it's probably not normal. And from then on, I had started announcing in class, you're going to get a better answer at 8 or 9 in the morning than you're going to get from me at 2 in the morning. And if you do call at 2 in the morning, I'm going to remember your name. Prioritize things. So another example of it's not being an emergency. Sometimes you get, oh, there's a deadline. Well, you knew the deadline was coming. So work up to the deadline. Don't just wait for the last second for things. You get this from undergraduates a great deal. Coming to you, but you also get it for grant applications and applications to graduate, things like that. Be aware of dates so that you don't create emergencies out of nothing. The fourth one talks about— is about teaching opportunities. When you're a graduate student, you're most likely confined to one or two courses within your discipline because, look, you're just a student. We can only allow you to teach certain courses. But the thing that's always fascinated me is you could be in the spring quarter or semester and teaching the intro course because you're a doctoral student and that's all you can teach, and you can defend your dissertation in April, and starting in the summer semester, oh yeah, you want to teach our capstone course? You want to teach every course we've got? Because all of a sudden, the process of going through your defense and getting yes has bestowed upon you the magical ability to teach every class in the offering. So be aware that that's coming and that you, when you get hired, you may not just be asked to teach, oh yeah, I've, I taught the intro course, I'm going to keep teaching the intro course. No, they're going to ask you to teach many other courses. So just be ready for that. The fifth point, and this is kind of a dark underbelly and is not always the case, but I'm going to call this there's no honor among thieves. I know of a number, I mean, it's not huge, but instances where a graduate student has written a paper and an advisor has taken that paper and submitted it to a journal and gotten it published under their name, excluding the student. I had someone call me about 2 years ago who said they were working on their literature review and their chair had said, "Oh, it needs a lot more work. Go back and do other things." And they had automatic notifications when new articles were published in their area, and they got this notification, and it was an article by their chair, and they thought, "Oh, I should read this." It was about 85% of their lit review that they had done. So you want to be careful. Just be aware that things like that can happen. One of the reasons I tell people, you know, hey, if you can get your chair to be a tenured person so they don't have the pressure of tenure, for a number of reasons, that's a good reason. So just be aware that sometimes pressure or other reasons can cause people to act maybe even outside of character. I do know a story about a person that I knew who was up for tenure, under pressure, was serving as a reviewer at a journal, rejected an article, took the article, submitted it to another journal under his name, and he got fired, didn't get tenure. And the reason I know all this story is because he was caught. So people eventually get caught in those situations. First of all, to prevent this from happening, Work only with people that you trust. Second, work with people who are tenured if at all possible, because they don't have that publishing pressure that a junior faculty member might have. Make sure that more than one person knows what you're working on. Take notes on everything. Keep emails. I'm not saying you need to, you know, do recordings of every meeting, but make notes. If you have a meeting with your chair or a professor, Write down notes, send an email back. Hey, this is what I understand we covered and this is what's gonna happen moving forward. Make a paper trail in case there's ever any question. You've got a paper trail to jog everyone's mind because sometimes chairs leave or committee members leave and you've been made promises. Sometimes they don't remember what they've said. Sometimes they change their mind. So you having the notes is going to be valuable for keeping things going and also protecting yourself. And the final point I want to make is there may be a different budget line. And by that, I mean universities have budgets, and many times there's multiple budget lines. There's a salary line and a travel line and maybe a publication line and maybe a research line. Well, there might be something you need, or you might need funding for something, and someone says, well, that line, You know, we're out of money in that budget line. And most people will just say, oh, okay, I guess I'm not going to do it. Or you can ask, wow, is there a way to be creative with other budget lines? Because they have budget lines to do things. For example, a number of years ago, I had the administrative assistant to the department come into my office and said, you know, we've got extra money in the technology line. Would you like an iPad? And I said, no, I'm not going to use an iPad in what I'm doing right now. So I don't need an iPad. 3 months later, they walked back in and handed me an iPad because they had the money in the budget line and had to get rid of it. What I thought was even more fascinating about that, 9 months later, they walked in and gave me another iPad, and I just put it on the shelf on top of my other unopened iPad. So there are different budget lines for different things. Don't accept automatically the, oh, there's no money in the budget. Ask about other budget lines. If we can ever help you in our process, During your journey to earn your doctorate, if you ever need assistance, please reach out to us. Click the link below to join our free dissertation help community.