How to Choose a Dissertation Topic That Gets Approved Fast

This is a really important and foundational issue in that you're going to be living with this, first of all, for a while, like a year, maybe more. And it's also going to ultimately be your calling card. It's what people are going to ask you, what you write about, what you're going to brag about moving forward. So you want to find a topic that. Well, let me just break down. You want to find something you're interested in. Okay. If you're going to have to live with it for a year or maybe more, you don't want to have something that is. You're just going to go, oh, God. At the beginning. You may go, oh, God. At the end, just because you're tired of the process. But at the beginning, you want to be excited about it and have interest in the topic. So after you have found an area that you have interest in, then you move on to what we'll call step two. You want to be exploring the literature. Find out what has been done, particularly what's been done recently. This is going to let you know where people have done a lot of work, where there's no work, where there's gaps in the literature. One red flag you want to consider is look if it's an interesting topic, but nobody's done anything for the last 25 years, that may mean there's not a lot of interest in doing it and your committee may not want it. In particular, a lot of schools now want the literature reviews, most of the material to be from the last five years. Well, if you're 25 years ago, you're going to have problems. So look for topics that have recent exposure in the literature, and that's going to really help you a lot. And this is going to move you to step three, which some would call narrowing the topic. You might call finding the gap in the literature. It's finding you really explored the literature now find what hasn't been done. For example, maybe it's been looked at in Europe that your topic area, but it has not been looked at in the US or maybe it's been done as a qualitative approach, but a quantitative approach has not been handled. So this allows you to narrow things down so that you're getting to a topic that you can explain. It was once told to me, if you can't explain your dissertation topic in one sentence, you don't really know what it is. So this is getting you down to where you can say, oh, yes, I'm going to study the impact of school lunches. On students in the Midwest performance or something like that. Once we've done that, a key step which a lot of people don't really think about, and I'm going to call number four, doable. Is this topic doable? And by doable, I mean doable within a reasonable time frame. You don't want to be a doctoral student forever. Are you doing a longitudinal study that's going to take 25 years to collect all the data? You're going to pay tuition for a long time that may not qualify as doable. So yes, it's interesting, but is there access to data? Can it be analyzed and done in a reasonable time period? And this is going to save you a lot of time if you keep that doability in mind as you move forward after that committee approval. While you think this is a great idea, you're going to have to get your chair and then your committee to buy into this. And it's going to be more than just a conversation. A lot of schools, they have what's known as a prospectus where you outline briefly, here's some of the literature, here's what my problem is, here's what the purpose is going to be, here's the research question. It's all going to come from that literature you've looked into and the topic you were interested in. And then your committee's going to get to say, yeah, based on our experience, this is a great idea, or no, this is not a good idea, here's why, or, okay, let's tweak this a little. Maybe you go at it differently, maybe you think about it with a different population or a different methodology. So this is where you get their buy in. And I guess as part of that step six, listen to your committee. If you listen early, you're going to get buy in from them. If you just keep saying, no, they're wrong, they're wrong, I'm going to keep going forward. First of all, they're not going to approve it and you need their approval to move forward. Second of all, they're not going to feel respected that you're drawing upon their expertise so that you can move forward. If you just ignore them, that's going to cause you problems, not only now, but in the future. Okay, so that's a brief introduction into the dissertation topic.