In this instructional video, the speaker guides doctoral candidates through the critical early steps of the dissertation process, focusing on how to choose and work effectively with a dissertation chair. The talk begins by warning against automatically selecting a chair solely based on research alignment, emphasizing the importance of the chair’s track record for student completion and interpersonal compatibility. An extreme anecdote about a non‑responsive chair is used to illustrate the risks of poor mentorship. The speaker then outlines best practices for the initial interaction with a potential or assigned chair, likening it to a first date: crafting professional emails, expressing genuine interest, and probing the chair’s preferred working style. The discussion moves to negotiating expectations around feedback frequency, chapter submissions, and communication with other committee members. Next, the speaker advises on selecting a dissertation topic that balances personal interest with feasibility, recommending the identification of a narrow, doable gap in the literature—often a specific population, setting, or educational level that has been under‑studied. The importance of assessing the practicality of the research (e.g., data collection timelines) is highlighted. Once a gap is defined, the video explains how to develop a prospectus: a concise document outlining the problem, purpose, research questions, methodology, and preliminary literature review, which serves as a roadmap for the chair and committee to evaluate the project’s viability. Throughout, the speaker stresses the ultimate goal of completing a dissertation and suggests seeking mentorship from experienced advisors or professional coaching services like Beyond Ph.D. Coaching for additional support.
Chapters
the beginning of your dissertation journey or getting started. One of the first steps that people encounter in this process is finding their dissertation chair. Now, at some schools it's assigned to you. We'll talk about that in a minute. However, if you get a choice, you have to think about this. Am I going to automatically choose someone because they do research directly related to what I'm doing? Maybe, but should it be automatic? No. Yes, it's good to have a chair who understands deeply what you're doing, but does this person help people finish, or do they have a reputation of not helping people finish at all, or do they have a reputation of being just very hard to work with? I just happened to hear a story yesterday about, that was relayed to me from someone outside the US, about a colleague of theirs in their doctoral program whose chair was not responding. At all and would not respond intentionally, seemingly, and multiple submissions and no comments back. So what this person did, and before I tell you this story, I am not endorsing this, what this person did is they went out and hired 4 or 5 people who went and kidnapped the chair and held him overnight. And then the chair said, I did not realize that this person was so important. I will make sure that things move forward quickly for them. So, I am not proposing that you kidnap anyone to get through your dissertation, but what I am proposing is that you be aware of their habits and their patterns in working with students. Now, let's move to either you've chosen somebody you think, and/or you have been assigned someone. Now we have a first impression. When you first meet with Even if it's an email. Years ago, someone told me the first thing that your boss's boss sees of the work you have done, it's something in writing. And it's even worse with emails because emails can be forwarded to anybody without you knowing. So you want to phrase things properly, how interested you are in working with the person, sharing your ideas, sharing what you want to talk about in this, asking them how they like to work. It's a get-to-know-each-other. It's almost like a first date. and you want to be on your best behavior in talking with them on your first date with your chair. Sometimes you're going to be assigned a chair or find a chair who doesn't like your topic or doesn't like your methodology. And this is the beginning of you entering academia as a peer, meaning this is a discussion that you get to have. This is where you ask them, why is this approach topic and/or methodology the best approach for this. And you can share why you think it is best and have a discussion about it. And the worst thing that's going to come out of it is you're going to learn something, even if you have to change. Because remember, your goal through all of this is to get to a dissertation that's done. The only good dissertation is a done dissertation. The negotiation process— and it's maybe not even negotiation— the discussion process about topics and and about what you think is the appropriate way to go is a valid thing to do with your chair. In addition, in that get-to-know-each-other phase, it's how do you want to work? Do you want me to wait and send you 3 chapters at once, or do you want to see just a chapter? Do you want to see sections at a time? What kind of response time, you know, will the chair provide? What contact does the chair want you to have with the remaining committee members? Because you're going to have 1, 2, 3, maybe 4 additional committee members. Do they want to have you, you know, just talk with the chair and meet with the committee at a defense, or are you allowed to, slash, encouraged to talk to committee members along the way? Your topic, your dissertation topic, because this is what you're going to be working on with your chair. Hopefully you're going to find an idea that you're going to choose that you like, that you have interest in, because look, you get to live with this idea 8 months, 9 months, a year, 2 years, 3 years depending on the program you're in, what your type of study you're doing. You're going to live with it for a long time. So choose something you have a deep interest in. That interest may diminish after you've put in a year on it, but still something whose topic and results will be of interest to you on an ongoing basis. The next thing you want to do is find an approach, a topic, a problem that comes from your literature. And one way we refer to this is a in the literature, what has been done and then what hasn't been done. And what hasn't been done should be thought of as a very narrow piece of what hasn't been done. Another way to think of it is, is it doable? For example, we haven't determined if children born in a certain hospital end up with higher GPAs in college and a certain hospital that used a certain technique starting today. Well, that means I have to find a certain number of children born today and then follow them for 22 years. Most people that I talk to aren't willing to pay tuition for 22 years just to do the research. So while it might be interesting, is it doable in a reasonable time period? And is it backed up in your literature? For example, we've studied something in education and we've looked at it in urban situations. But has it been done in a suburban situation or in a rural situation? Or have we done it in elementary school but not in middle school? Or has it not been done in high school? Or has it been done in public schools but not private schools? These are the types of small gaps we are looking at that tend to be accepted as means to complete a dissertation but also add information to your discipline. I like to think of it as just a little piece of information you're adding to the pile. And as the pile grows, we begin to believe we know certain things. Once we find our problem, our gap in the literature, then typically we move on to what a lot of schools look for is a prospectus. And a prospectus is a document to give to your chair and your committee. It can be a template and it can be a loose it can be a template or can just be a document where you write, "Hey, here's my problem, here's my purpose, here are some research questions, here's how I'm gonna go about doing it, here's a little bit of the research." And it's a way for your committee to say, look at what you're doing, say, "Yeah, that looks reasonable. It looks like there's a good start to you to dive deeper in." Or, "Wow, you know, you're basing this on literature from the 1970s. There's been a lot done since 1977." you need to update this, or this problem's already been tackled, or this gap in the literature is too big. So it's when you're starting to get guidance to put parameters on what you're doing using the expertise of your committee so that you then develop a prospectus, a roadmap, on how you're going to move forward in setting up your proposal, defining what you're going to be doing, and then ultimately collecting data testing that data, and moving forward to complete a dissertation. So that's a relatively quick introduction to getting started on your dissertation journey. As always, if you need assistance, look to people who've been through it before, who've got a track record of helping people, and you can always reach out to me through Beyond Ph.D. Coaching to see if we can be helpful in helping you finish your journey.
