How to respond to your dissertation advisor's feedback

Hello, everyone. I hope you're having a beautiful day. If you're somewhere in the US you could be snowed in. I just got a text from someone who had asked how much snow they got, and he said, well, one site said 14 inches and the other site said 29 inch inches. So maybe there's a measurement error there somewhere. But today, what I want to talk about is feedback that you get from, you know, dissertation chairs and committee members and, and how it can be confusing. Okay. When we're involved in writing, first of all, for our academic writing, for our first time, for many of us, we have to learn that this is a new language for us. We explain everything thoroughly and completely, feeling like we're even beating it to death. But we really want to be thorough so that there's no room for misinterpretation. So many times your feedback is going to be based on that. But the frustrating feedback that I know about is things like, well, give me more, or, you know, go find more references. Excuse me? Well, you probably would have given them what more if you'd known they wanted more or if they'd given you directions as to what they wanted. And the response many times is going to be, well, it's not my job to do this for you. You have to find it. Because this is the way they learned. They were just thrown out and told over and over again, well, give me more. Go find this. Go find something unknown. And that's kind of what you get. So it's not uncommon to get vague, vague comments. It's okay to ask. I don't really, you know, what are you looking for? I'd like some help in determining where I'm off the mark and, you know, take the blame yourself. Where I, I'm not understanding. Can you help me see if you can engage them that way? The another area with this is inconsistent comments. And to me, one of the frustrating ones was, well, you've seen this document four times. Why are you now giving me a comment on this one section where the first three times you didn't do anything on that section? In their defense, sometimes you don't see things because you don't understand how they relate to what's written. And when what's written changes over time, then that might mean other things need to change that didn't need to change ahead of time. So it's just something that can be frustrating. You want to try to engage people and find out more about what they are looking for. This leads into. And a lot of this is all going to Be tied together difficulty in understanding what they're asking. They may say they want something, but it's hard to interpret what they're asking. And what might seem clear to them might not be clear to you. And what you wrote might seem clear to you, but might not be clear to them. So you want to try to again be explicit as possible. One of the things that's incredibly helpful here, and it does take another iteration step to get more clarity, but that is a change matrix which is basically, hey, here's the comment, here's what was there before, and here is how I've interpreted it and how I have responded to it. And sometimes the response is I've changed this to include X, Y and Z. Or I have kept it this way because. So you don't automatically have to change. You do get to say I've kept it this way because. And then justify why you've kept it at a certain place. And this begins the back and forth that is part of becoming a scholar. So, yes, you're sent out many times to wander in the woods and find things, but it's incumbent upon you to ask some questions because they're not used to providing direction or boundaries or scopes of parameters of what you should be looking for. But as you engage them more, you're going to get more information from them and, and more able to understand what they're asking for. Some of this comes down to not really understanding what's, you know, being required of you in writing a dissertation. Okay, yes, many schools have templates which give you broad outlines, slash headings for sections. However, you have to fill in words there. And I'm going to use just chapter three as an example. Chapter three is the methodology, and I like to think of it as the recipe. Many of you have heard this. It's, you want to make sure that you have laid out your dissertation in such a way that, that everything is there. Any scholar who comes along can replicate what you've done. That's important. So that means if you say I'm going to recruit candidates, you then have to say who the candidates are, how you're going to recruit them, what steps you're going to take. Just like a recipe, it's going to tell you you're going to need four eggs. But where do I put the four eggs? Do I scramble them? Do I just add them later on? You know, what happens to the scrambled eggs and when are they used? What happens with the respondents and when and how do you get them involved? So understanding that academic writing is not meant to be a novel, okay. It's meant to be clear and concise and. And consistent. One of the issues that people run into is trying to be interesting, where they say, well, I've said it this way before, now I'm going to say it a different way to keep it interesting. Well, when you say it a different way, it can be interpreted differently. And that's when you're going to get lots of comments about things like, whoa, you said it this way on page 18, but over here on page 27, you've said it this way, and that's inconsistent. Excuse me, how are you going to, you know, reconcile that so you'll get a comment like, well, this is different. What that means is be consistent. You might be writing clearly, but not academically. Okay? So you, you know, I've seen this. People say, I'm a really good writer. Great. And they may be a really good writer and they may be a published writer, but are they a really good writer? In academic styles where you have to be, again, consistent, you have to be clear, you have to be concise, you have to explain every single step. I once was working with someone who said, well, I'm going to send this to an editor before I submit it. And I was on their dissertation committee and it came back, it wasn't not improved for academic writing. They sent it to a friend who was an editor who edited things like newspaper articles and papers for, like, Time magazine or something like that, not for academic writing. So you have to be aware that you're writing for an academic audience and that's the style you want to get. Otherwise, you're going to get feedback like, oh, synthesize, don't report. And what does that mean? Well, a lot of people write chapter two and they just report, or they make it like a book report, and they just try to go along chronologically or in some pattern, but they don't understand that it's integrating and synthesizing the material that's the most important. It's letting your committee know you understand things. You get how things fit together and how they interrelate and how the topic, the field, benefits from all of this. And then where there are gaps, and then moving ahead to chapter five, where people get in trouble is. And they get feedback saying, well, you know, you need to integrate this. What do they mean? They mean you need to show how your results fit in with the previous research. Do you match? Do your results similar? Are they different? And come up with explanations about that. That's what they're Looking for. And much of this gets easier as you have more exposure to academics and the comments that they make. And you know, many times it's needing to share with others, hey, what does this mean? That you get better and better and you have a good relationship with your chair or someone who's helping you. They can help translate things for you. One thing that can be frustrating and I want to just say, if you do have questions, just go ahead and ask them anytime. And I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but, you know, changing, seemingly changing expectations, Hey, you approved this or you, you know, we were on this research topic and that was four iterations ago now I changed it. Now you've got me coming back to this research topic. You know what's going on. Quite frankly, sometimes it's, they're not paying attention. Okay? I would never throw anything away because things can come back. Also, they can be good ideas for future research. And like I also said, if I've read something and it seemed okay, but then the material around it changed, this may need to change now, even though I've approved it before, because the context in which it's written has now changed. So ultimately, I want to say more often than not, comments can be cryptic because they're not used to giving you thorough comments. They're used to you doctoral students being told to go wander around and find things and because that's how they did it, and that's how their major professors did it, and that's how those before them did it. So, you know, there is a, you know, somewhat of a burden put on you to try to figure out what they're saying. But I want to encourage you to communicate with them. Don't just say, translate this for me, saying, I've tried to understand this and this is my interpretation of it. Am I correct? That shows you've actually worked on it. If you're just asking them to give you or what many would say, spoon feed you, they're going to be very reluctant in my experience to provide a lot of help. But if you show here's what I have done and here's my interpretation, meaning I've worked on this based on where I am. This is what I believe is you're looking for, am I on track? That's going to be much easier to get involvement and engagement from people. And everybody faces this, everybody goes through this and gets comments like, what do you mean? Or why are you commenting like this now it becomes part of the process. So it's part of the, I guess coming of age in becoming a doctor. Does anybody have any questions? Sure, I look forward to hearing your questions. Let's go. I think it was Harsha who said they had questions but now you're on mute. So. Yeah, How much I do broader impact versus technical depth, that's really going to depend upon the question you've been asked. For example, if you're doing literature review, more often than not you're going for a broader impact. If I'm doing methodological answers, it may be more technical than breadth. So it's hard to just say always do breadth broad or always do technical. It's kind of going to depend upon where you are in the process and you know, ultimately the wording of what you've been asked. So generically you're going to have to show some breadth. You're going to have to show how something fits, but you're also going to have to, and I'm just going to come up, use the problem statement as an example. The problem statement gets down into technicalities because we're showing what has not existed, what has not been done and proving that while proving is not a good word but demonstrating that through the demonstration of what has been done show. So that's technical. Which then leads us to what hasn't been done and leads us to our gap. But I am going to start, typically I'm going to start broadly and then work into narrow and more technical matters. So most schools, most committees are looking for peer reviewed material upon which to base your work. So a peer reviewed article is going to be complete in and of itself. It may talk about this is evolving and there's more things that need to be done but you're basing it on material that has gone through the peer review process. Common mistakes in what area? As a, I mean, Ah, okay, let me. I was once told by someone if you can't explain your dissertation in one sentence, you don't understand it. Okay. The other way to think of it is and not a sentence limit, but you know, within a paragraph. If you can't get your aunt or uncle to understand what you're doing, you probably don't have a good grasp on it. So you have to be able to explain it in that way. Now if your aunt or uncle are nuclear physicists and you're writing in nuclear physics, that's going to be different. But the typical human relative. Well yeah, look, you, you're gonna, you're gonna have to come up with an idea. Your gap in the literature, your problem statement, okay. From digging in literature, from there you're going to write about it and the process of writing gets you more familiar with it. And you know, you're right. It's practice. You practice at becoming better at academic writing. You practice becoming better at sharing this idea with others and, and learn that sometimes if I'm explaining it to my aunt and uncle, I don't need some of the technical terms in there because that's going to confuse them for that level of explanation. But I can give it a level above that maybe that can give me a broad understanding of what you're doing. You know, you can't do it until you, you're, you've been set loose to do your research. Okay. And then. Yeah, concentrate on your subjects. Yes. With, yeah. And every school handles the process leading up to the dissertation differently. Okay. So it's kind of hard to give one answer that fits everybody around the world at a different school. So a hypothesis has a technical meaning in quantitative research. If you're not doing quantitative research, I would kind of steer away from using the word hypothesis as well as using the word significance because that can make people think, oh, you're doing a quantitative study. But you know, your problem statement is what you're saying hasn't been done and pretty much should be done. That missed everything quite, you know, in my mind. And this goes to alignment. You got a problem, then you follow with a purpose. The purpose is to get to the problem. Then you have research questions. The research questions are to come up with data that will then answer your research questions which then lead you to addressing the problem, You know, the contributions of your dissertation. Okay, right. And, and I'm get, I, I understand what you're asking. Up to you say dissertation contribution. Many people have to say what their dissertation, it adds to the field. Is that what you're, Ah, yeah. So the ultimate answer typically is base it in the previous research. This came out of the research by Jones and Smith and whomever. And this is what happened. And the results imply that. And here's how it can be applied. But you ground it in the literature and ground it back to the literature. Well, you're going to have to have limitations in your dissertation. Yes. Because you should, you should be explaining what limitations there are because look, I cannot generalize beyond my study. So I want to say what my limitations are because otherwise things can be way out of context. So you mean the challenges that you faced in doing your dissertation, that's all great information. It's great information for the field and it's also great information for the next Researcher that comes along saying, oh well, they said there were these limitations. If I can control for those, we'll add to the body of knowledge by doing that. Well, you know that one really is going to depend on your field and what you've done. But ultimately what I guess ask yourself this question for the real world. So what? Okay, I got some results. So what? What does it mean to them? And that's what you write on. So typically a dissertation is not written for non technical stakeholders. It's written for your committee to show your academic abilities. You can then take it from there once they've approved it and modify for different audiences. You want you're writing to get the approval of your committee. Okay, I think we can do one more question. Hi lenore. Okay, Good, Good. Yeah, Really good question. I understand where you are. I would say more often than not a committee is going to say eight. No, More often than not, committee's not going to like eight. Two, maybe three. Seems to be what gets people through. One is great if one will work. Now I would look at previous work and see where they grounded their work in and use that as some grounding, I guess, for your moving forward and to get back to what you said to finish this before your senior eligible. You want to keep this as narrow as possible so that it can be finished. Because one of my biases is that, you know, the only good dissertation is a done dissertation. So get it done, then go change the world when someone's paying you to change it. Yeah, you're welcome. So that's going to depend upon what your university and your committee will accept. Some schools want a research dissertation only. Some schools want it with a application section as well. And it depends upon a number of factors. And that one you're going to have to ask internally. So look, thanks everybody for being involved and asking a lot of really good questions. You know, we're here if you need help. Reach out and we'll be back tomorrow. Have a great day. Bye bye.