Life After Doctoral Defense

Let's talk about what to do now that you've defended your dissertation. Hi, I'm Steve Tippins and I'm the founder of Beyond PhD Coaching. I've coached scores of students to finish their dissertations. I've served on over 300 dissertation committees. So I've seen a lot of people do this and a lot of people finish first. Congratulations. You've made it through. You've done it. You've climbed through the exhaustion. You've handled all the comments. You're here, you have finished. You're a doctor now, or at least an almost doctor, depending on your institution. So what do I do now that I finished? Well, it's not uncommon at the final defense, your committee to still have some things they would like changed, minor changes typically maybe add in a reference or tie something into a different reference. So you've got to go back and make those corrections. And I would suggest you make them rather quickly because it can get old, meaning you can forget what somebody said or what they meant when they said, well, tie this in, but tie it in where? And sometimes there are recordings of these, but it might take several weeks to get access to a recording. Well, do you want to just sit around waiting for several weeks or do you want to get done? So make any adjustments that are needed as quickly as possible. The next step along the way, once you've done this, is kind of what I call administrivia. It's going to be complying with your university guidelines. For example, you defended on March 15, great, you got everything tied up. You made all your adjustments. It's March 23rd. What does your university say the deadline is to turn things in and to what department? And do you have to go through something which can be called form and style, or checking the template of what you've submitted, the fonts. So understand what the university ultimately wants and then turn it in to meet the deadlines. This is not a lot. It's not a research project. It's just following the rules and turning things in. Now, after you've done that, you can really sit back and first of all, maybe breathe, relax a little bit the next day. Next thing I would do is say thank you to your family and friends because they've been supporting you in many different ways during this process. Helping with kids or helping do other chores or just providing emotional support. Thank them. It'll go a long way. Just thank them. Now what do I do for my committee? Well, it's really nice to send a thank you letter. Emails are nice, but not many people send actual letters anymore. So send a letter and thank them and not just say, thank you, I finished. You know, I'm great. Thank you for your support. Thank you for. Specifically for what that person provided for you. That makes them feel good and it makes them feel good about you. Because you never know when you want to go back and work with them on a different project or ask them questions. So if you show that you sincerely appreciate the work that they did to help you, that's going to also help you in the long run. When we talk about celebrations, these can vary. It can be, I'm going to take my partner out to dinner or I'm going to have a huge party. Some people tie these in with graduation. Now, an advantage of doing that is graduation. The ceremony is usually not the next week. It might even be six months later, depending on timing of your finishing and when the school holds a formal graduation. If you're going to go to a formal graduation and make it a big event for you and family and friends you want to check to see, are there limits to the number of tickets that you can get? If the graduation is held at a popular location, can we get hotel room? So make reservations as early as possible. I have worked with people who've gone to graduation and then headed off on a cruise for a week, you know, to really acknowledge to themselves and reward themselves for what they've done and what they've accomplished. Along with thanking committee members, it's a practice that some people partake in of gifts to their committee members. Gifts to people like this can be problematic. You don't want the gift to be too big. Like don't give them a car. They you can't accept something like that. It needs to be a gift that's meaningful but isn't overly expensive. When you did your research, the IRB wouldn't allow you to give participants $4,000 to give you answers. So you don't want to be doing that for your committee members either, because then it looks like the committee members. Or it could be implied that the committee members were paid off to give you your degree. But giving them something, a pen or with their name on it or something engraved saying thank you. Some people give copies of dissertations, a bound copy of the dissertation to committee members. Before I would do that, I would check in their office. If you get to see their office, do they collect these and keep them? Great, then they want them. Other people may not want them. For example, if I'm on your committee, don't send me a Copy, because I don't want it. I've already read it multiple times and I don't even have a copy of my own dissertation anymore, so I'm not going to put it on my shelf. But other people really like to do things like that. So it's understand who your committee members are and what they may want. Now, when it comes to thank you letters, I've said a letter to somebody is great. There can be a little controversy about whether this can be a typed letter printed out or a handwritten letter. Handwritten can be great and wonderful, but if you're like me, nobody wants to see my handwriting. They aren't going to be able to read it. So I will type things and then sign it. You just don't want to send something that people are going to spend three hours trying to decipher what it actually says. Once you've celebrated and you've thanked, don't do anything. Do not nothing for a while. Allow this to sink in. Now, I'm not talking about do nothing for the next 17 years, but I'm also saying do not automatically go on to that to do list you've built up. Relax a little, you're tired. But also you're a different person than when you started this program. You're a different person than you were in the middle of the program when you started to accumulate. Oh, yeah, there's some research I want to do or I've got to go do this and I got to volunteer for that. And yes, there's going to be things you can do. But take some time to understand, understand who you are now. You're a scholar, you're a member of the community. You're a peer to your committee members. What is it you want to do now to move forward within your discipline? And when I say take time, I don't mean you're lazy at all. Although rest is going to be great. It's. You're just assimilating, bringing together, synthesizing who you are now, letting all the parts come in to be, you know, communicating with each other. Because walking into that defense, you were just a doctoral student walking out. You're a doctor, you've changed. So figure out who that is and who you are and what you really want to do moving forward. Part of the reason I encourage people to take time is you went into a doctoral program with a goal. I want to get a doctorate and I want to change the world. I want to be a tenured professor at an R1 institution. I want to. And we all have these goals and they help us finish. But we are different people. And I've had clients come in and say, I'm never going to be involved in academia. That's okay, I want a doctorate, it's a personal thing. And they get all done and say, you know, I really like this process. I'm going to go be a teacher and a scholar. I'm going to do research and do things. And also, you don't know what opportunities are out there. You don't know now that you have the degree, the union card as I like to call it, you now get to sit at tables you never sat at before. And there's going to be opportunities you never dreamed of that are going to come to you. So allow those to happen, allow yourself to be open to those and understand that you have the abilities and capabilities to do all of this. Now. We are currently right now in a market that is tight for academics and positions, although people are getting jobs. I'm talking to people, you know, multiple times a month who are searching for and finding academic jobs. So it's not that there aren't any, but the market is more limited than it was a few years ago and it tends to swing through highs and lows as far as numbers of positions. But that doesn't mean there's not opportunities. And we one challenge people who have PhDs and EDDs and doctorates of any kind is translating that into a non academic job. Well, jobs are made up of skill sets and you have created and learned all kinds of new skills. You can handle large projects, you can handle long term projects. You may have learned to manage people, your rate reports, you can meet deadlines. Think of all the skills you've learned in doing this to translate that to an employer or opportunities. And those skills can help you do things you never thought possible. You have worked hard on a dissertation and it's lots of pages and it's going into your university's library. But you may also want to publish this in an academic journal because that's where all of your work you found was there. Let the rest of the world know, the rest of the academic world know that you have done this work and how your work fits in with the rest of the world. So submit this if you want to a journal. Sometimes people struggle with trying to figure out how to submit it to a journal. Many times you can work with a committee member. I've helped a lot of people take their dissertations and shrink them into publishable journal, publishable format so that they can get publications And I know people who've gotten a publication and then, oh, wow, I want another one. I want to do more of this. I will tell you, when I finished my degree, I said, I'm. I'm going to publish five times in my life. That's it. I want to get tenure someplace, and I'm never going to publish again. And my dissertation chair, really nice guy, just looked at me and said, okay, we'll see. He was right. I published a lot more than five times. You know, I found things I was interested in and I continued doing it. You may do the same. One phrase I, like I've heard recently is, your dissertation is a foundation. It's not the final product. Your committee's going to see your dissertation, but if you can get it into a journal, a lot more people are going to get to see what you've done. One way to look at, because becoming a member of the academic community is you've now joined a family. And if you think about it, let's look at your dissertation chair. You are now A student of Dr. Smith. But who's Dr. Smith? A student of. Maybe Dr. Jones. And who's Dr. Jones? A student of. So we're all related through these committees and our committee members. And now you've got a tie. And you can use that tie as an introduction to move forward and do other things. I would love to hear what you've done since you've completed your dissertation. So put a comment below so that I can see what you've done and the rest of the world can see what you've done, and we can open up conversations about opportunities of what's available. You've finished your dissertation. Congratulations. You've finished this chapter of your life. But now new things are opening for you, and I'm excited for you. If we can help in any way, please click the link below to see what we can do to help you. If possible, change your document into a publisher academic article. Look for academic jobs. But ultimately, you've done great work. Take a bow and be proud of yourself.