Steve Tippins Ph.D.Helping doctoral students get their dissertation accepted, succeed in their careers, & change the world | Academic Career Advisor | Dissertation Chair & Founder, Beyond PhD Coaching | 35 + years of experience.

Stop Guessing What Your Chair Wants

7 Sept 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:50

In this brief instructional video, Dr. Steve Tippins urges doctoral students to stop attempting to read their dissertation chair’s mind. He identifies the common problem of repeatedly rewriting Chapter 1 due to misaligned expectations, and offers a concrete, underused strategy: obtain the most recent dissertation that the chair has approved from the university library. By using that dissertation as a template, students can replicate the preferred structure, academic tone, and framing, thereby avoiding unnecessary revisions and saving weeks of work. The video concludes with an invitation to comment for a link to a free dissertation help community.

Chapters

Stop trying to guess what your dissertation chair wants. We see brilliant doctoral students rewrite chapter 1 again and again and again, and the bottleneck is not about lack of intelligence or research, it's that they were just trying to read their chair's mind. Here's a simple strategy that almost no one utilizes. Go to your university library and ask for the most recent dissertation that your chair supported. This single document is a gold mine because it's giving you the same structure that your dissertation chair approved. Giving you the academic tone and framing that they prefer and a real verified example of what made it past their desk. The candidates who stall the longest are the ones who are trying to reinvent the wheel. Save yourself weeks of unnecessary revisions and look at the blueprint that is already laid out for you. Comment help and we will send you the link to our free dissertation help community. You've got this!