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.

This PhD Mistake Wastes Months of Your Time

8 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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In this instructional segment, Steve Tippins Ph.D. advises doctoral candidates to ensure their prospectus includes the chair’s feedback and fully complies with the school’s prospectus template. He explains that omitting required sections or neglecting the chair’s input leads to the prospectus being returned for revisions, causing weeks of unnecessary delay. By completing these elements up front, students can submit a polished prospectus quickly and stay ahead of schedule. He also mentions a free dissertation help community as an additional support resource for students seeking assistance.

Chapters

Most likely, before you submit your prospectus, you've had some interaction with your chair. Don't ignore it. Put it in there. They'll remember. Okay? Make sure you've included the chair's thoughts on this topic. One other sure way of getting something sent back quickly is missing parts of the prospectus. Again, if your school has a template, that means they want all of those things. So, do all of those things. If you don't do them, they're going to look at the template or look at your document and say, oh, number 3 is missing. Send it back. And every Every single time you do something like that, what you're doing is wasting your own time because you know you're going to have to do it. So do it at the start instead of sending to them and losing 1, 2, 3, 4 weeks of time having them send it back to you. Why don't you just do it at the start? Submit it a day later and you're still ahead of time. If you're working on your prospectus and you're looking for help, you can join our free dissertation help community.