Dissertation Tips: A monthly compendium of thoughts, tips and strategies for completing your dissertation!!
September 2008
Those of you who frequent my website will notice that there's been quite a gap between my last monthly tips and this one. I took a well-deserved summer break after a busy year that saw a job transition and the beginning of my coaching practice. Now that summer is over, I feel that inevitable pull of the beginning of the new school year. I love the month of September! There's nothing more exciting to me than getting on campus and seeing the energy and excitement of the new students coming to college and starting their higher education. The feelings of a new beginning, a fresh start, and the excitement of new friends, new learning and new experiences still occur some 30+ years after I started college. When I first started working on a college campus I discovered that sense of place that I hadn't felt with any other job. I knew I was home and in the right place. And that feeling and excitement gets reinvigorated each new school year.
So, the focus this month is on new beginnings and setting goals for this year. As you think about the past few months, identify what has worked for you as well as what needs to change. We often start the summer with ambitious goals of what we'll accomplish on our dissertations during the less stressful summer months. How many of you are asking yourselves where the summer went? How many of you are kicking yourself that all your great plans didn't materialize? We can't go back and change what happened in June, July and August, but we can learn from our mistakes. So use the notion of a fresh start and set small, achievable, manageable goals for each day of the week.
Many of you have recently finished and defended your dissertation proposal or prospectus. Your committee has given you the go ahead. You're plugging away at data collection, analyzing your data, or trying to write! Often after the press of getting your proposal done, we feel that we deserve to take a break. One thing I've learned from the years I've worked with doctoral students is that the longer we are away from our dissertations, the harder it is to get back into the swing of things. If you've really pushed yourself to get your proposal done, by all means, take a break, but make it a short one!! I've seen too many people whose short breaks turn into months. And then we inevitably beat ourselves up with the "shoulda, woulda coulda's"! There is a common dissertation suggestion that you should touch your dissertation on a daily basis. Each day stay connected to your dissertation. Create a master list of small, manageable tasks that you can do even if you have just a half hour. There are going to be those days when you don't have the time or energy to write - but you could organize your references, edit a section you've already written, or jot down ideas for a future chapter. The point is to not let a lapse become a collapse. Keep your momentum going and move forward each day.
Those of you who are anticipating defending your dissertation this fall semester and graduating in December or May face a different challenge. As you are finalizing your dissertation and readying it for submission to your committee, dissertation fatigue often sets in. I remember feeling tired of dealing with my dissertation right before I submitted it. But I wanted to make sure that I was submitting a "good enough" dissertation. So edit carefully, get a second pair of eyes to read through your chapters for spelling, grammar, coherence, organization, etc. I think we become so familiar with our dissertation that we are blind to its flaws - or we assume that since we understand what we are trying to say, our committee will understand too! Because we have been pushing ourselves to finish, we often become lazy and overlook obvious errors. Also, at this point, remember that there is no perfect dissertation. Perfectionism is the enemy of doctoral students! At some point you have to say that you have done enough and the dissertation is good enough. True, there's always one more new article you could add, but you have to be ready and willing to put closure to the process and submit it. Keep the lines of communication with your advisor open and use his or her help to decide when you are ready to submit your final draft. And remember that even after you have successfully defended your dissertation there will be more "tweaking" that you'll probably have to do before you submit it to your institution.
So no matter where you are in the dissertation process, setting small, concrete, manageable goals that you can achieve is a strategy that will help you move forward. Make the 2008-2009 school year the year that you become a Doctor!
- Blame no-one. Expect nothing. Do something.
- Goals are dreams with deadlines. ~Diana Scharf Hunt
- A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all. ~Rita Mae Brown
- Between the great things we cannot do and the small things we will not do, the danger is that we shall do nothing. ~Adolph Monod
- I don't care how much power, brilliance or energy you have, if you don't harness it and focus it on a specific target, and hold it there you're never going to accomplish as much as your ability warrants. ~Zig Ziglar