Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 2: A Different Kind of Project

In the first post of this series, I highlighted four factors that made the dissertation stage of graduate school challenging for me. In this post, I focus on how the dissertation differs from other graduate work and why these differences tend to make writing the dissertation more difficult than the other stages of graduate school.

Difference #1: Lack of Rigid Structure and Concrete Deadlines

The first few years of graduate school are highly structured. You take courses with clear reading lists and concrete deadlines. You have conversations about the course material every week, and the professor will often give you insight into the kinds of topics that would make for good papers. Often, you’ll get some feedback on in-progress work (through peer review, presentations, etc.) during the course.

The dissertation stage is not like this. There is no rigid structure to how you should spend your time, and while your advisor will often feedback on in-progress work, it is very different from the guidance that you’ll receive during the coursework stage. This lack of structure can be a benefit: it gives you more freedom to spend your time as you see fit – to read what you deem important and to submit work for review according to your timetable (unless you have an advisor who imposes very rigid deadlines on you). More commonly, however, this lack of structure makes it harder to get things done since you have to impose your own deadlines and be disciplined about making consistent progress.

Difference #2: A (Much) Larger Project

The dissertation is a longer and grander project than anything else you will do in graduate school. Most of your projects prior to the dissertation stage are papers ranging in length from 3000 to 10,000 words. An adequate dissertation usually needs to be at least 50,000 words – perhaps significantly more, depending on your advisor’s standards. (My dissertation advisor specifically said that anything under 200 double spaced pages would be “too thin” to earn his approval; that translated to a minimal requirement of about 60,000 words.) Moreover, the dissertation needs to be cohesive: it cannot just be a series of standalone papers stitched together.

The length of the project also increases the likelihood that you will get “stuck” at some point. You might be able to reliably crank out an 8000-word draft without getting stuck along the way, but the dissertation is so long and has so many components that it’s unlikely to go so smoothly. You will probably discover weaknesses in certain chapters months after drafting them or inconsistencies in your position that only become apparent once a large chunk of the dissertation is drafted. Since revisions made in one chapter can affect how the entire work hangs together, they are likely to require revisions in other chapters. Keeping the entire project coherent in your mind is much more challenging when it’s this robust.

Difference #3: Higher Stakes

What happens if you fail to complete a term paper at the semester’s end? You take an incomplete and finish it after the semester concludes. Usually, so long as you don’t take years to clear an incomplete, no one will care. And even if the paper is subpar, no one is going to care if you have a B+ on your graduate transcripts. (Few hiring committees even look at graduate transcripts when evaluating candidates.)

What happens if you miss the deadline for submitting to that conference? Nothing. After you finish prepping your paper, you find another conference and send it there.

What happens if you don’t finish your dissertation before your funding runs out? Well, you probably get forced down the path of adjunct work to support yourself, and your efforts to finish it and find permanent academic employment become very slim. (The horror stories of folks spending 10-12 years in graduate school usually involve this situation: often, more than half that time is spent in this tragic ABD purgatory.) In the worst-case scenario, you will be dismissed from your program.

Compared to most of your graduate studies, the dissertation is a high-stakes project. Beyond the risks associated with taking too long to finish it, its quality will also affect your long-term employability, since a significant portion of your early-career work will probably be derived from it. The importance of the dissertation creates additional pressure that can make working on it more emotionally and mentally exhausting than other projects.

Difference #4: Dissertation Work Cannot (Easily) Be Postponed

Many things in graduate school can be delayed with no serious penalties – so long as you do eventually get them done and they are of acceptable quality. Typically, it is not a big deal to put off a term paper or take an extra weekend to grade a stack of exams. But if you get in the habit of putting off progress on your dissertation, things are likely to go badly for you. Once you have gone a week or two without making much progress on your dissertation, it becomes very difficult to jump back into the project and to re-establish the disciplined regiment required for consistent progress. (I’ll have more to say about this phenomenon in part 5 of this series.) This problem is heightened by the fact that the dissertation occurs at the very end of graduate school, a time when delays often cannot be afforded.

Does Writing a Master’s Thesis Help?

Writing a thesis was not required in my graduate program: you don’t need to a get an MA to acquire the PhD, and even if you want one, there is a non-thesis option. Nonetheless, I elected to write one in the belief that it would help prepare me for writing the dissertation down the road (as well as give me some material I could craft into conference papers and publications). Did it help prepare me for the dissertation? Somewhat.

A thesis, like a dissertation, does not have the formal structure or rigid deadlines associated with coursework and is also much longer than a typical philosophy paper. (My thesis was just over 30,000 words.) But in my case, differences #3 and #4 did not apply: there would have been no long-term costs associated with a failure to complete my thesis, and pushing back the defense date from the spring to the fall did not end up being a big deal.

I should also note that the thesis was still short enough that my progress only stalled once – when it became clear I would have to retool my position in response to some strong objections. Recovering from a single lull in the writing process is not all that daunting. With the dissertation, in contrast, I hit significant lulls on three separate occasions, two of which were very difficult to recover from. Just because you’ve written a thesis successfully does not mean that the dissertation will be smooth sailing.

Comments

[lategrad]

Concerning Difference #2: My impression is that departments (and advisers, and committees) differ on length requirements. They also differ on whether you can "stitch together" stand-alone papers on a given topic into a dissertation. I've been at two different programs (I transferred mid-grad school) and at both, my advisers told me that I could write 3 or 4 good papers on a given topic and stitch them together. (Note also that, unless these papers were all crazy long, this would result in a dissertation significantly shorter than 50,000 words.)

There are reasons (I've heard) to proceed with caution when "stitching together" a dissertation: mainly, you want to have a unified research program on the market. (Of course, you can often find a unified theme to apparently unrelated papers on a given topic.) But that's an independent issue.

[Amanda]

Whether or not one does a stitch together dissertation, it seems wise to write a dissertation that one can turn into individual journal articles without too much work.Doing articles early career, and a book after you are at least a little bit more established seems the best way to get your book noticed. Whether one was allowed to do individual paper dissertation was up to the individual dissertation supervisor in my program. My dissertation was about 57,000 words.

[cw]

For me, #1 was the biggest problem. I'm not good with unstructured time. I found myself rushing at the end of each semester to have something to show my director.

I should have set more meeting points for us, and clearer expectations for each meeting. I'm sure my director would have gone for it, but I didn't ask.

My dissertation clocked in at around 82,000 words.