Dissertation proposal advice?

In the comments sections of Liz Jackson's post on tips for success in graduate school, a current PhD student asked for a thread on dissertation proposal advice. I think this is a great idea. Coming up with a viable dissertation proposal was without a doubt the most difficult part of graduate school for me--and my sense is that something similar is true of a lot of grad students. I actually had to come up with two proposals, as my dissertation committee rejected my first one. I think the tale of my proposals may be helpful to share, as I pursued two very different strategies each time: one that worked well, and one that (obviously) didn't. Allow me to quickly share the story, and then open things up for discussion.

I've always had a tendency to work alone (indeed, it's a relatively bad habit I struggle with to this very day). As I explained a few years ago, believe it or now I'm an extremely shy and introverted person. In graduate school, this meant that once I finished coursework and comprehensive examinations, I initially tried to come up with a viable dissertation proposal all on my lonesome. I retreated into reading books and journal articles, and aside from department colloquia and some social events, mostly worked in an isolated fashion. It did not go well. First, I bounced from idea to idea. At one point, I started developing a proposal defending internalism about moral motivation. Then I got a bit stuck on that, and got enthralled by some stuff on voting and opinion polls (which I returned to many years later in this book chapter).  Anyway, I spun my wheels on these two topics for about a year-and-a-half, after which point I drafted up a proposal and three chapter drafts on one of the topics. Mind you, this whole time, no one had seen any of my work. I hadn't shared it with my dissertation supervisor, nor had I shared it with any other faculty or fellow grad students.

Now, I know what you're thinking: bad move, right? Yes, it very much was. However, like many grad students (in my experience, anyway), I lacked self-confidence, and as a shy and introverted person I was basically 'scared to put myself out there.' So that's what I did--and I've seen other grad students do similar things. Of course, at some point I had to show other people my work, so after drafting up the proposal and three chapters I sent them to my committee and arranged a proposal defense. It did not go well. The night before my scheduled defense, my dissertation supervisor called me and said the committee had rejected my proposal and there would be no defense. Suffice it to say, there were a few tears after that phone call. The next day (I believe), I walked into my supervisor's office (and then the office of another faculty member) and asked for help. Much to my surprise, they both expressed confidence in me despite my failure, and gave me some advice. My supervisor invited me to join a dissertation reading group he was in the process of putting together. I started attending, and even though at the time I had nothing viable, it was incredibly useful to see what kinds of things other grads were working on. It helped me to see what a viable proposal might look like! The other faculty member encouraged me to read widely, far outside the topics I had been previously exploring. This too was incredibly helpful. Indeed, it quickly led me to my eventual dissertation topic! Let me explain.

Although I had previous background in political philosophy (ethics was my major area for comp exams, political my minor area), it really wasn't my strength--so the first thing I did was go back and read all of Rawls' work: Rawls' early journal articles, A Theory of Justice (the original and revised editions), Political Liberalism, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, The Law of Peoples, and so on. As I was reading these works, a light suddenly went off. Rawls spent nearly all of his time working on 'ideal theory'--on defining conditions for a fully just domestic society and international law of peoples--and basically set 'nonideal theory' (how to respond to unjust conditions) aside. Yes, he said a few things about civil disobedience in TOJ and war in LoP, but it was all topical and disconnected, with no systematic nonideal theory whatsoever. In fact, at one point in TOJ, Rawls essentially throws up his hands and writes, "In the more extreme and tangled instances of nonideal theory…we may be able to find no satisfactory answer at all." (TOJ rev., p. 267) I remember reading that passage a lightbulb went off. "This", I thought to myself, "is a very serious problem!" Then I looked at the literature and saw that no one had (at that time) filled in this lacuna in Rawls' theory. I was off and running. I drafted up an initial chapter that eventually became these two articles, shared it in my supervisor's dissertation reading group, shared it with my other committee members, got very positive responses all around, defended my proposal a short time later, got my first chapter accepted for a symposium presentation at the Eastern APA...and nine months later my dissertation was done! In retrospect, it wasn't a great dissertation: there were still a lot of problems in it that I hadn't solved properly. But then again, in my experience few dissertations are very good. Just about everyone I know cringes at the very thought of their dissertation. But, as I was told at one point, the dissertation is not supposed to be an ending: it is supposed to be a beginning--a project that is good enough to develop and publish on for many years to come. As Liz put it, 'a good dissertation is a done dissertation'!

This is just one story of course--but I think the takeaways are pretty clear. Like a lot of grad students I knew, I initially avoided my dissertation committee like the plague (not the best analogy in the COVID era, I know). Don't do this! The closer you work with other people--with other grad students, your committee, etc.--the more likely you are to see what a viable proposal looks like and get vital feedback to come up with a good one of your own. Second, I cannot emphasize enough how useful the "read widely" advice was. You never know where a good dissertation idea will come from. Sure, it may come from stuff you are already immersed in. However, sometimes being deeply immersed in a literature can be stultifying. You can find yourself so 'in deep' with the received ways of thinking about things that it may be hard to come up with something new in the area (which is what happened to me in the motivational internalism project). The wider you read at the dissertation proposal stage, the greater the chances are (I think) that a lightbulb will go off and you'll see something that others haven't. That, at any rate, is what happened to me and it basically saved my career.

But this is just my experience and tips that worked for me. What do you all think? Do you have any dissertation proposal advice or experiences you think would be helpful to share?

Comments

[Tom]

Must have been nice to have other PhD's in your cohort. I am the only one in mine.

[Mike Titelbaum]

Here are my two standards pieces of device for dissertation development:

(1) Work bottom-up, not top-down. Many people try to find a dissertation topic by thinking about what area they want to work in, then finding a particular problem or figure in that area, then trying to come up with something to say about it. That can take *forever*, and go nowhere. Instead, find something that bothers you, or a specific problem (however small) in which you're really interested and which you might have a thought about how to address. Work on that, and see how large it becomes, or what else it might connect to. It might evolve into a dissertation-sized project! If not, find another something and try again.

(2) My advisor once said to me, "No one will ever read your dissertation". He didn't mean it literally, but I got the point. The thing doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be a summation of who you are and what you might ever become as a philosopher. It has to be written, then your committee has to approve it. Before it ever goes out to a wider audience (if it ever does), it will require much more work anyway. This is just to repeat things Liz and Marcus have said, but they're worth repeating!

[grad student]

As someone in the early stages of their dissertation, Mike Titelbaum's advice above makes a lot of sense to me. I was stuck for a long time trying to come up with a topic, until I decided instead to delve into a small problem that bothered me.

However, when I brought up this small problem to my advisor to see if she thinks it's worth pursuing, she was kind of ... annoyed that I didn't come to her with a theory about said problem. It didn't stop me from working on it, but it makes me wonder if some advisors just don't react well to the bottom-up approach?

[Daniel Weltman]

My advice is to think strategically. The dissertation must fulfill two goals:

1) Be finished.

2) Satisfy your committee.

Beyond that there are a number of features it would be nice for the dissertation to have:

1) Be on a topic you want to become an expert in.

2) Be on a topic that sounds interesting to search committees.

3) Be a research project/argument/whatever that you are interested in developing further, like in a book or articles.

4) Be a basis for excerpting some articles, or for turning into a published book.

5) Be intrinsically interesting/fun to work on.

6) Be on a topic that is interesting to people in your sub-field, such that when they hear about the topic they might like to talk with you about it and hear what your views are.

7) Constitute an important contribution to the literature (in principle - in practice, not really, because nobody will read it).

There are many ways to end up with dissertations that fulfill both required goals and some (or all) of the desirable goals. Try to find a way of working that lets you do that. For the required goals, my advice is to be in touch with your committee and your advisor especially about what they want so that you can make sure your dissertation will fit those two. For the desirable goals, there seem like so many ways of achieving them that I'm not sure I have any particular advice. But, having the goals in mind allows one to shape one's dissertation proposal, topic, and writing, so it's good to have the goals in mind.