The Philosophers' Cocoon

Tips for choosing a dissertation supervisor?

In our September "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

Would be very curious to hear about strategic choices grad students must make when it comes time to form a committee. If i know “famous” professor X would serve as chair on my committee and also for someone in my cohort, and that person is held in better regard than I am, should I avoid having professor X as my committee chair? Is this way of thinking about things misguided? Do faculty compare students? Need one’s chair be the most “famous” person on the committee to be competitive for the best jobs?

Interesting questions, and a good issue more generally. My experience is that the choice of dissertation supervisor can be crucial. Some supervisors are good mentors who graduate and place a lot of students in good jobs. Others can be brutal to work with and rarely graduate anyone, let alone place graduates in good jobs. Indeed, I've heard all kinds of horror stories, ranging from supervisors who take 6 months to provide any feedback on chapter drafts to perfectionists who won't agree to hold a defense until the dissertation meets impossibly high standards. By my lights, these are probably the most important things to know: does the supervisor graduate students within reasonable time-frames and place them in jobs? Are they supportive and helpful or neglectful and impossible to work with?

While I have heard that faculty do compare students--including in recommendation letters--I'm not sure how huge of a concern this should be. For again, the best supervisors I've seen are ones that graduate a lot of students and regularly place them into good jobs. Whatever 'ranking' of students is going on, it doesn't seem to hurt their students' job prospects! Finally, in terms of whether you need the most 'famous' person to head you committee, I think that probably depends a great deal on what your job-market aspirations are. If you're in a top-ranked PhD program and out for an R1 job, then yeah, I think it probably makes sense to have high-powered people on your committee. But if this is not the case--if you're a better fit for a job at a teaching-focused institution--then I suspect it doesn't matter all that much (though you might want that person on your committee anyway so that you learn the most as a philosopher and write the best dissertation you can!).

But these are just my off-hand thoughts, and I'm perhaps not the most in the know here. Anyone with experience in these areas care to weigh in?

Co-advisors for a dissertation?

In our September "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I am a grad student and a faculty member suggested to me that I may want or need co-advisors for my dissertation given my department's faculty and the two intersecting areas I want to work in. I can imagine that this has both pros and cons. Can anyone offer any advice about this? Has anyone had co-advisors? If so, how did it go?

Interesting questions. I've never heard of co-advisors for dissertations before. One obvious potential benefit here is that you would have two people who are highly invested in the dissertation. However, the obvious potential con is that they may want fundamentally different things out of it. I didn't have co-advisors, but something like this happened to me. When I was doing my dissertation, my advisor thought that I should make the theory broader than just Rawlsian nonideal theory. However, one of my other committee members thought the dissertation should focus primarily on Rawls. Yet, precisely because the latter wasn't my supervisor, they deferred to my supervisor. What would have happened if they were both co-advisors? I can imagine it would have been a stickier situation. And I could imagine it could be an especially sticky situation if the co-advisors are in quite different areas. Here, I imagine it is important to think about the personalities of the potential co-advisors, and how well they might 'work together', as it were, in supervising a dissertation in common. Then again, this is really just me speculating. Anyone with any experience here able to weigh in?

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.

Turning Your Dissertation into a Book

A while back, Marcus addressed a question from Big Dawg about how to turn one’s dissertation into a book. I finished a project similar to that during the last semester, so I can provide some timely input on the subject. I’ll start with a short summary of how I got the book contract, and then I’ll say a bit about how to approach a project of this sort.

Background

I got my book contract in a somewhat unusual way. When I was midway through graduate school, my dissertation advisor published an environmental ethics textbook with Routledge. Sometime afterward, Routledge sent him an email asking him to provide some feedback on their editorial process and his experience. Evidently, one of the survey questions was about in-progress work in the field of environmental ethics that he thought might be of interest to the editors who work on their series of books in environmental studies. One of the things he mentioned was that I was working on a dissertation at the intersection of the ethics of procreation and environmental ethics.

Months after this happened, I was contacted by one of the editors from Routledge asking about my dissertation. That was in Summer 2015, and I was only getting started on the project. Even so, I sent her a copy of my prospectus and promised to follow up with her when things were further along. Down the road, after the dissertation was finished, I made good on that promise, and she requested to see some chapters. So I provided them. A while later, I was invited to submit a formal proposal for review. The proposal was essentially a 4000-5000 word pitch for the project. Beyond providing a summary of my main arguments and a sketch of the book’s layout, I needed to explain how it compared to similar books and who the audience for the book would be.

External committee members for European PhDs

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, European PhD candidate writes,

I am currently a PhD candidate at an European university, and I wonder what exactly the relationship between the candidate and the external members of their committee is.
What are exactly the tasks of the external committee members?
How soon should one invite an external professor to be member of their committee?
Can one ask the external members of their committee to write letters of recommendation on their behalf?
Thank you in advance!

This is a great query. Unfortunately, given that I've spent my entire career in academia in the US, I don't know anything about it. But I'd be very curious to learn more and help European PhD candidate and others in their position out. Anyone with experience here have any helpful answers?

Query on applying for dissertation fellowships

In the comments section of our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, Morgan Thompson writes:

I'd be curious to hear advice about applying for dissertation fellowships, especially how to pitch one's dissertation proposal/summary to both philosophers and non-philosophers.

Good query! I'm probably not the best person to ask here, as I don't have any experience evaluating fellowship applications. However, I do have experience serving on several search committees for academic jobs, and in my experience candidate research statements often run into the following programs:

1. Too much jargon (using technical terms that outsiders may not understand).
2. Too much intricacy that only specialists are likely to understand.
3. Not enough time spent explaining in a down-to-earth, convincing way why the project matters.

While again I haven't read dissertation fellowship applications, I would not be surprised if they often run into similar problems. My general thought on these kinds of things--research statements and applications in general--is that it is vital to to explain and motivate one's research in simple, down-to-earth terms. You can't just assume that because you or people in your subfield think a problem is important that any odd reader will feel the same way. You need to be able to explain the importance of the problem and the importance of your research program in a way that anyone can grasp. This isn't easy--but in my experience it is what effective research statements and the like tend to do.

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours, particularly those of you who have either evaluated dissertation fellowship applications or been successful in applying for one?

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 9: When It's Over

The final suggestion I offered in the previous post in this series was that graduate students should not expect to be overjoyed when their dissertation is finished, but I said nothing about what graduate students can expect after they’ve finished their dissertation. So what is post-dissertation life like?

In the short term, you’ll probably feel some sense of relief. From recent PhDs I have spoken to, this feeling is pretty common. It’s not just that you’re freed from the burden of dissertation work –  though that’s obviously part of the story – but rather that you’re freed from the burden of graduate school. Think for a moment about how many hoops you have to jump through to get a PhD: course requirements, teaching assignments, comprehensive examinations, a language requirement, the dissertation, and perhaps more. You have some flexibility with regard to how you meet some of these requirements, but it’s often fairly limited. As a teaching assistant, for instance, you are unlikely to have much input in assigned readings or methods of assessment that are used in the class; the professor will usually make those judgments without your input. As another example, you don’t have much (if any) say in what graduate courses are offered each term, and in smaller programs, course offerings could be fairly limited.

It’s a safe bet that some of these requirements won’t seem so burdensome, since you’re likely to enjoy fulfilling some of them, but after toiling away at them for the better part of a decade, you will be ready to be done with them. The first day you wake up and realize you have no graduate school requirements on the agenda can bring a sense of relaxation that hasn’t been felt in a long time.

That being said, do not expect the semester after your defense to be easy, assuming that you’re pursuing long-term academic employment. Most people end up in a temporary position for their first job, so there’s not a ton of time to relax before you’re back to polishing job applications and trying to add to your CV. Some experience a post-dissertation slump, often as a result of no longer having a grand project that demands their attention and provides structure to their priorities. Even if that doesn’t happen to you, it’s safe to say that your workload won’t significantly lighten after the dissertation concludes. In some respects (e.g., increased teaching responsibilities), your first position will likely require more work than what you were required to do as a graduate student.

Nevertheless, even without feeling overjoyed at the completion of your dissertation or being freed from the labors of academic life, completing the dissertation still provides a persistent source of gratification over time. Most of the good feelings associated with academic achievements do not come from immediate euphoria or the ongoing process of their completion. (This is true even in cases where portions of that process are enjoyable: I generally like writing, but this enjoyment is easily overwhelmed by tedium when addressing a revise-and-resubmit verdict or preparing a manuscript for submission to its third or fourth venue.) Instead, the satisfaction that comes from most academic achievements is a stable, gradually accumulating sense of accomplishment. The dissertation, so far as I can tell, is not an exception to this rule.

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 8: Lessons Learned

I’ve spent prior posts in this series recapping various aspects of writing the dissertation that can make the process difficult. Since these have been scattered across posts over the past few months, it’s worth recapping them:

1. The dissertation is a different kind of project than most anything else one does in graduate school.
   • The dissertation lacks rigid structure and concrete deadlines.
   • The dissertation is a much larger project  than most others pursued in graduate school.
   • There is more riding on the completion of the dissertation than any other single project in graduate school.
   • Work on the dissertation cannot be easily postponed.
2. The need to pursue publication (to be competitive on the job market) can lead to an abundance of non-dissertation commitments late in graduate school.
3. You will most likely need to go on the job market at least once while your dissertation is still unfinished.
4. Your dissertation work may lead you to lose your enjoyment of  writing.
5. Your dissertation work can be impeded by personal crises (e.g., financial difficulties, health problems, mental illness, relationship struggles).

After all that, I briefly described how I actually got the dissertation done in the end. So what are the lessons that can be taken away from all this to help graduate students prepare for the dissertation stage and ultimately complete it? Here are a few suggestions.

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 7: Getting It Done

I ended the last part of the series on a cliffhanger. Here’s an abbreviated recap: after a series of starts and stops on the dissertation, January arrived, and it still wasn’t done. In fact, there was still quite a bit of unwritten material. After returning from the APA Eastern meeting, I faced the fact that time was running out, and I really didn’t want to drag the project into the summer. So how did I finally get it done?

First, a little background is in order. During my very first semester of graduate school (all the way back in Fall 2010), after completing all my preliminary research and determining what I wanted to argue, I wrote and revised all 3 of my term papers in an intense 4-day writing binge. In total, I wrote around 15,000 words in this stretch. The routine during those 4 days went roughly as follows: get up, get a bowl of cereal, turn on the computer, bring up MS Word, write for 4-5 hours, 30-minute break for lunch, write for 5-6 hours, 1-hour break to make and eat dinner, write until tired, go to sleep, and repeat.

Now, let’s be clear: this is not a sustainable or desirable model for academic writing. It doesn’t come anywhere near the well-balanced academic life one might want, and it’s incompatible with significant teaching and service commitments. But for a short spell at the very end of the term (when I no longer had teaching commitments), it was effective.

Fast forward to January 2017. When the semester got rolling, I tried to emulate this schedule as much as possible. After allocating the necessary hours each week toward teaching and job applications, I put as many hours as possible toward dissertation writing. As many as I could without losing my mind.

For two months, I became a social hermit, worked out less, and refused to take on any additional projects beyond what I was already committed to. I was teaching a course that I had already taught several times, so my required teaching prep was relatively minimal. Grading did take longer than it normally would have, though, since it was not as high on my priority list. The grind wasn’t fun, but it was successful. I sent out the polished first half of my dissertation to committee members in early March and followed up with the revised second half two weeks later. The defense at the end of the month was uneventful.

The costs of the grind were severe. Once post-defense revisions were submitted in April, I set my research aside for almost two months, a longer break from my research than I had ever taken during graduate school. While I had succeeded in my two major goals for that semester – finding a job for the following fall and finishing the dissertation – these triumphs brought little joy. The mental and emotional toil wrapped up in the prior academic year had left me exhausted, and the only good feeling that could be savored was relief. It was time for a break.

And so the narrative portion of the series concludes. But there are still two parts to go. In the next segment, I’ll summarize the major lessons that can be drawn from prior posts and consider how those insights might help graduate students prepare for the dissertation stage and eventually finish their degree.

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 6: When Other Things Seem More Important

As I said in the previous entry in this series, I believe there were two moments where I came close to not completing the dissertation. The first occurred in Summer 2016 when the tedium of dissertation work stifled my enjoyment of writing. As I noted in Part 5, I eventually snapped out of that spell and got back to making steady progress. In October, I had to disrupt my momentum to polish dossier materials and send out job applications, but that brief gap in progress did not affect me too much. I kept sending material to my advisor, and everything continued as planned. A defense at the end of January looked likely.

Unfortunately, things did not stay that way for long. Outside of my philosophical life, two things happened that fall that had a significant impact on me. The first was the 2016 U.S. presidential election. I had, for the most part, tried to ignore the political developments in the U.S. over the summer and focus on my work, but the all-encompassing election coverage on social media and the vitriolic nature of the campaigns made the events difficult to ignore. When the results were finally obtained on November 8th, the outcome was not what I had hoped for, and many of my peers spent the remainder of the night (and a chunk of the morning) in the close proximity to hard liquor.

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 5: When You Start to Hate Writing

In the last few parts of this series, I have discussed several major factors that make the dissertation difficult to complete. Since it’s taken several weeks to get to this point, let’s recap what I’ve highlighted thus far:

1. The dissertation stage of graduate school lacks a rigid structure and concrete deadlines.
2. The dissertation is a much larger project than anything else in graduate school.
3. The dissertation has higher stakes than any other project in graduate school.
4. Unlike many other things in graduate school, dissertation work cannot be easily postponed.
5. Other commitments often hinder your ability to make consistent progress on the dissertation.
6. Dissertation progress (often) must be maintained even when navigating the academic job market for the first time.

That seems like an impressive list. It’s not hard to see why the dissertation would be tough to finish given this information. Here’s the catch: none of these factors explains why the dissertation was the hardest part of my graduate career. I actually think I was rather well-prepared for these things, insofar as that’s possible. The biggest reason that finishing the dissertation difficult was something I had not anticipated and something I was not ready for.

For a time, working on the dissertation actually made me hate writing.

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 4: The First Job Market Run

Part 3 of this series focused on the problem of stacking commitments – the tendency for non-dissertation commitments to overwhelm one’s schedule in the final stages of graduate school as one tries to become a viable candidate on the job market. Now’s the time to consider the job market itself and how the initial run can impact your dissertation work.

First, let’s start with the ideal scenario. You manage to get a couple publications during graduate school, and the rest of your CV is pretty solid. You spend most of your summer finishing a full draft of your dissertation. Only revisions and the formal defense remain. You then devote the remainder of your summer and the first half of the fall toward job market preparation. You make sure all your statements are polished and that your writing samples have been thoroughly revised and edited according to feedback from your colleagues. You keep pace with the job market deadlines while making revisions to your dissertation manuscript and schedule a January defense, ensuring that your dissertation will be done long before you start your first job (if you're able to snag one).

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 3: Stacking Commitments

In my last post, I emphasized the ways in which the dissertation stage differs from other aspects of graduate school. One of the major differences is that the dissertation is a much longer project than anything else you will be required to complete. Given its length, it’s no surprise that you have to devote a lot of time to it over the last year or two of your graduate studies. In the abstract, that might not sound too terrible, since you aren’t saddled with coursework or preparing for comprehensive exams. If only it were so simple.

In this and the next part of the series, I consider two related features of the dissertation stage that both threaten to rob you of your writing time: commitments tied to side-projects and professional development and the job market push that will most likely occur during your final year of graduate school. We’ll start with the former – what I call the problem of stacking commitments.

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.

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 1: Is It Really That Hard?

By Trevor Hedberg

In Spring 2017, I finally completed my doctoral dissertation. While the experience is still fresh in my mind, I thought it might help graduate students to offer a little perspective on what it’s like to write a dissertation and what makes it such a difficult part of graduate school. In the opening segment of this series, I want to consider a question that crossed my mind several times during my first four years of graduate school: is writing a dissertation really that difficult?