The Philosophers' Cocoon

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?