The Philosophers' Cocoon

Should an ABD seeking a SLAC job prioritize teaching experience or their dissertation?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a grad student asks:

I am an ABD candidate who will be on the market next year. I have two solo-taught logic courses and am trying to place at a SLAC.

Even though I am slated to teach medical ethics next AY, I feel uncomfortable with how little teaching experience I have.

I have 2/5 of my dissertation chapters done. Should I aim for a 2-2 next AY (with another prep) and risk slowing down my dissertation progress?

One thing I am worried about is over-committing myself so that I have 2 new preps, a dissertation, and a bunch of applications to fill out. But I don't think this is unique; this labor comes with the territory!

Good question. I noticed that the OP didn't mention anything about publications, so before I respond to their query more directly, let me say something about that.

Working outside of philosophy while ABD?

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

Do you know of cases where people take other jobs (non-TA jobs) outside of the university while finishing a dissertation? I can make more outside of the academy in fewer hours than if I were TAing because of a particular skill set I have, and I want to be able to live with my partner who is in another state. I've only heard about this in other fields, but not philosophy. For context, I feel 50/50 about going into academia or into industry. Have people seen successful or unsuccessful examples of this in philosophy?

Good questions! I'm curious to hear from readers on this. I guess I'd worry a bit about being distracted too much from finishing the dissertation. But then again, the OP says they could make a significant amount of money working fewer hours than they do now. Given that they are only 50/50 on going into academia and working outside of their university would enable them to live with their partner, the positives might well outweigh the risks.

But these are just a few of my quick reactions. It would be great to hear from readers who have tried this! Were you able to work outside of academia while finishing up your dissertation? How did it go?

Dissertation committees and job-market recommendation letters: junior vs. senior faculty

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I am currently starting to think about my dissertation committee and, as an extension of that, job market letter writers.

I'm not sure how much I should care about the prestige of the philosophers on my committee, who will end up being most of my letter writers (except, perhaps, for a teaching letter). For example, I can ask a recently retired and very-famous professor to be on the committee, but they have been pretty flaky lately and enjoying their retirement a lot, so I'm not sure how committed they would be and how closely I could work with them. On the other hand, there is a junior faculty member in my department who is only a few years out of grad school, but is already very well-respected and has a lot of connections in my AOS (and an extraordinary publishing record). I am leaning toward the junior faculty member because I think the dissertation would probably be better with their help, but perhaps some people might advise me to find a famous person and just do what you need to do to get a good letter from them? Or perhaps having someone well-connected is better, regardless of their seniority in the field?

I could also try and find a famous person outside of my department, but of course most of these people are extremely busy and might not be able to write me a great letter in the end, either.

I'm not sure what the best thing to do here is!

Good questions. Another reader submitted the following reply:

As a young faculty member I was involved in many situations where my older, more famous colleague was the official Chair of a committee, but I met much more frequently with the student dissertator. This is perfectly fine and everyone understands how it works. Get the respected figure on the committee for the letter, but add others who will help you do your best work. 

This comment sounds right to me, but I wonder what others think!

How often to meet with committee members?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a grad student writes:

I don’t meet a lot with my committee members and they’re quite hands-off but I know some people that meet theirs very regularly. I feel like I’m falling behind a lot, and I want to meet them more but I’m slow at putting out work to show them. So I’m wondering how often did you meet with your supervisor and other committee members, and how often do those on committees want us to meet?

This is an excellent question, and I'm curious what readers' answers are. Although it's obviously been a while since I've been in grad school, my sense is that one of the most serious and common errors that grad students make is to avoid meeting consistently enough with their committee members, or at least with their dissertation supervisor. Let me explain.

Moving on from your dissertation?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

Is it usual/acceptable to switch to another research area for a grad student after finishing their thesis? Is it a good idea to mention it in one's research statement?

These are excellent questions, and I'm curious to hear what everyone thinks. My take here may be a bit controversial. I think that while one should of course try to publish material from one's dissertation, it can be really good to move onto another area after finishing the dissertation. Indeed, I think that focusing too much on similar stuff as dissertation after finishing it can be a bit of a trap, for several reasons.

Disinviting someone from your dissertation committee?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a grad student writes:

I have a question about disinviting someone from my dissertation committee. Is it 1) possible, 2) acceptable, 3) a bad idea (for strategic/interpersonal/departmental reasons, etc.), or 4) a good idea (given the below)?

The problem I am having is that said committee member does not engage with me AT ALL. This person won't answer emails, including requests for meetings, or give ANY feedback, etc. and is on my committee b/c given their area and my area, it made sense. But it seems they will not be in a position to recommend me when all is said and done, which is pretty terrifying. And despite my best (and many!) efforts, I feel I have no relationship with them not even a bad one, really, since so unresponsive. So I would like to disinvite them (I don't have a replacement yet), but I assume this is extremely controversial. Thus, seeking advice.

This is an excellent question, and I am sure some other grad students have (or have had) experience with similar situations. Mike Titelbaum (Wisconsin) submitted the following response:

That's a really tricky problem you have, and I'm sorry you're stuck with it. Besides the concerns you mentioned with "disinviting" one member, there's the additional problem that if that person is very well-known in your field, when you apply for jobs folks might wonder why that person wasn't involved in your dissertation, and might informally ask them what they think of your work.

Maybe one way to move towards a solution is to recognize that there are two groups of people here: Those that are officially listed as being on your committee, and those who help you write the dissertation. Those two groups don't always have to be the same. Many grad students have three people on their committee, but work closely with only one or two and hardly ever interact with the others. Heck, I've sometimes worked closely with someone on their dissertation without ever being on their official committee. So the fact that this person won't help you doesn't mean you necessarily need to get them off your committee.

If I were you I'd try to gain more information about this person, based on experiences of their colleagues and your fellow grad students: Is this ghosting behavior typical for this person, or is it an indication that they dislike your work? Even if they're unresponsive now, when dissertation defense time comes around will they read the thing and show up where they need to be? It's possible that even if they're behaving badly now, they will come through at the end and then (if they like the dissertation you produce) write you a perfectly good letter. If you do get information that leads you to remove them from your committee, I'd recommend identifying a replacement first. It's a lot easier to say to a cantankerous faculty member that you'd like to sub them out for someone else with whom you've struck up a good relationship, than to simply tell them you don't want them involved with you any more. And until you get a substitute, it doesn't sound like having the bad member on your committee for the time being is doing you any active harm. Good luck!

This strikes me as wise advice. You don't necessarily need to work closely with all of your dissertation committee members. What you do need is to write a passable dissertation and get good letters of recommendation from faculty whose letters are likely to help you on the job market. So, along with Mike, I think the contextual details matter a lot here. Is this just how that committee member is? Might they still write you a good recommendation letter at the end of the day? Would it look bad on the market if you didn't get a letter from them? Can you write a good dissertation working primarily with your other two committee members? These, I think, are probably the questions the OP really needs to answer in order to make the best decision.

One additional note: what the OP describes could even be a proverbial blessing in disguise. Dissertation committee members can sometimes disagree substantially on the direction a dissertation should take--which can give rise to difficult binds where you have to choose between which committee member's advice you follow. I've heard that in some cases, situations like this can lead to a divide within the committee itself, angering the committee member whose guidance isn't followed. So, in principle, it could actually be good to have "fewer voices involved" in working on the dissertation, particularly if the OP's other two committee members are responsive and helpful. So, long story short, I think the answers to the OP's questions are probably: (1)  Yes, it's possible; (2) Sure, it can be acceptable; (3) and (4) whether it's a bad idea or a good idea depends on the details.

But these are just my thoughts (and Mike's). What are yours? It would be great to hear not only from grad students who have faced this kind of situation, including how their decision worked out in the end, but also from grad faculty (including dissertation committee members). What do you all think?

The dissertation prospectus

A reader writes in:

I wanted to see if you have posts on the cocoon about the prospectus. I'm currently writing mine and I wanted to see what people think about it--e.g., it's purpose, the expectations, the features that make it good, etc. 

Interestingly, I don't think we've ever had a discussion of the dissertation prospectus before. My own sense is that the prospectus is primarily intended to evaluate whether one has a viable dissertation topic--one that can fly, as it were, even if you still need to work a lot out. And of course the prospectus defense can help to isolate potential problems and what you'll need to do in the rest of the dissertation. Beyond this, I'm not sure. What do you all think? I actually attempted the prospectus twice, so allow me to share my experience there, as some readers may find it helpful.

Getting a visiting student post while ABD?

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

I have a question about the process of applying for becoming a visiting student in another university especially when you are in the dissertation phase. I am currently in a PhD program of one of the US universities and I am wondering how can I be a visiting student in another university (in the US) for awhile.

This is an excellent query. I seem to recall a grad student or two that I knew having done this, and it seemed to really be a boon to their career, as they were able to draw on the expertise of people outside of their home department, get good outside recommendation letters, network, and so on. However, I don't know much about the process. Although I could be totally wrong about this, I sort of suspect that you (and/or your dissertation supervisor) just need to approach a person or two at the department or two that you would like to visit to see if their department would be willing to have you.

But again, I am really just speculating here. Do any readers have experience with this? It might be great to hear both about the process of becoming a visiting student at the dissertation stage, and the costs and benefits of doing so! 

When (and how) to try to publish a dissertation?

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

For those who want to try and publish their dissertation as a monograph: what is the best time to start getting in touch with publishers? Once the thesis is starting to take shape, or when it is more or less finished/submitted, or only after the dissertation has passed the defence?

On the one hand, it seems that earlier = better, if only because the same time can otherwise be spent trying to publish individual chapters. On the other hand, the defence itself might provide valuable feedback, and publishers might not want to take a gamble on a dissertation that has not even passed yet!

Relatedly, suppose one plans to revise their dissertation to become more like a monograph, rather than a dissertation (i.e. include a gentler introduction, but leave out long literature reviews): should one do this *before* submitting the manuscript to a publisher, or is it fine to submit the dissertation 'as is' but with a (detailed) note in what ways one intends to change things? (I am thinking here of the initial 'proposal' stage, not the later 'review' stage, for which it seems sensible to submit an as-final-as-possible version).

These are excellent questions, and I am curious to hear what readers think. Here are a few quick thoughts...

External dissertation committee members?

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

PhD student here. What are reasons for and against having a dissertation committee member who is not part of your department? How do you go about inviting a professor from another department to be on your committee? Should you be working with them first/already, or at least be acquainted with them? What are the odds of their acceptance if you ask them? Are there any drawbacks to asking?

These are great questions. I imagine there are two different types of dissertation committee members who are not a part of your graduate department: committee members from other universities and committee members from a different discipline at your own university (e.g. psychology, political science, etc.). In both cases, I imagine there are two main reasons to want an external committee member like this: (1) to draw on their expertise, and (2) get another recommendation letter for the job-market. I'm not entirely sure what reasons there are against having external committee members, though, nor am I at all sure what the process looks like for seeking one out. Do any readers with experience in these matters have any tips to share?

Posting your dissertation online?

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

I recently have had a number of requests for a pdf of my dissertation. I defended in 2018 and am currently a postdoc. At the moment, I've polished and published a few sections of the dissertation; however, I'm currently in the process of refining other elements into their own proper articles. Is there any reason, besides the somewhat dated content and style, that I shouldn't post a pdf version of my dissertation on my website? When I've searched for advice on this topic, I've found blog posts (usually from other humanities fields) that recommend not making the dissertation freely available (e.g. https://theprofessorisin.com/2011/08/24/the-perils-of-publishing-your-dissertation-online/). I would love some advice from folk in the tenure-track process on this matter.

This is an interesting question that I have to confess never coming across before. Having read The Professor Is In's post above, the main worry there seems to be book publishers not wanting to publish something that's already available online. However, this worry seems to me a bit overblown in philosophy. My understanding is that some disciplines (English?) generally expect faculty to publish books for tenure. But this isn't the case in philosophy, and my impression is that publishing dissertations as books is pretty rare. Further, the Professor Is In updated their post with data indicating that almost no publisher would refuse to publish a substantially revised dissertation, and that posting dissertations online is in general no obstacle to tenure.

By my lights, a more relevant worry about posting dissertations online might be 'idea poaching', i.e. someone reading your dissertation and publishing ideas based on yours without appropriate attribution. Here again, though, I'm not sure how seriously to take the worry, and of course in one sense 'publishing' your dissertation online (via ProQuest or even on PhilPeople) does constitute a public record of the relevant ideas being yours. So, I'm really not sure what to advise. I uploaded my dissertation to PhilPapers prior to obtaining tenure, and it didn't prevent me from obtaining tenure or from publishing papers based upon it.

What do you all think?

Publishing dissertation work before defending?

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

1. Is it advisable to publish dissertation chapters before the final defence?
2. Can one incorporate published articles in one's thesis (say, if you published an article early on in your PhD but it is directly relevant to your thesis)?

The answer to question (1) seems to me to be 'obviously yes', though it may make sense to check with your committee first. After all, suppose they're not entirely happy with the work yet, and think it should be improved prior to publishing it anywhere. In that case, I suppose that publishing something they're not terribly happy with could rub them the wrong way. I'm a bit less sure about (2), but I guess here too my suggestion is: ask your committee! What do readers think?

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?