Summer Programs at the Thesis Office

This Summer at the Thesis Office we are offering several of our perennial programs to help you complete your thesis or dissertation.  Some of these were not offered in the Spring session, so here is your chance to check them out! In addition, some programs we offer are now online or hybrid online/in-person formats to make them accessible to all. If you would like to attend any of these workshops, please register here.

Create and Nurture a Productive Thesis/Dissertation Committee
Tuesday, June 4, 4PM

In this online presentation and Q&A, learn methods for creating a functional committee and making work with your committee count. Hear about best practices for common committee blunders and difficulties. Participation and sharing is encouraged!


Demystifying the Thesis/Dissertation Submission Process
Monday, June 10, 4PM

In this online presentation, Thesis Office advisor Carolyn Law will explain the ins and outs of submitting your completed thesis or dissertation. NIU has strict requirements for the "final product," and those requirements can keep you editing even after you've defended! Know what to expect and how to prepare for the final step of the process.


Tables/Figures/Pagination for Theses and Dissertations
Tuesday, June 11, 2PM

If your thesis or dissertation includes tables or figures, this is definitely the workshop for you. And if it doesn't include them, this might be the workshop for you anyway! One of our most common complaints from students is about page numbers, which can be a huge bugbear if your document is not set up properly. Come get it all straightened out in this workshop -- bring your laptop and be prepared to do some good work. This is an in-person event with ample time for workshopping, in Adams Hall room 103.


Writing Your Thesis/Dissertation Proposal
Tuesday, June 18, 4PM

This hybrid workshop will be an in-person presentation and discussion that is Facebook Live fed to our Facebook group. This interactive workshop will address typical characteristics of a successful thesis or dissertation proposal as well as offer practical strategies for organizing the key elements. Breakout sessions will allow for generous time for questions and small-group discussion. Bring your laptop and specific questions to maximize the workshop’s effectiveness!

Last year we had more attendees than ever at these events. Please keep taking advantage of them! We're here to help.

Register for any of these events at The Graduate School's workshop calendar.

Hello From Your New Blogger and Fellow Dissertator!

by Tiffany Messick

Tiffany at work

I’m a transplant from Austin, TX. This month I’m beginning my fifth year as a PhD student in the English Department. I put my committee together in February and recently defended my proposal at the end of June. I’m currently half way through a first draft of my first chapter. I’ve taught FYCOMP for four years and absolutely loved it but now I am here to help other dissertation writers make progress. I can answer big existential content questions but am also great with MS Word formatting. My concentration is 20th Century American Literature, specifically Southern authors (Walker Percy, Zora Neale Hurston, Carson McCullers, and Richard Wright). I like to complicate matters for myself by choosing topics which are interdisciplinary, which is how I landed on Cartesian dualism and the American South. I’m often in libraries or coffee shops dissertating.

Bowie at work

When I’m not twisting my brain into a pretzel, I love to watch classic movies like my favorite, A Streetcar Named Desire, and listen to music. I’m a bit of a rock music encyclopedia. Test me sometime! I have two wiener dogs, Vienna (Sausage) and Bowie, who are very cute and very spoiled. I also like to read (obviously) philosophy. Camus, Nietzsche, Sartre… are a few of my favorites. Eventually I hope to become a professor of literature at a university somewhere. I earned my Bachelor’s in English at the University of Texas. Hook ‘Em! For my MA I studied at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. I love to write and I’m sure my enthusiasm for writing will rub off on you to make the seemingly endless dissertation process easier. I’m addicted to watching history programs on PBS and National Geographic and true crime on Investigation Discovery.

The biggest struggle I’ve encountered writing the dissertation has been being away from my support group back in Texas. Graduate School, especially the dissertation process, can be very isolating. Come talk to me about any obstacles you might be facing and how to tackle them. 

My Dissertation Boot Camp Experience

by Robyn Byrd

For the past eight years, Gail Jacky, Director of the University Writing Center at NIU, has had a summertime mission: getting dissertation writers to finish their dissertations! In June, July, and August, Gail runs what she calls Dissertation Boot Camps. Writers hole up in the Writing Center's isolated basement, and do nothing but write and snack. (And maybe talk a little.) The program's alumni are proof that this "retreat" method of retiring from the world for a few days is a proven winner for getting dissertation work done.

You may be wondering, "Why can't I just lock myself in my own basement for a week?" Well I'll tell you why, curious reader! I did the Boot Camp lite version last week (2-day camp versus 5-day camp) and here are the perqs of doing this with Gail in the UWC:

1) Healthy snacks, water, and coffee/tea are provided. No getting up to make food or brew a pot.

2) You work alongside other dissertation writers who are similarly focused and unfocused. You will all need to hole up, but you will all also need to take breaks. You can do so together if you like.

Jack London writing outside.
Idyllic! But not practical.

3) You work alongside a mildly busy office team. The UWC continues to meet with students (mostly graduate and adult students in the summer) during the Boot Camp, the phone continues to ring, and Gail continues to stay busy. No one is breathing down your neck, but they are present, creating an environment conducive to working productively.

4) Assistance is all around you. Gail and her team are ready and willing to read parts of your dissertation with you, during the camp. You will get the same attention they give their appointments, and quality tutoring and critiques for your writing. They can work with writers at any stage, from "Is this a bad idea to put this chapter here?" to "I'm almost done please check my citations!"

5) Most importantly, no matter what the UWC has or doesn't have to offer, it has this: IT'S NOT YOUR HOUSE. We all need to get out of our own spaces at times, or we get stuck in a rut. This is a chance to jump start your writing in a new place, a place where you don't have to answer the phone or worry about the dishes in the sink (there aren't any).

So don't lock yourself in your basement just yet! And don't go sit on a mountain top. There aren't any good snacks there.

As for me, I did not get a ton done in those two days, but my colleagues clacked away merrily all day. If I went again, I could make a better go of it, I think. I was delving back into my diss after a summer hiatus. What I did take away was a renewed understanding of what the heck I was writing, an organized to-do list for the rest of the summer, and about four new pages of material. That's not a lot of writing, but the executive function work I was able to do by being out of my house will lay the path for a lot more writing. I can see where I'm going now! I needed to temporarily remove my kids and my dirty floors from the view to be able to see the big picture.

So I highly recommend the camps to anyone who can swing it, at any stage of writing the dissertation or even the prospectus. But there are a couple things I would change:

Actual photo of me
in the cold writing center

1) I would like to see more programming. We did have encouragement from Gail and the opportunity to sit with tutors, but I wanted to talk and interface a little more. Just enough to break up the writing for a few. The longer 5-day session might be better for really digging in and yet having these opportunities.

2) The UWC is COLD!!! If you are one who starts wearing flip-flops on March 21, you will be very happy. If you are like me, and wish you lived in balmy Palm Springs or the like, you will be very cold. For myself and the older woman I sat with, we got very sluggish in the afternoons as 12 floors of cooled air sank its way further down into the basement of Stevenson Tower B. The camp could use a better location... but the cave-like nature of where the UWC sits now is probably an asset too.

Next week I am leaving for a writing retreat in the Catskills Mountains. I hope it'll be warm!

Approaching the End

In composing your thesis or dissertation, you naturally move back and forth through all five phases of the writing process.  (For more on engaging each stage of that process, see this post from March 2017.)  In this entry, we revisit this theme but with an emphasis on the eventual product—your final monograph—and some tips and thoughts on one of its important components: the end.

The End First

No matter how many chapters it has, your thesis or dissertation is like any piece of writing in that it presents to the reader three broad parts: an introduction, a body, a conclusion.  In the Thesis Office, we generally suggest that you compose these parts in following order: chapters of the body first, conclusion next, introduction last.  Still, we acknowledge that during the long project you’ll likely need to veer slightly from this overall plan.  If you find yourself stuck on a certain chapter or part, you should move on to another that you can more actively and productively make progress on.  If you find yourself adequately ready to draft introductory material, so be it.

Yet consider the advantages of drafting your ending very early on—long before you start to tackle the introduction and even before you draft one or more chapters of the body.  Components of a successful final chapter include a brief summary of your key findings, a restatement of your conclusion(s), an assertion of your work’s significance, an acknowledgment of its shortcomings, and recommendations for related future research.  When you wrote your proposal, you likely envisioned how your project would address such concerns.  You may be able to draft a concluding chapter that tentatively covers them while—or shortly after—you complete necessary readings, lab experiments, interviews, field work, and/or data analysis.  Drafting an ending first can provide a firm foundation on which to build the rest of your document, particularly its beginning. 

The End in Reach…

As you head toward your finish line, keep in mind that, in the final analysis, no piece of writing is ever fully realized.  “Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see,” said poet Alexander Pope back in the 18th century, “Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be.”  Granted, in the Thesis Office, where we generally work with writers in the final stages of document preparation, we do stress the need to adhere to the Grad School’s guidelines for formatting a thesis or dissertation at NIU.  Your finished document must be consistent and accurate in terms of form.  But we certainly recognize that any piece of writing varies in presentation of content.  So should you.  Ways to express ideas in writing are infinite.  In finalizing your overall written statement, try not to let the best be the enemy of the good.

The Writer’s End

On a related note, consider the various meanings behind the end to a piece of writing.  More than just the happy moment when you can confidently type “The End,” it can refer to the purpose you bring to the overall task.  Pope, the poet mentioned above, had this meaning in mind in these further lines in his versified “An Essay on Criticism”:

          In ev’ry work regard the writer’s end,
          Since none can compass more than they intend;
          And if the means be just, the conduct true,
          Applause, in spite of trivial faults, is due.

Thoughts worth keeping on board as you realize—and approach—your writing’s end.

Incidentally, in another sense this post is this blog writer’s end.  My assistantship in the Thesis Office ends on July 31.  Another graduate assistant will take my place in August and work with Carolyn and Robyn.  Best of luck to all, at any and all stages of your projects!

Fred Stark
Doctoral Candidate in English

Your Defense: Closer Than You May Think

Soon the day will come when you stand before a room full of peers and speak in defense of your project.  That is, you’ll sit (and stand) for the oral defense, the final exam for your degree.  Whether your oral defense is scheduled next month or not yet scheduled, think ahead and plan carefully for this important event in order to reduce stress and ensure success.

Who Will Be There?

In almost all cases, more people will be present than at your proposal defense.  For thesis writers, the final oral defense features at least four participants: you and your three committee members.  For dissertation writers, the smallest number of participants will be five: you, your minimum of three committee members, and the exam’s designated reader, who is appointed by the dean of the Graduate School.  (In almost all cases, you won’t know who the designated reader is until you show up at your oral defense.  For an official explanation of this non-voting faculty participant, see information at this link under “Designated Reader, Dean’s.”)  Of course, you’ll likely invite friends and family members to experience the proceedings.  But you should expect others to be in attendance as well.  Both the Graduate School and your department will announce an oral defense of a dissertation ahead of time, and the event is open to all interested parties.  Colleagues from your graduate program, former professors, and perhaps even people from other departments may be in the audience.  Various public-speaking skills will no doubt come into play.

When 

When it’s time to defend, you’ll know.  Not only will you have a sense, as a writer, that the argument you advance in your document is suitable for public airing, but your director and committee members will have communicated to you that your work is ready to be defended.  At least three weeks before the examination (a Grad School deadline), you need to submit a Request for Oral Defense of Thesis or a Request for Oral Defense of Dissertation.  Note that the Graduate School also has several strict deadlines, including a deadline to submit the post-defense version of your thesis or dissertation.  Ideally, schedule your defense more than three days before this deadline.  That way you’ll give yourself ample time to make any needed changes to your document before submitting it electronically to the Thesis Office for final review.  Your committee may request that you make changes during or after your examination.  In addition, you may need to reformat your document so that it meets the Graduate School’s format requirements.  (See Thesis Format Guidelines or Dissertation Format Guidelines.)  Here in the Thesis Office, we often assist writers editing their documents during the post-defense phase.  We strongly advise that you plan ahead so that you have more than three days to prepare your final copy.

How

Procedures during the 90 minutes or so of an oral defense vary slightly, depending on expectations of your department and committee.  But, as noted in the Graduate School’s Quick Guide for Faculty (see “Defense, Oral”), all defense meetings consist of two main parts: an examination session and a public presentation with opportunity for Q & A.  The order of these parts is determined by your department.  Last year, when I attended a colleague’s dissertation defense in the Department of English, the candidate opened the meeting with an overview of her work (a presentation that lasted about 12 minutes).  Then the examination began.  Each committee member—as well as the designated reader, who came from the Department of History—asked probing questions about the dissertation’s content and its relation to other studies in the field.  The session was formal and rigorous but never became overly tense.  The Q & A was lively and enlightening, with questions from several colleagues and guests in the audience.  The event was also “traditional,” in that each committee member was there in person.  However, these days, it’s not uncommon for a “nontraditional” defense to take place, whereby one or more members participates via Skype or some other internet-based communications program.  Here in the Thesis Office, we’ve recently become aware that such virtual participation is often unavoidable in fields like anthropology, in which faculty members and even degree candidates routinely spend extended periods of time away from campus to conduct field research.  On this note: if your oral defense will require internet-based communications, you may wish to look into alternatives to Skype.  For a recent list of such options, see this link.

Final Thoughts

Once you’re past the halfway mark on your big writing task, earnestly start thinking ahead to your defense.  As soon as you start on the last segment of your document, get back in touch with your director to determine when to schedule the important day.  Best of luck to each of you defending sooner or later—this summer and beyond!

The Graduate Degree: A Prelude to Knowledge Work

Investigating, analyzing, evaluating, creating, contextualizing, self-directing: skills like these are integral to the writing of a thesis or dissertation but also characteristic of the broad occupational domain called knowledge work.  To thesis and dissertation writers at any stage of their projects, below we offer thoughts on how you’re already developing—and can continue to develop—skills that are crucial for success in knowledge-oriented fields.

Tallies and Time Clocks?

Knowledge work is generally hard to quantify or measure.  Ironically, though, those who engage in such work across fields of academia tend to be fairly obsessed with counting and measuring.  Most carefully keep or monitor totals of papers presented, articles published, grants awarded, committees served on, and classes taught per year.  When you arrange your CV and the several accompanying documents needed for an academic job search, your field’s particular obsessions with such performance-related numbers boldly reassert themselves.  Other academic endeavors are sometimes summed up in terms of hours spent per week in classrooms, offices, labs, meetings, field investigations, grading sessions, or writing stints.

Yet the efforts that go into various kinds of academic production are not always easy to break down into regular time chunks.  Realistically, much academic work can keep the worker occupied from early morning to late at night, during parts of weekends, and during stretches of semester breaks.  (Let me briefly add that plenty in and outside academia do seem interested in figuring out the number of hours per week academics actually work—or in debating how many hours per week they should work.  A couple of recent reports (see here and here) suggest that such investigations and debates are complex and sometimes testy.  We avoid these issues in this post.)

Your Project: Training in Key Knowledge-Work Skills

A lot of what you do while completing your thesis or dissertation is obviously solid preparation for a future career in knowledge-centered domains.  As outlined and nicely detailed by the Careers & Employment Division at the University of Manchester, those aiming for a career in academia need to develop at least five skills for success.  Good news: as soon as you embark on your project, you’re immersed in an experience that can help you hone each of them.

Networking: As you develop relationships with members of your committee, each member can introduce you to others to help build your professional network.  In addition, while researching and writing, you can further extend your network by attending and/or presenting parts of your project at conferences.  Last year around this time, I traveled to a national conference to present a paper based on research for one of my dissertation chapters and attended multiple panels in areas central and peripheral to my academic interests.  The experience led to new contacts and eventually a request to submit a piece to a scholarly society’s publication.  Next month, I’ll travel to a regional conference to deliver a presentation with an NIU colleague and attend several discussion sessions.  You’re likely taking advantage of similar networking opportunities.  If not, seek them out.

Time Management: You’re already a knowledge worker and thus already weighing priorities and setting many deadlines of your own.  In previous posts on this blog, we’ve covered approaches to managing time during writing sessions, balancing your project with family matters, and maintaining your focus and enthusiasm by mixing work with recreational activities.  Consider such scheduling practices as sound preparation for the self-directed knowledge work of your post-degree career.

Resilience: While writing a thesis or dissertation, setbacks inevitably occur.  Data may need to be reanalyzed.  Ideas and approaches may need revamping.  Feedback on your progress from committee members—or from attendees at academic conferences—can be encouraging but also humbling.  As you get closer to the project’s completion, you’ll likely start looking for your postgraduate job.  Academic job hunting is especially fraught with pressures, rejections, and disappointments.  But lows like these that you experience throughout your project build your patience and resilience for similar wrinkles you’ll face down the road.

Presentation Skills: As a knowledge worker, you need to be able to present ideas clearly, in a variety of settings, among colleagues but also among people unfamiliar with intricacies of your work.  Each time you revise a section of your long document, you add useful material to your expanding pool of well-articulated expressions of your findings.  And you shouldn’t just aim to present them at your defense—another reason to plan to present at conferences while completing your project.  If you’re teaching, consider ways to integrate insights from your developing work in the classroom.

Project Management: At the NIU Thesis Office, we stress the value of being proactive in managing your thesis or dissertation project.  In a previous post, we featured a review of a useful book that describes the project-management approach to the dissertation.  Ultimately, you’re the manager of your project—under supervision of your director, of course.  The management experiences you gain now will certainly inform many aspects of your future knowledge-oriented employment.

Final Thoughts

Happy investigating, analyzing, evaluating, self-directing, and writing to all.  And good luck to those of you defending over the next few weeks!

Explain Your Project. You Have Three Minutes.

 

You’ve probably heard of the elevator speech: a short summary of an idea that you can pitch to someone (a prospective business partner, for example) while waiting for and then sharing an elevator.  You may even have crafted (or thought of crafting) a variation on the elevator speech for your thesis or dissertation project.  But have you worked out just how long this short speech should be?  Length is part of the official name for an increasingly popular speech contest that challenges grad-student participants to craft such a presentation: Three Minute Thesis (3MT®).  Details behind the 3MT speech are well worth exploring.

Hatched in a Shower?

A decade ago, experiencing a severe drought, people in Queensland, Australia adopted several ways to conserve water, including limiting showers to three minutes.  During those parched days, it seems that Alan Lawson, an emeritus professor and graduate school dean, was glancing at a three-minute egg timer attached to his bathroom wall when he suddenly found inspiration for the Three Minute Thesis.  This account of the humble beginnings of 3MT, now an international academic speech competition, doesn’t stray too far from historical information provided by the University of Queensland, the birthplace of 3MT.  Contests are now held in 62 countries outside Australia.  The contest in a nutshell: grad-student contestants must present their projects in three minutes.  If a contestant chooses to use visual support, it must take the form of a single, non-animated PowerPoint slide, displayed when the contestant starts speaking.  (No other visuals or props permitted). Currently 237 universities in the U.S. participate, including the University of Kentucky, which shares several informative videos derived from their past 3MT events.  Currently there are only three institutions participating in Illinois: UIC, ISU, and SUIC.  Last year’s contest at SUIC was the first one ever held there.

Competition Aside...
.
Competing is a primary goal in a 3MT event.  Ultimately, however, becoming a 3MT winner is beside the point.  Preparing such a speech is its own reward, valuable now and in the near and distant future.  How so?  Think of all those times over the past few months (or more) when you’ve found yourself explaining the project you’ve been working on to colleagues, friends, and family members.  Wouldn’t it be great to rattle all that off smoothly in three minutes (or less)?  Or picture your upcoming defense, an event that will be open to the public.  At the start, you’re going to need to summarize and rationalize your project to your committee members, your outside reader (if defending a dissertation), and other attendees in a meaningful and concise manner.  You’ll most likely have more than three minutes to do this, but why not practice so that you can capture your project’s essence in such a short amount of time?  Further, when you go on the job search and eventually become a finalist candidate, you’ll need to be ready to give a three-minute, one-minute, or 30-second summary of your project, depending on circumstances during interviews, presentations, and/or informal meetings at your prospective place of employment.  Why not pull together the longest of these short summaries now?  If you can explain your argument cogently and completely in three minutes (or less), you keenly demonstrate expertise in your field, familiarity with your areas of specialty, and a firm grasp of your project’s place in scholarship.  That is, you constructively crystallize the significance of your thesis or dissertation research.

Drafting and Organization
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When you set out to create an effective three-minute thesis speech, consult the guidelines and judging criteria that Queensland provides.  As emphasized in those materials, a successful presentation centers on listeners’ needs: it starts off by creating a bridge to their interests, avoids jargon, summarizes important research outcomes, and ends by inspiring a desire to know more about the topic or to take some kind of action.  To meet these goals, arrange your presentation so that it answers the following questions:

     * Why is your research important to your listeners?
     * What brief examples best illustrate your project’s outcomes?
     * After hearing about your project, what should listeners do next?

An effective visual-support slide supports your message clearly, simply, and concisely.

Stand on Shoulders 

A famous speaker once responded to a request for a formal speech by saying, essentially: “If you want me to talk for three hours, I’m ready today.  If you want me to talk for only three minutes, I’ll need two weeks to prepare.”  Mark Twain is commonly associated with this quotation.  Words to the same effect (with variations) have also been attributed to several other celebrated orators: Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Disraeli, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, Will Rogers...and on and on.  In short, plenty of sharp wits are popularly linked to an important communication principle, which the 3MT contest underscores: expressing big ideas compactly requires careful thought and planning.  As you progress toward completing your program, follow the footsteps of accomplished speakers.  Give yourself ample time to prepare a good—and short—presentation of your thesis or dissertation.

Images: CC0 and Public Domain

Interview with a Freelance Editor

Producing a thesis or dissertation is one thing.  But then after the writing’s done comes the crucial final phase of combining, editing, and proofreading front matter, chapters, tables, references, indexes, and such so that the whole document meets the Graduate School’s formatting requirements—no small chore.  As you head toward (or envision) that final lap, perhaps you’ve considered getting help from an editor.  Here in the Thesis Office we maintain a list of freelance editors who are familiar with NIU’s document formatting rules and offer various editing, formatting, and transcribing services for a fee.  These experts see a lot of research-based writing and can thus share plenty of useful insights on the process of getting your big document in proper shape.   

In this post, we offer some words of reflection, wisdom, and advice from one of the veterans among this group.  She recently visited our office and sat down to share her experiences working with thesis and dissertation writers at NIU.  Our interview covered a range of topics, including her early years of editing (back when clients came to her with printouts and/or files on 3 1/2-inch floppy disks), changes in her work methods over the past decade as documents became almost completely electronic, and the various fields in which her clients have written their papers.  Below is a summary of a few other matters we discussed.     

Red Marks, Red Shoes

It was near the end of the last century when friends and colleagues in DeKalb encouraged Susan Richter, an English literature major, to offer her editing services to thesis and dissertation writers at NIU.  Carolyn Law, our Thesis Office director, told her the work would be “fun.”  Has that prediction turned out to be true?  Overall, Susan’s answers add up to a firm yes.  

“I’m really a bean counter at heart,” she offered at the start of our interview, in reference to the intricacies of arranging and formatting a document in order to avoid a final editor’s red marks.  “Putting everything in the proper order, checking references to make sure they have the volume, issue, and page numbers, making sure everything is following the rules: I enjoy that.”  Though she sometimes finds the content of a thesis or dissertation to be intriguing, Susan insists that what the paper is about is less important to her than the editing of it.  “When people ask me what I do, I tell them, ‘I read but I don’t pay attention.’”  She mentioned that she remembers a few topics from documents she’s edited over the years—teaching methods, management approaches, and engineering solutions come to mind—but doesn’t recall much detail.  She said: “I don’t try to retain any of it because unless it’s something that really interests me, it doesn’t get to stay in my short-term memory.”  In emphasizing her enthusiasm for editing, she also offered a few words worth passing on to writers who may be reaching that final submission stage: “I enjoy making things look the way they’re supposed to look and follow the rules.  If that’s not something you enjoy, you’re going to have problems.  You’re going to have lots of red from Carolyn.” 




Memories about a document’s content may not linger, but anecdotes from her experiences working with grad students readily come to mind.  For example, years ago she would often meet new clients in person.  “It was interesting with the international students,” Susan recalls.  “I would usually meet them over at the student center.  And the first couple of times I said, ‘I’m a white female,’ you know, ‘I’m…’—whatever my age was at the time.  They thought I looked young.  I didn’t look as old as they thought I should.  So I started wearing red shoes.  I would say, ‘I’m 5’3” and have dark hair and will have on red shoes.’”  Thus, students looking for their editor in a crowd would scan below people’s knees, searching for foot coverings matching the color of an editor’s pen.  And does she still have those shoes?  “I do, just in case!”

Words of Experience 

Susan also shared insider views on what writers who seek a freelance editor’s assistance can get right or get wrong.  Highlights worth noting:

• Determine the particular editing or formatting problems you need help with.  Susan likes it when clients are “honest about what they have” up front.
• Give your editor ample lead time before deadlines.  “Most clients contact me ahead of time and seem to be working through the process like responsible adults,” she said.
• Remember that your editor feels deadline pressure, too.  As Susan puts it: “If clients say they’ll send something to me Monday morning and they don’t send it to me until Wednesday night, then a Friday deadline is going to be a little hard to meet.”
• Check your in-text citations and references extra carefully for accuracy and completeness.  Susan reports that they’re never correct.  She says, “People will say, ‘Oh, no, I used a program.  It’ll be fine.’  They will not be fine.  That has never happened.  Twenty years—never.”  Susan will often assist a client by adding missing information in citations and/or references, but she notes that the writer is ultimately responsible for these things.

Sympathy and Advice

Over the years, Susan has also developed a great deal of sympathy for soon-to-be-finished students at this stressful stage in their careers.  “When people would come over to the house to pick up their three copies and their original, or just their original if they needed it, I kept Kleenex by the door.”  Why Kleenex?  “Because they would just burst into tears—men and women—when I would give their finished document to them.  It was done, and it was delivered, and they would be talking and normal and then just start crying.  And so I know it’s a stressful time.  What I hope is that I can relieve some of that stress.”

Near the end of our talk, we asked if she has any words of advice on how to accomplish the thesis or dissertation wisely.  Her answer provides food for thought for writers of all stripes, not just those who may be thinking of sending their document to an editor for hire:  “Focus on the project and the writing.  Nobody can do everything equally well.  The actual formatting, the mechanical part that I work on, has pretty limited value.  Don’t let that end part be a bad memory or a problem.  Make your research worthwhile for somebody to look up and quote.  That’s the whole purpose—to contribute to the body of knowledge.  Do that.  And if editing and formatting has you overly stressed, consider hiring somebody else to make your document look pretty.”  

The Future of the Dissertation Is Already Here

This post was contributed by Carolyn Law, Thesis and Dissertation Advisor in the Graduate School at NIU

James Whiton: "Aren't you jealous?"

How did we get here?
To talk about the future of the dissertation, you must understand a little something about its past. To say the dissertation has changed over the centuries is an understatement.

The first three doctorates in the U.S. were awarded at Yale in 1861. A dissertation was required, but only one of the documents survives today, the notorious dissertation of James Morris Whiton. It was handwritten, of course, entirely in Latin--six whole pages on the subject, “Brevis vita, ars longa” (Rosenberg, 1961).

Today, the average length of a doctoral dissertation in the sciences is hovering around 200 pages. There was a dramatic surge in length between 1950 and 1990 (Gould, 2016, p. 28), probably for a number of reasons. For one thing, literature reviews over time have grown because, frankly, there’s just more literature to review now and that body of literature is more easily accessed by students. Also, new theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and experimental procedures are often more complex, unfamiliar, and difficult to explain in academic prose than in earlier eras.

But much of the change in dissertations over the course of the 20th century was conspicuously driven by technology. A dissertation in the 1950s was produced on a manual typewriter with carbon paper. Corrections were made with a razor blade. I wrote my own master’s thesis on an IBM Selectric typewriter. By the time I got to doctoral study in the early 1990s, computers were available, but not universally used.

Memories...

Big change was occurring in the access chain as well. A dissertation has always been a public document, but until very recently “public” did not mean “accessible.” Dissertations were typed directly or photocopied onto cotton-bond paper, bound, and shelved in research libraries. They were very rarely accessed and many (like two thirds of Yale’s PhD class of 1861) have been lost forever.

In 1938, a little firm in Ann Arbor began microfilming and archiving dissertations, mostly because they were a technology company in search of content and the massive stock of dissertations presented a perfect pool of material. UMI is today known as ProQuest International and it is the largest database and repository of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in the world. In 2008, NIU made electronic submission of digital theses and dissertations (in PDF) mandatory. These documents are now discoverable and in some cases fully downloadable anywhere in the world, any time of day or night.

Recognizing the acceleration of technological change in the way research and scholarship are produced and shared in the 21st century, the Council of Graduate Schools convened a symposium in January 2016 on the future of the dissertation, citing “recent controversies about the purpose of doctoral education and the meaning of the dissertation” (Blackwell, 2015, p. 1). What came out of that meeting suggests that the future of the dissertation must include a heart-to-heart discussion of the role of doctoral education in general in the 21st-century knowledge marketplace. That’s changing too. More accurately, it has changed, but graduate education and its grand artifact, the dissertation, are lagging far behind the times.

Where do we go from here?
Graduate schools are just now beginning to grapple with three prominent issues arising in this evolving new-century context: authorship, access, and format. Some of the discussions we must continue to have include:

NIU students collaborating in a study lounge.

Collaboration and Coauthorship 
Most knowledge is created in groups, and in some disciplines the particular skills required to work in teams are absolutely essential to the successful conduct of an individual study as well as the professional development of the student-researcher. Shouldn’t dissertations be allowed to reflect that real-world process?

Open Access 
Knowledge that is not shared might as well not exist, and a dissertation that is not accessible fails to achieve one of its primary purposes. According to Maureen McCarthy (2016), Assistant Director of Advancement and Best Practices for the Council of Graduate Schools, “The idea of the dissertation moving a student from a private to a public phase resurfaced repeatedly” (p. 1) throughout the symposium in 2016. But the public nature of the dissertation in the 21st century is not the same as it was in the 20th. The internet, full-text downloadability, Creative Commons licensing, none of this was even imaginable when dissertations were routinely shelved in brick-and-mortar buildings. On the one hand, such accessibility furthers knowledge dramatically, but on the other hand, that accessibility may run counter to tenure review policies that privilege conventional publication. Shouldn’t dissertation authors choose their own levels of exposure? Shouldn’t students maintain control over their own intellectual property?

Alternative Formats 
In recent years, the idea of the monograph dissertation, an extended discourse on a single topic or experiment, has been challenged. The two most common complaints are that these papers take too long to write and they are not representative of the kinds of writing expected of working researchers. In economics, for instance, the norm now is the “three-article dissertation,” in which the author bundles a series of shorter pieces under a unifying introduction. In other disciplines, the very nature of the “document” itself is being questioned, introducing multimedia, graphical representation, and other digital forms into the dissertation genre. Shouldn’t dissertations be allowed to fly free from the cage of the page when it is technologically feasible and intellectually meaningful to do so?

Dance your dissertation!

These are just some of the questions, not thoughtfully crafted, negotiated policies. But we must ask the questions to arrive at the policies. And we need the policies soon. What do you think? We welcome your comments.








----------------------------------------------------
 References

Blackwell, J. (July 2015). Rethinking the dissertation: An opinion piece. GradEdge [Council of Graduate Schools], 4(6), pp. 1-3. 

Gould, J. (7 July 2016). Future of the thesis. Nature, 535, pp. 26-28.

McCarthy, M. (March 2016). The dissertation’s many futures [summary of the January 2016 symposium on the future of the dissertation]. GradEdge [Council of Graduate Schools], 5(3), pp. 1-3.

Rosenberg, R. (1961). The first American doctor of philosophy degree: A centennial salute to Yale, 1861-1961. The Journal of Higher Education, 32(7), 387-394. doi:10.2307/1978076

Announcing Our Fall Programs

Adams Hall, home of the Graduate School
and the Thesis and Dissertation Office.

Welcome to fall 2017!  In September and October the Thesis Office will once again offer brown bag sessions, presentations, and workshops for NIU grad students at various stages of the thesis or dissertation process. Some brown bag sessions are also open to faculty, and one is geared for faculty and staff.  We look forward to seeing you!

Basics
Brown bags will start in the second week of September and meet Wednesdays from 12 to 1 p.m. in Adams Hall, Room 103.  Presentations and workshops will start in the last week of September, and most will will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. in the same Adams Hall location on a Monday, Tuesday, or Thursday.  Note that two presentations meet at different times, locations, and/or days.  For details on each program, see below.  

Registration
No registration required for brown bags.  Registration is required for a presentation or workshop.  Register via email at thesis@niu.edu.  Include the name of the presentation or workshop you want to attend in the subject line or message.  We do have space limitations for events in Adams 103 (12 seats maximum).  Register early!

What to Expect
Plenty of important information regarding completion of your graduate degree.  After running these programs over several semesters, we’ve learned that most students who attend presentations and workshops are blown away by how much they didn’t fully know about meeting various deadlines, submitting the proper paperwork to the proper place, or formatting the long document.  At all our events, expect thorough coverage of common concerns as well as time to address individual questions.

Brown Bag Sessions 
Breaking Through Writer’s Block (and Other Obstacles)
Wednesday, September 13 (12 to 1 p.m. in Adams Hall, Room 103)
Informal discussion on common obstacles that slow or entirely halt progress on one’s thesis or dissertation.  Carolyn Law, Thesis/Dissertation Advisor, will facilitate the discussion and offer practical strategies.  Students only, please.

Committee Relations
Wednesday, September 20 (12 to 1 p.m. in Adams Hall, Room 103)
Informal discussion on choosing committee members, creating productive working relationships with them, maintaining good communications, and managing feedback throughout the process.  Graduate School policies regarding committees will be reviewed.  Faculty and students welcome.

Robyn Byrd leading a brown bag discussion
in Adams 103.

Writing the Proposal
Wednesday, September 27 (12 to 1 p.m. in Adams Hall,
Room 103)
Discussion will address typical characteristics of any strong thesis or dissertation proposal (sometimes called a prospectus) as well as aspects unique to proposals in various disciplines.  Faculty and students welcome.

The Balancing Act: A Life in Grad School
Wednesday, October 4 (12 to 1 p.m. in Adams Hall,
Room 103)
Informal discussion on the complexities of managing life as a graduate student, balancing family responsibilities, personal health, outside work, and the pressures of a dissertation or thesis.  Session will be facilitated by Thesis Office GA Robyn Byrd, doctoral candidate and mother of two.  Students only, please.

Faculty Q & A

Wednesday, October 11 (12 to 1 p.m. in Adams Hall, Room 103)

(Grad students, you might want to bring this one to the attention of your director or other faculty members in your department.)  Carolyn Law, Thesis/Dissertation Advisor, will introduce the functions and services of the Thesis Office and answer questions about Graduate School requirements and standards for theses and dissertations.  Faculty who are directing a thesis or dissertation at NIU for the first time are especially encouraged to attend, but all faculty and staff are welcome.

Presentations

Carolyn Law presenting on the submission process in Wirtz Hall.

Demystifying the Submission Process
Tuesday, September 26 (5 to 7 p.m. in Wirtz Hall, Room 104)
This presentation is for students preparing to submit a thesis or dissertation to the Graduate School for December 2017 graduation.  Carolyn Law, Thesis/Dissertation Advisor, will walk students through the steps of the process: defense, electronic submission, and final approval.

Dissertation Essentials
Monday, October 2 (2 to 4 p.m. in Adams Hall, Room 103)
Designed for all doctoral students enrolled in 799 in any department.  Staff will walk students through the Graduate School’s specific requirements for dissertations and cover a wide range of the most troublesome issues dissertation writers frequently encounter.

Thesis Essentials
Tuesday, October 3 (2 to 4 p.m. in Adams Hall, Room 103)
Designed for all master’s students enrolled in 699 in any department.  Staff will walk students through the Graduate School’s specific requirements for theses and cover a wide range of the most troublesome issues thesis writers frequently encounter.

Writing a Thesis in Engineering
Thursday, October 5 (2 to 4 p.m. in Adams Hall, Room 103)
Designed specifically for thesis writers enrolled in thesis-credit hours in the College of Engineering and Engineering Technology.  Staff will walk students through the Graduate School’s specific requirements for theses and cover a range of issues that students in engineering fields often find troublesome.

NIU Naperville, venue for Writing a Dissertation in Education.

Writing a Dissertation in Education
Saturday, October 14 (9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at NIU Naperville, Room 119)
This one-day program at NIU Naperville is designed specifically for dissertation writers enrolled in 799 in the College of Education.  Staff will walk students through the Graduate School’s specific requirements for dissertations and cover a wide range of the most troublesome issues dissertation writers in education frequently encounter.

Workshops
Tables/Figures/Pagination
Tuesday, October 10 (2 to 4 p.m. in Adams Hall, Room 103)
This hands-on workshop is designed to help writers comply with the Graduate School’s requirements for tables, figures, and pagination.  Students should bring their work in progress on their own laptops.  Staff will cover the specific format requirements, demonstrate helpful techniques and short-cuts in Microsoft Word, and allow generous time for individual troubleshooting and one-on-one consultation.

ASME Documentation
Thursday, October 12 (2 to 4 p.m. in Adams Hall, Room 103)
This hand-on workshop will teach the documentation style of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, known as ASME journal style.  Using real-word examples, students will apply the principles in real time to their own writing.  ASME journal style is ideal for research documentation in all departments of the College of Engineering and Engineering Technology.

Staying in Love with Your Thesis or Dissertation

Exams passed, proposal approved, and you happily move forward with your writing project.  The growing relationship between you and your significant document draws on several forces, not least passion and devotion.  For some writers, these forces never waver and may even increase over time.  Yet other writers can face weary stretches due to a fading of that initial spark.  How does it happen?  How can writers stay enthralled with their thesis or dissertation?  This post mainly goes out to those of you who ponder such questions.  But it also offers helpful bits even to those convinced from the outset that they will blissfully go the distance—and those thrilled to be nearing their project’s final stages.    

Prime Factors Behind Burnout

Waning enthusiasm over the course of such a long undertaking can result from many things.  You deal with certain matters beyond your control, such as outside commitments to work or family, schedules of your committee, or availability of resources for research, experiments, or data analysis.  But most important are your own contributing thoughts and emotions, internal matters that can press acutely but that you can likely address more readily.  Such as:

Doubts about your progress.  Uncertainties about the development of your lengthy document can crop up during writing slumps and delays.  You may also harbor doubts while waiting for feedback on chapters from your readers—or, after receiving feedback, while acting on requests for changes or revisions, major and minor. 

Concerns that what you’re doing is trivial.  Such concerns partner with the so-called imposter syndrome.  They may cause you to reconsider the theory or methodology you’re applying to your endeavor.  You may ponder tweaking your approach, revisiting your proposal, or even stripping away at the foundations of the entire affair.

Temptations to pull the plug.  These can accompany outbursts like “I’m sick and tired of this whole thing.”  Probably not the exact words of any contemporary American grad student, and most likely not always true about all parts of the undertaking.  For example, in the case of my dissertation, the literary texts I’m writing about are, to me, endlessly fascinating and enjoyable.  But let’s face it: even re-examining stuff you like can eventually become draining.  Outside the context of language and literary research, important supporting tasks like tabulating results, running statistical tests, or transcribing interviews can each get tedious.  Any project requiring long stretches of deep thought, creativity, intense focus, and adherence to standards and guidelines inevitably leads to exhaustion.

Some Solutions

OK, so what to do about all this?  Among the many possible courses of action, the following three seem eminently achievable:

Revisit work that brought you to your project.  Look back at previous studies or research relevant to your current doings—or at things not directly related to them.  This experience may help remind you of what drew you to your project in the first place or point out approaches to it you may not have considered yet.

Talk about your project.  Although your ultimate aim is to arrange your ideas in writing, talking them over with others can help you maintain momentum and flow, rediscover what excites you about your project, and see what others find interesting in it.  The first person to turn to is your director, who knows your project well but is still one step removed from the composition process and, therefore, able to rekindle your sense of its strengths and significance.  Certainly you can also approach your committee readers for similar feedback.  Friends and family members can be good sounding boards, even if they’ve already heard a lot from you about your various compositional ups and downs.  Also consider the benefits of sharing your project’s aims with new acquaintances in your department, across campus, and at academic conferences.  I recently traveled to a large national conference, where I presented a portion of my dissertation research, attended several panels on topics relevant to it, and took in few that were distantly related.  The trip was a brief but helpful break from the writing.  It gave me welcome chances to meet and talk about what I’m doing with grad students and faculty from other institutions.  I came back refreshed and reenergized.    

Take regular breaks.  Needed diversions from your largely indoor endeavor should be regular and clearly distinguished from your main tasks at hand.  Getting outside, especially now that the weather is turning sunnier and warmer, can do wonders for your writing, thinking, and overall enthusiasm for your project.  Such sessions of “meditation on the move,” a term writer and runner Joe Henderson has applied to recreational long-distance running, will be explored in a future post on taking your writing outside.  Look for it in the coming weeks.  Until then, happy writing!     

Meditation on the Move, Southwest of the NIU Campus

Engaging with the Writing Process

Over the past few weeks, several advanced grad students have contacted us in the Thesis Office to check on requirements and deadlines they need to meet now that they’ve passed exams and are moving on to the thesis or dissertation.  Congratulations to all who’ve reached that point!  Heading toward completion naturally entails reengagements with the writing process, a process that involves five stages: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading.  Each stage deals with important but discrete sets of activities, and it’s worthwhile reviewing them.  Noting how writers move back and forth between the stages can help you set goals and prioritize tasks as you work on the different parts of your project.

Stages of the Writing Process

Prewriting:  Many activities before (and even after) you sit down with pen and paper or face keyboard and screen are parts of prewriting.  Prewriting is likely one of the longest stages of a thesis or dissertation project.  Ideas for your project likely begin to form as you take courses, complete other program requirements, and prepare for your qualifying exam(s).  For some writers, ideas have been forming over a period of many years.  As you turn to the writing project itself, prewriting involves focused idea-generating activities like listing, clustering, freewriting, and outlining.  

Drafting:  Composing with a plan.  The word plan distinguishes drafting from activities that belong to the stage before or after it.  When you’re producing text from a plan based on outlines, notes, or texts you generated while prewriting, you’re drafting.  If instead you’re staring at a blank page and don’t quite know how to move forward, you’re still in the prior stage and need to engage in prewriting activities until you can form a plan for your draft.  On the other hand, if you’ve drafted a considerable amount of planned text and feel it’s time to make changes to it, you’re progressing to the next stage.

Revising:  Literally, looking back at an accomplished draft.  But more than just looking back, revising involves rethinking and changing the “big picture” of what you’ve drafted: reorganizing sentences or paragraphs, deleting passages, or adding new content.

Editing:  Making changes to textual details.  The phrase textual details anchors the answer to the question “What’s the difference between revising and editing?”  But in truth, revising and editing often overlap.  The nature of the changes you’re making helps distinguish the two stages.  If you’re reordering sections of a draft, adding substantial amounts of text to it, or cutting out large portions, you’re still involved in revising.  If instead you’re more concerned with word choices or word forms, fact checking, and confirming that your in-text citations match your end references, you’re editing.
 
Proofreading:  The final stage.  Proof is a publishing term for a nearly-finished piece that needs final checking before going to the printer and out for public viewing.  Final checking involves careful, methodical, line-by-line reading and correcting of textual mistakes to ensure accurate punctuation, spelling, and formatting throughout the document.

Embrace Each Stage: Advice for All Seasons

As you progress through your project, a sound piece of broad advice to take on board: embrace each stage of the writing process in nearly equal measure.  Prewriting is needed to get you started in the right direction, and drafting is essential.  But revising, editing, and proofreading are also vital to a successful finished product and deserve plenty of attention and care.  If you seek help or guidance during any of these stages, but particularly with prewriting and drafting, remember that the University Writing Center is a fantastic resource.  If you have questions or concerns with revising, editing, or proofreading, be sure to contact us here in the Thesis Office.

Good luck in all stages, happy spring break, happy writing!     

A Thesis Office with a Mission

The Thesis and Dissertation Office at Northern Illinois University is focused on student success, offering resources at every stage of the thesis or dissertation writing process, and operating on a unique peer-advocate model for informing and motivating graduate students.

Comprehensive, service-oriented thesis offices exist at a few grad-degree granting institutions throughout the nation, it’s true. But they are not common, and at many schools the thesis office is focused only on guidance through red tape and the managing of documents.  While NIU’s Thesis and Dissertation Advisor, Carolyn Law, can help students navigate the most tangled red tape the graduate school can dish out, we like to think that our holistic approach to thesis and dissertation assistance is a unique one!

Not Just Information

The Thesis Office is the definitive source of information on how to get through the process of finalizing a thesis. But we are not just here to inform. We are here to help.

Some services we proudly offer:

• One-on-one formatting and documentation assistance

• Workshops on tricky thesis issues, such as page numbers, tables, and citations

• Brown Bags and social media for meeting (online or IRL) other grad students and maintaining contact with people who understand your life situation

• Writers’ meet-ups to help you hold yourself accountable for getting the writing done

• Presentations on how to do the things we explain on the website (in case you need to see it and not just read it!)

• And coming soon: Instructional videos on the toughest formatting bugbears 

So, as you can see, we offer a lot more than just telling you what to do!  We believe that this holistic, student-centered approach to guidance throughout the entire thesis process (you can visit us whether you’ve never written a word, or if you’ve written “AAAAALL THE WORDS!”) will help graduate students complete their goals in a timely manner, saving them money, headache, life crises, and preparing them for the job market. (In fact, as a department of the NIU Graduate School, we are committed to the Graduate School’s express mission of student professionalization.)

Another key to our approach is, as I mentioned above, our peer advisors.  Two graduate assistants are always employed by the office, to help you help yourself. I am one of them! (Robyn) The other is Fred. But whether you meet me and Fred this year, or Bob and Joe two years down the road (because Fred and I plan to finish our dissertations and get out of town…), you will come into contact with graduate assistants who know your struggle, and share in it every day.  We are living through the thesis process with all its highs and lows, and we also happen to be experts on how to get it done. (As well as on formatting, grammar, documentation, and everything else you would expect from English majors). In fact, part of our job requirement is that we get it done! So, the graduate student advisor helps students feel like they are not alone and provides a great connection for networking, as well as being an approachable authority in the Graduate School.

We do think we are special. While comparable missions are expressed by the thesis offices at Purdue and UT Knoxville to name a couple, we think we are hitting it out of the park.  Indeed, we would like to see this type of thesis office mission become a ubiquitous goal, especially among state institutions that often grant degrees to students of diverse and non-traditional backgrounds, while operating on limited funding… and working with students who may have limited funds themselves!

In fact, that is certainly one font from which we draw inspiration for the mission of the Thesis Office: our diverse student body of international, non-traditional, low-income, and returning students. That said, we are here for every grad student.

As you can see, we are a Thesis Office with a mission. We want graduate students to succeed, so our goal is your goal. We want to provide you with every resource (or at least refer you to one if we don’t have it) so that you can finish your thesis or dissertation with confidence and expedience.

Come see us in beautiful Adams Hall during the week, or call or email anytime!
M-Th, 10-2
thesis@niu.edu
815-753-9405

Happy working!
--Robyn

Submission Process – Upcoming Informational Presentations

“Everything is ready to go, and I believe the formatting is perfect. I should get a degree just for that – haha!” – quotation from an NIU graduate student.

We agree with this student’s sentiment: getting a thesis or dissertation ready for submission can be a degree-worthy task! And for some of us, the same goes for submitting the thesis or dissertation electronically (at which point the document becomes an Electronic Thesis/Dissertation, or ETD).

For instance, did you know that your thesis or dissertation must be submitted with keywords for indexing? Do you know how to embed all fonts into your document before submitting to Proquest? Do you know who or what ProQuest is and does? Are you aware of your embargo options and when to use them? Are you planning to order bound copies of your project when you submit?

You must manage those tasks or choices as well as a few others when submitting your ETD. Knowing a little about the process before submitting really helps!

Our website offers detailed instructions about exactly what to do before, during, and after submission of your ETD. 

ProQuest, NIU's publishing partner for theses and dissertations, also includes many informative resources to help you through the steps of submission.

Even after looking through these materials, however, many still have questions about submitting their ETD. Carolyn Law, our Thesis Office Advisor, will demystify the entire process in our upcoming presentations, open to all NIU thesis and dissertation writers:

• The first session of “Demystifying the Submission Process” is Wednesday, June 8, from 2 – 4 PM in Founders Library room 297.
• The second session (same presentation – no need to attend both) is Wednesday, June 15, from 6 – 8 PM in Wirtz Hall, room 104.

We still have availability for either session, but we do ask that you register via email at thesis@niu.edu – please always include the name of the presentation and the date you wish to attend in any registration message.

If you can attend one of these sessions, I bet you'll feel much more comfortable with the process of submitting. If you are unable to attend, we will offer these presentations again in the fall. As you know, you may always contact your director or the Thesis Office for help as well. We hope to see you soon!

Interesting Reading

It's been awhile since I've put up a post on recent-ish articles having to do with graduate school, graduate students, or having to write your thesis or dissertation.  I recently came across a couple of pieces that I found to be good reads, so I decided to share them with you.

"The No-Fail Secret to Writing a Dissertation" by Theresa MacPhail

MacPhail tells us that the secret to writing and finishing your dissertation is -- get this -- to sit down and write. She offers essentially the same advice that I wrote about in an earlier post on writing groups:

"Sit your butt down in a chair, preferably in a quiet and distraction-free room. Disable your internet and turn your phone on silent. Come into your writing space having already done the research you need for that day's writing task. You will not be researching or looking anything up during your writing time (researching and editing are discrete tasks, believe it or not, and should be done in separate blocks)."

She recommends writing every day, five days a week, 50 minutes a day. Don't write in ten minute chunks. Such a strategy does not accommodate deep thinking when writing.

Her style is conversational, making it a quick and easy read. I like a lot of what she has to tell her audience, such as: "[T]he dissertation is best thought of as the lousy first draft of an eventual book. No one but you expects your dissertation to be perfect." My director, my boss, and my committee have all told me this exact same thing. For some reason, it sinks in when I read it in MacPhail's piece.


"Your Dissertation Begins in Your First Seminar" by Rebecca Schuman

Schuman tells us that writing a dissertation is no different than writing the all-too-familiar 20-page essay for one of your seminar courses. She outlines strategies -- researching, writing, revising -- graduate students should be using to write an essay for a seminar class, as opposed to throwing something together a couple of days before the paper is due. I don't know anyone who would -- wait a second . . . oh yeah. I may have committed this egregious sin. It is actually good advice, and it reminded me that a couple of my peers in the English department expanded some of their own seminar papers into master's theses and dissertations.

Schuman's essay is a quick read, reeks of common sense, and I like her approach to the topic -- i.e. the dissertation is not some holier than thou document; it's just a longform version of a seminar paper. It made me wish I had read this back when I first started out in the graduate program.


"Master's Degree Programs Specialize to Keep Their Sheen" by Jennifer Howard

Howard's article focuses on graduate schools and how "master’s-level programs have had to adapt to keep up with students who seek an educational experience customized to their particular goals, and who put a premium on skills and experience that prospective employers will find valuable." 

According to the Department of Education, 751,000 master's degrees were awarded during the 2012/2013 academic year. Approximately half of these degrees were in health and education. While students continue to pursue higher degrees in fields like Math, computer science, and engineering, fewer students are pursuing master's degrees in subjects like education. There are a number of reasons for this drop in enrollment.

What Howard notes is that this generation of graduate students desire more specialized degrees that will be appealing to potential employers and to be taught a diverse skill set that will enable them to have an impact on the community. This is being attributed to an "activist air" among grad students. Because they want more from their higher education, graduate school programs are readjusting in order to be more appealing to future students.  
It is a fascinating read.

One last thing:

I want to remind everyone that the next session of Write Place, Write Time is coming up -- Thursday, April 14, 2016. Once again we will be meeting at 6pm in Founder's Library. Be there or be a dodecahedron. If you are still a bit confused about the group, you can read up on it by clicking here.

As always, please feel free to share your comments, concerns, random thoughts, hopes for the future, jokes of the day, etc. on our Facebook group page, or feel free to post in the comments box below.