Committee Coordination...Together or Apart

While working on your thesis or dissertation, you may occasionally find yourself out of regular communication with your director and/or committee members.  Several factors can lead to such a situation.  Examples: a committee member goes away on a sabbatical, someone receives a distant research fellowship, or you or others need to conduct field work away from campus for a while.  

But even during phases of separation, you still work on a team.  To borrow thoughts and phrasing from Robert Frost, you and your committee work together, whether together or apart.  (Read the original thoughts and lines in Frost’s “The Tuft of Flowers” here.)  

In previous posts, we’ve covered various aspects of forming and working with committees.  For general thoughts on committee relations, see this post from September 2017.  For details on different types of project directors and their working styles, see this one from April 2016.  And to read about approaches to choosing a director, check out this entry from March 2016.  In today’s post, we offer ideas on coordinating with committee members—whether nearby or far apart—during the middle and final stages of your project.  We also add a few thoughts for those of you who may need to reconnect with one or more members after an extended period of separation. 

In Progress: Staying in Touch

In the Thesis Office, we strongly recommend that thesis or dissertation writers regularly update committee members on their progress.  In-person updates are nice, but, as noted above, not always possible.  Consider how you might be able to adopt or adapt the following approaches to updating:

Office Visits:  If you and a committee member haven’t seen each other in a while, such a meeting can be especially rewarding.  Even a brief face-to-face chat can be meaningful and uplifting.  If possible, arrange to stop by a day or so before or after you’ve completed an important chapter draft or other project milestone.  

Classroom and/or Lab Visits:  Similarly, catching up with a committee member while that person is engaged in teaching or research can be constructive.  If possible, arrange to audit a class session or to observe lab activities that touch on interests or concerns you’re currently working on.

Group Email:  A commonsense way to integrate progress reports into your email practices, but one worth reviewing here, is to include each committee member as a recipient when you send out a “major” email message.  Examples include (1) any message with a revised chapter attached for review, (2) any message in which you respond to feedback on a chapter or chapters that all members have seen, and (3) any message in which you review or confirm procedures or scheduling matters that your director has asked you to follow.  

Nearing Completion: Bringing Everyone Up to Speed

As your document grows and its parts come together, consider the following ways to communicate its holistic development to all members your committee.  

Share a Folder Online:  Uploading files to a cloud service is not just a matter of safe computing.  Doing so can also make your large document easier to access and evaluate.  Share a folder on OneDrive or Dropbox with your committee members.  When the time comes, you can upload your combined file to this shared folder.  (The combined file may be rather large for email, especially if it contains images and/or other graphics.)  Your committee members can then conveniently open and experience your whole document in one piece.  

Share a List of Author’s Notes:  If you’re like me, as you make progress, you compile notes of various kinds concerning the text you’re making.  Some notes emerge from additional reflections on past feedback from committee members.  Others develop as the overall document starts to take shape.  When you approach your project’s end, share a list of author's notes with all committee members, via group email or the online shared folder.

Final Thoughts

About that Near-Final Document:  Over the past few weeks, a few student writers have contacted us to ask if their thesis or dissertation needs to have all front matter—including abstract, acknowledgments, and dedication—complete and properly formatted before their oral defense.  In short: the Grad School has no rule on this.  (Note: if your director wants these parts included, then of course you need them.)  But, at minimum, your defense document should feature coherent page numbering throughout so that committee members can easily refer to parts of the text during the defense examination.  Note that, as shown on the Results of Oral Defense form, your examination can result in one of two kinds of “Pass”: (1) a pass requiring no further revisions or corrections or (2) a pass requiring such changes.  Regardless of the kind of pass received, the document will need to contain all needed parts and meet all Graduate School formatting requirements before it can receive final approval for graduation.

As always, if you have questions about formatting or submitting your final document, be sure to contact us here at the Thesis Office.  Good luck...and happy committee coordinating!

Images

Working Together Teamwork Puzzle Concept by Lumaxart: Flickr.

Robert Frost Stamp: Wikimedia Commons.

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!

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...
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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

Re-reading Your Dissertation

I read my primary texts; I collected and annotated my secondary sources; I composed an outline; I reflected on my subject matter; I procrastinated; I became frustrated with myself for procrastinating, which only bred more procrastination; I wrote my dissertation one chapter at a time; I met with my committee to discuss my chapters; I grew frustrated and despondent after meeting with my committee, which contributed to additional procrastination; I reflected on my own academic abilities to finish my dissertation (a.k.a procrastination); I revised my chapters, again and again and again; finally, I heard the following magic words: This work is defensible.

It has been a long journey, and it has been tiring. My graduate school experience started out as a part-time experiment: I took two evening classes, spent my days reading my homework assignments out loud to my kids while coaxing them to take a nap, sat in the basement and wrote papers late into the wee hours of the night, and somehow managed to eke out passing grades. The next thing I knew I was a full-time student, teaching the occasional undergraduate class, and padding my resume with conference presentations. Now, as I approach the finish line, I recall one last piece of advice, previously alluded to in an earlier blog post: Re-read your dissertation before your defense.

Your response may be, "What? Why? Don't be silly. I've been writing the thing long enough that I know it backwards and forwards."

You may know your thesis and your supporting arguments like the back of your hand, but that does not mean that you have perfect recall of the contents. During the defense, you will be asked for specific page references concerning such-and-such argument or some secondary source. Why did you decide not to include some specific piece of research? a committee member may ask. If your response is, "But I did," then they will want to know precisely where it is cited in the body of your work. The thing that most worries me is a committee member reading aloud a passage from my text and I have no memory of writing those words. In fact, while I have been revising my dissertation, I stumbled across passages that I do not even remember writing - most likely, because I wrote the chapter long ago.

Once your committee has made the decision that your thesis or dissertation is ready to be defended, you will be expected to put together some sort of presentation -- Speak to your committee and/or members of your department about what all is involved in such a presentation as requirements may differ from department to department. While you are putting together this presentation, my advice is: re-read your thesis or dissertation. You are not proofreading the work one last time, therefore do not read it as though you are the author. Read it as though you are the target audience; read it with fresh eyes; read it in order to familiarize yourself with the content; read it as you would a piece of secondary research that contributes to your field of expertise; read it one last time as you make marginalia that will help you prepare for the defense.

When you are done re-reading it, give yourself a pat on the back. After all, you wrote it. That was the hardest part.