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!

Brown Bag Recap: Committee Relations

Committee Relations.  It’s a topic of great importance to grad students, and one that covers a lot of ground.  Last week in our office—on Wednesday, September 20, to be precise—we held a Brown Bag discussion on various issues that come up when working with a director (or, as some say, advisor) and committee members on a thesis or dissertation project.  Below we share some of the big takeaways.

Committee Formation

The Grad School has certain requirements concerning who can serve on a thesis or dissertation committee.  We talked about these requirements and noted you can find plenty of information on composition of committees and other facets of completing your degree via the Grad School website.  But we really wanted to talk about the process of choosing committee members, especially a director, that is, someone to chair the committee.  We noted that the form you need to submit once you line up either a thesis director or dissertation director helps to contextualize the situation.  But how to approach a professor about all this?  While running through various scenarios, both clever and clumsy, we noted that sometimes a professor will approach the grad student about working together on a project.  In any case, we firmly agreed on this: keeping in touch with faculty whose work you admire and/or whose courses you’ve taken and found especially relevant or inspiring is especially important as you progress through your first semester or year in your program.  We also agreed that once you have a director lined up, a good procedure for filling out the rest of the committee—if you’re unsure about this part of the process, which can also be tricky—is to ask your director for suggestions.  In the case of at least one participant in our discussion, the director was very glad to help with this important matter.

Working Together

Once everyone is on board, then of course you have to move forward, together.  Some tips for working with your committee members that we found especially useful:

* Plainly and simply, make a schedule.  That is, a semester-long schedule for you and your committee.  Think of it like a course syllabus.  Plan dates for completing drafts, submitting drafts, and meeting with members in the same way you would when sequencing assignments over a semester.  Distribute the schedule to your committee at the start of the term and ask if they have questions.   We considered making such a schedule to be a constructive way to help initiate and keep communication lines open with committee members at different stages of the project.  Another reason for a semester-long plan: many of us, in the course of the big endeavor, end up needing to make changes to the overall schedule of completion as outlined in the proposal.  A shorter schedule can take such changes into account and inform all committee members about them clearly.

* Send updates to your committee.  Think of these as progress reports for the benefit of all involved.  Praise yourself and your committee for work you’ve already completed.  “Look how far we’ve come,” or effusive comments of that sort, can pepper emails and/or face-to-face meetings.  We noted that by sending updates, you can also reassert your role as one of the principal actors moving the project forward.

* Use “I…” statements when corresponding/communicating about submitted work.  Such statements contrast with the all-too-easy hedging questions you might already be using with members such as “Can you please see about possibly responding to this draft within, say, a few weeks or so?” or even the slightly more direct “Please respond at your convenience.”  Better results are likely when you politely state your needs.  For example, “Our schedule has me starting on this next chapter next week, so I need your feedback on the last draft on. . . .”  You get the idea. 

What if…?

The last phase of our discussion on committee relations touched on some of the things that can go right but centered on things that can possibly go wrong.  Let’s say, for example, you need to make a change to your committee—the main thing we thought of in terms of things going wrong.  Sometimes a member leaves to take a position elsewhere, must bow out for personal reasons, or for other reasons turns out to be not quite working out.  What to do?  Our biggest takeaway here: tread lightly but firmly.  The Grad School does have procedures in place for working through committee changes and has form to use if needed for a thesis or a doctoral committee change.  We also noted that a committee change usually won’t happen all of a sudden.  Likely a series of events, signals, or impressions will lead up to it.  In the end, we reemphasized the importance of keeping lines of communication open between you and all committee members.

Final Thoughts

We have a few more Brown Bags scheduled this fall—one of them planned just for faculty and staff.  We also have more formal presentations and workshops happening over the next two weeks.  Check out the details in our previous blog entry.  Email us for more information or to sign up.  We look forward to meeting you and helping you finish your project with flourish.  Now: take a few minutes away from reading, writing, or revising…and wish your committee members a happy fall!

 

The Nontraditional Dissertation and You

Opening panels of Nick Sousanis's dissertation.

By tradition, the dissertation is a text-centered project rooted in conventions established long, long ago during the early days of print. Perhaps you agree it's high time to overturn the old ways. Perhaps you're ready to see academia break free from the shackles of tradition and embrace dissertations that depart from the monograph or that combine text with images and other media.        

The Nontraditional Dissertation

Actually, contemporary dissertators have already started clearing such nontraditional paths, and coverage of these developments makes for some interesting reading. In an entry last June, our blog touched on stories of pioneers of various sorts who have approached the dissertation in novel ways; the first story is amusing but also alarming (detailing how politicians and other officials in Russia have been buying dissertations on the black market!), whereas the second is intriguing and rather inspiring (documenting dissertations that take the form of interactive digital texts or even comic books). The advent of the comic-book dissertation was further detailed (with plenty of eye-catching graphics) in this 2014 article by Sydni Dunn at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Dunn devotes much of her piece to Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening, a dissertation in comic form that Sousanis produced at Columbia University and subsequently turned into a book, published in 2015 by Harvard University Press. Sousanis is now a professor at San Francisco State; you can read more about his work on comics as educational tools on his detailed website. Finally, you can find an abundance of relevant articles and media clips on the website of the #Alt-Academy, a place for humanities scholars to share their experiences at producing unorthodox dissertations and embarking on nontraditional academic careers.

Where Do You Fit In? 

Regardless of your field, you may wish to pursue a nontraditional dissertation. When I initially heard that term, the first thing that came to my mind was some kind of creative piece that involves more than just written text, something like Sousanis’s comic-book dissertation or a performance-based project one might produce in fields such as dance, theater, or film. But there is certainly room for nontraditional approaches in other fields such as education, engineering, or health and human sciences. In fields like these, research and post-degree goals may fit in nicely with a project comprised of stand-alone articles, reports, or digital materials (instead of a unified set of dissertation chapters).

If you're contemplating a nontraditional route for your dissertation (or thesis), here are three main points to consider as you make your plans.

1. Acceptability. How enthusiastically will your committee members accept the idea? You obviously need to get approval from your director and other readers as you prepare your project's proposal. At this stage, you'll most certainly need to inform them of any plans you may have for out-of-the ordinary methods or innovative presentations of results.

2. Marketability. How will a nontraditional project enhance your short-term and long-range career prospects? 

3. Flexibility. How willing and able are you to make changes to your nontraditional document, your methods of displaying it, or to the way it mixes textual innovations with conventional formatting requirements? Note that certain features in complex multimodal files may not display effectively on platforms like ProQuest (or the file may exceed the size limit).   

And, by the way, if you're already working on a nontraditional project (or if you've completed one), we'd be thrilled if you told us a little about your experiences in the comments section below!

Nontraditional in Form: Your ETD 

Of course, compared to a traditional dissertation or thesis from the distant or even more recent past, the document you eventually complete will be inherently nontraditional: no matter how conventional or non-digital it is in execution (whether you develop it from handwritten drafts, lab experiments, fieldwork, studio sessions, or performances), you must convert the report of your defended piece (conventional, innovative, or somewhere in between) into a PDF file that can be read and distributed electronically. Remember that we provide step-by-step guidelines for submitting your file as an electronic thesis/dissertation (ETD) on our webpage. Good luck with all your work as you progress to that final stage!

To Choose or Not to Choose … A Director, That Is!

This is the first of a two-part series on thesis and dissertation director styles and different models of working together. We hope to help those beginning their thesis or dissertation can choose their best director for the long haul. In this post, I will use the terms director, advisor, and supervisor interchangeably; in the second post, I will offer my thoughts on some possible differences in those terms’ meanings.

Lack of Direction in Choosing a Director

I don't know about you, but I never thought about a director's "style" when I began my dissertation. Some time into my project, I joined the MOOC "How to Survive Your PhD," which covered the topic. Since then, I've noticed that publications discuss director styles only briefly, if at all. In The Portable Dissertation Advisor, Miles T. Bryant talks about the importance of one’s thesis or dissertation advisor, saying that the “advisor is a key factor” in a student’s overall program (4). Then he quickly moves to topic selection and components of the study.

And I recall having a hard time choosing my dissertation director. In my department, I felt comfortable with any faculty member within or near my field of study. I held great respect for all the professors who could have directed my study. I finally chose my director based on our coinciding interests as well as her expertise in such matters, which is actually quite logical! Plus, I wrote the term paper that led to my dissertation topic in her class, so I felt she had a stake in the project. I learned along the way, however, that I got lucky in terms of my director’s style, and our compatible working styles, considering some of the unpleasant stories I've heard from students all over.

So How Should You Choose a Director?

I've found that writers on this topic mostly agree: students typically choose an advisor based on departmental hearsay. I'm wondering if this is a good method, as my experience differed from some of the stories I'd heard "around."

However, R. Murray Thomas and Dale L. Brubaker, authors of Theses and Dissertations: A Guide to Planning, Research, and Writing, state that departmental buzz is a good method of determining how a director will direct, and they list “fellow graduate students who are farther along than you are” as one of the “best sources of information about advising styles,” which includes professors “who are willing to talk about their colleagues’ modes of guidance” as the second best source (11).

Okay: maybe getting other peoples’ input on your prospective directors is the place to start, but I still wish to give you ideas on how to assess a director’s style with a bit more precision.

What to Ask Regarding Different Styles

Thomas and Brubaker say that “at one end of a monitoring scale” there are advisors who “closely control each phase of the student’s effort”; while at the other “end of the scale,” some directors may simply “tell students to work things out [… even] to finish a complete draft of the project before handing it in for inspection” (10).

Wow, that's quite a range! I’ll bet that most advisors fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, but I would definitely recommend asking your director how often and at which stage/s he or she will want to monitor your writing.

Thomas and Brubaker also point out that directors “vary in how available they are when students need them” (10), and that professors “differ in the way they offer advice and criticism” (11).

Again, these are good topics to ask prospective advisors about, though I'd guess that some professors may not agree exactly with the general opinion as to how they assess student work :)

A Link to One Supervisor's Thoughts on Best Style

And what are directors' thoughts on this issue? We should probably ask ours, but I've got one source handy. Dr. Inger Mewburn is the author of The Thesis Whisperer blog and has worked with thesis and dissertation writers for over ten years. In one of her posts called “Supervisor or Superhero,” Mewburn addresses the expectations and concerns of advisors or, to use her term, "supervisors," on this matter.

In this post, Mewburn first mildly chastises supervisors who stop learning about their role; she feels it is their duty to always improve in that capacity as in any other. Next she includes an expert’s checklist of the things that supervisors should do and know. Here, Mewburn becomes reflexive, wondering whether she herself needs more training or if those particular demands are just too great for one person. Finally, she borrows a student’s comparison of a supervisor to Rupert Giles from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer series, saying that Giles models the best director style. Read Mewburn's post to get her take on the topic.

What Can Directors Do to Help?

The Oxford Learning Institute insists that directors explore “with students their expectations of supervisory style, so that any differences in styles do not lead to miscommunication.” 

The Oxford Learning Institute further refers to a study of four main supervisory styles, which are detailed on the Australian National University website and plotted on a quadrant by coordinates of how much support and how much structure a director offers the writer (e.g., high support with low structure vs. high support with high structure, etc.). Click the ANU link if you want to learn more.

The ANU writers also believe that mentoring characteristics, such as long-term interest, enthusiasm, and sensitivity to a student’s personal and professional needs, are even more valuable than any supervisory traits are for most students. 

The Take-Away, "Writer" (?) Beware

If your prospective director doesn't bring up any of the above issues, you should. Do your research, ask questions, and try to select a director that matches your needs and style. I’m glad my director is supportive, helpful, and understanding; however, you might want an advisor with a different style. I believe that with some knowledge and probing, any “pairing” should work--at least, it should work better--when we students know a little bit more about what to expect.

Please share your ideas or stories of your experience if you'd like (no professor names, please!).