Coming this Spring to the Thesis Office

This term we are offering programs essential to the successful completion of your thesis or dissertation. Whatever stage you are in, from beginning the proposal to submitting the final document, we have a presentation that you should attend!

The best new thing this term? We are live-streaming some of our events to allow access to off-campus (or very busy) students!

All programs are led by experts in graduate school requirements, document formatting, and the general  woes and wonders of thesis writing! Scroll through these options and click the link at the bottom of the page to find registration details. (Most programs require registration)

Breaking Through Writer's Block and Other Obstacles

This informal discussion is designed to address common obstacles that slow or entirely halt progress in writing a thesis or dissertation. Carolyn Law, Thesis/Dissertation Advisor, will facilitate the discussion and offer practical strategies. You will leave with ideas to immediately use to break through your writer’s block. Also streaming live in the Facebook group NIU Theses and Dissertations.

 Wednesday, February 20 at 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM, Adams Hall, 103 

Writing a Dissertation in Education

This one-day program is designed specifically for dissertation writers enrolled in 799 hours in the College of Education. The Thesis Office staff will walk you through the Graduate School’s specific requirements for dissertations and cover a wide range of the most troublesome issues dissertation writers frequently encounter. There will be generous time for individual questions and one-on-one consultation. So, bring your laptop and specific questions to maximize the workshop's effectiveness.This program is the best way to ensure compliance with the Graduate School requirements. 

 Saturday, February 23 at 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM, NIU Naperville, Room 166 

Create and Nurture a Productive Thesis/Dissertation Committee

This presentation will address the process of choosing committee members, fostering strong working relationships with them, maintaining productive communications over the long haul, and managing faculty feedback to achieve steady progress toward completing your thesis or dissertation. In addition, Graduate School policies regarding committees will be reviewed. Bring your specific questions to maximize the workshop's effectiveness. 

 Monday, February 25 at 3:30 PM to 4:45 PM, Holmes Student Center, 405 

Thesis Essentials

This presentation is designed for all master's students enrolled in 699 hours. The Thesis Office staff will walk you through the Graduate School's specific requirements for theses and cover a wide range of the most troublesome issues thesis writers frequently encounter. There will be generous time for one-on-one consultation. This program is the best way to ensure compliance with the Graduate School requirements. 

 Tuesday, February 26 at 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM, Adams Hall, 103 

Dissertation Essentials

This presentation is designed for all doctoral students enrolled in 799 hours. The Thesis Office staff will walk you through the Graduate School’s specific requirements for dissertations and cover a wide range of the most troublesome issues dissertation writers frequently encounter. There will be generous time for one-on-one consultation. This program is the best way to ensure compliance with the Graduate School requirements. 

 Wednesday, February 27 at 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM, Adams Hall, 103

Demystifying the Thesis/Dissertation Submission Process

This presentation is for graduate students preparing to submit a thesis or dissertation to the Graduate School for May 2019 graduation. Carolyn Law, Thesis/Dissertation Advisor, will walk students through the steps of the process: defense, electronic submission, and final approval. 

 Monday, March 4 at 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM,  Founders Memorial Library, 297 

Problems in Theses/Dissertations: Tables/Figures/Pagination

This hands-on workshop is designed to assist thesis and dissertation writers to comply with the Graduate School requirements for tables, figures, and pagination. The Thesis Office staff will cover the specific format requirements, demonstrate helpful techniques and shortcuts in Microsoft Word, and allow generous time for individual troubleshooting and one-on-one consultation. So, bring your laptop and specific questions to maximize the workshop’s effectiveness. 

 Tuesday, March 5 at 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM, Adams Hall, 103 

Writing Your Thesis or Dissertation Proposal

Do you need to write a thesis or dissertation proposal? This interactive workshop will address typical characteristics of a successful thesis or dissertation proposal as well as 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.

 Wednesday, March 6 at 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM, Holmes Student Center, 405 

Visit our website HERE and click on your desired program on the right-hand side of our programs page. Questions? Email us at thesis@niu.edu

See you there!

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.

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!

A Quick Note on Re-Writes

What is the most frustrating part of writing my dissertation? All of the revisions.

For example: I just turned in the latest draft of chapter four of my dissertation. It was the fourth rewrite of the chapter. Do not get me wrong - with every tweak, alteration, subtle adjustment of my language, argument, organization, etc. I know the quality of my monograph improves.

Here's the problem: my eyes have begun to glaze over with all of the re-writing that I have been doing. I have devoted more time -- or at least, it feels like I have -- to re-writing and re-organizing my dissertation than actually researching and writing the original draft. I made so many changes to one of my chapters that I completely forgot my thesis for the entire dissertation. I started to wonder: Did my thinking change about the topic? Or did comments from my committee steer me in a completely different direction? (It was both)

I started doubting myself. I fell under the spell of the impostor syndrome (see blog entry from March 9, 2015). Based on all of the comments that I was receiving, I started to question whether or not I was a qualified academic. Where was all of this marginalia on essays I wrote for my graduate level courses? I always thought that I was a halfway decent writer. Was I delusional to think this? Why was I having so much trouble writing my dissertation? It got so bad that I even started to consider dropping out of the program. Why had the department not offered an one hour seminar on the theory behind organizing and writing a dissertation?

All writing is rewriting. I know this. I am in English Lit. I teach composition. Every semester I tell my students this basic fact about writing. Still . . .

When I first wrote my prospectus, I was tasked with designing a calendar of due dates for the rough draft of each chapter. In addition to this, it was recommended that I incorporate potential due dates for revisions. I was told to figure four to six weeks to write each original draft, and then plan two weeks for each revised draft. Needless to say, this calendar was thrown out. My experience for the past couple of years has been to write a chapter, and then rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite that chapter. I do not move to the next part of my monograph until after having composed a "finished" draft of a chapter -- this alteration in my writing and revising schedule became necessary as each chapter builds on the argument of the preceding chapter. Still, all of the revisions are driving me insane. Even now, with one chapter remaining, I am writing and rewriting, and I have deadlines looming over me that I am scared that I will not meet because I expect to hear my director say, "You need to do another daft." It is as if this phrase has become obligatory every time we meet. What's more is that even though a draft has been deemed "final" by my director, I still have to submit the work to the other members of my committee who may or may not -- let's be honest, they will -- have comments about how the work can be upgraded. Oh joy . . . another round of rewrites.

Just last night I was sitting in Founder's in the dissertation room on the fourth floor taking part in Write Place, Write Now -- the office's writing group for NIU graduate students working on their thesis or dissertation. For two and a half hours I worked on yet another rewrite of an earlier chapter, previously deemed "finished." At some point, I realized that my prose was getting stronger, my thinking about my topic was clearer, and I came across a random sentence that I completely forgot about, yet as it turns out the phrase supports a vital claim that I make in a later chapter.

Here's the thing: I never would have realized this had I not been compelled to perform all of these revisions. For a few minutes, I thought myself rather smart. I've since made a note to myself to highlight this point in my work, thus prompting . . . another round of rewrites.

Oy!