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!

 

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!