I wrote a dissertation.
I’m a doctor now.
Let’s go over how you do that.
When I started writing this, I
hadn’t finished my defense, just the paper itself, and I figured it was only
going to be a few days until that was done, so might as well wait and hell, I
can add that here too. But as I thought
about this article some more, I realized that just making it a proscriptive
document was never going to work. What,
was I going to title it “How to write a dissertation at this state school in
western New York”? Not a catchy
title. But making this more about my
journey, that was something I could do.
So is going to be a guide to writing your dissertation exactly at any
school? Probably not. But is it how I did it? For sure.
Congratulations, random PhD
student, you’ve done it! You’ve been
accepted to a program, hopefully with a fellowship, and are looking forward to
becoming a doctor. Just a few more years
of coursework until you get there.
If you’re reading this, I’ll
assume you know by now what PhD coursework is like: lots of reading, lots of
making your own ideas, lots of writing, but overall if you’re subjecting
yourself to this, you know what you’re doing.
Since you’re in a PhD program you’re clearly obsessed with some aspect
of your field, so I’ll also assume you know in general terms what issue area
you want to write your dissertation on.
Things can change through your time, and that’s both fine and good. But what you might not know is what happens
next. What do you do when you finish
with coursework?
Well, step 1 of writing a
dissertation comes about 6-9 (heh) months before you get started on writing, in
your penultimate semester of courses.
You need to ask professors to be on your committee. Typically, you’ll have one professor you work
with directly as your chair, and two others that show up for the important
events along the way. You want your
chair to be someone who you respect and preferably someone who likes you. Also, someone whose work is at least tangentially
related to the stuff you’re interested in.
Go to them, tell them you want them to be your chair, and explain what
you’re interested in writing on. They
might want you to write them a page or so on exactly what you’re thinking
about, but don’t do that immediately.
Just talk to this professor first.
They’ve done this sort of thing before, you haven’t, so they’re probably
used to hearing graduate students ramble about their interests. Just have an idea and be willing to accept
whatever they suggest because it’s gonna change, like, at least twice more.
Ok, that’s done, and you hunted
down two more professors who like you and you like and are tangentially related
to your field (I cannot emphasize how important it is that there’s mutual
liking here, I passed on one professor for another even though the first was
far more related to my interests because I didn’t like the former and was
friends with the latter). They just need
to be informed, hey, this is a thing, the chair is this person, we’ll be in
touch. What next? Next, you need to register for your
comprehensive exams. For the two
subfields your focus is in, you need to pass a big-ass exam that determines if
you know what you’re talking about.
There’s probably some form that lists all the details for your specific
case, but here’s the gist: you need to have taken a bunch of courses for each
subfield (which can overlap), a bunch of prerequisite courses, and at some
point you need to have written a whole ass paper. As long as you got like a B+ in the course
and wrote a whole paper for it with intro, theory, data, conclusion it should
be fine. You’ve probably written like 2
of those so far. Just get whichever
professor graded it to sign a form saying it didn’t suck.
Comprehensive exams are gonna
suck. There’s no way around that. You’ve got 48 hours for each one to write 20
pages in total on three different questions.
You’ve got some leeway in what you write about but these are going to be
pretty rote. There’re a lot of reading
lists out there for various fields as to what you should have read before
writing your comps. Your school probably
has one. Look over your school’s, but
also those from other schools too, since professors like it when you cite works
that aren’t on your reading list. By
this time in your PhD life you probably know how to read articles fast, so do
that, take a lot of notes, and work together with any other students in the
same boat. You’ve done like 3 years of
work by now, so you are prepared, but it’s a lot of effort and stress. I’ve known people who developed hives, people
who had breakdowns, hell I had to study for and write mine when covid
started. That was fun. But it’ll get done and you can do it.
You might also have to teach a
class to get your PhD. I would 10000%
recommend doing that either during the summer after your comps, the semester
before your comps, or some other time that’s not while writing your
dissertation. Teaching while having to
write a dissertation is not a pleasant experience. It can be done, but having done it, would not
recommend.
You passed all your comprehensive
exams, wrote your qualifying paper to even be able to do those, maybe taught a
course, and you passed all your other courses.
Great work. Now the real work
begins. And no, I’m not joking,
everything you’ve done to this point, including your comps, is pretty easy
compared to what comes next. Writing a
dissertation is fucking hard. But again,
you’re a PhD student, you can do it.
The first step for actually
writing your dissertation is, surprise, more reading! Based on what you were interested in writing
about and what your advisor recommends, go and find recent articles or books
written on the topic and dig in. You’re
looking for two things here: first, what are people writing about, or more
specifically, what AREN’T they writing about, because that’s what you can write
on, and second, who they’re citing. See
someone cited twice? Go and read them. Repeat.
And repeat. You ideally want to
have somewhere between 70 to 100 articles/book chapters/general literature
stuff in a folder that you’ve at least skimmed and understood the main points.
What is this all moving
towards? Your proposal! To actually write a dissertation, you need to
argue to your committee that you have something that you can actually write
about. This is typically going to
involve you writing a 20ish page paper listing what people have talked about in
the past on your topic and what you think you can bring to the field. Remember, that after you get your PhD, you
are at least a nominal equal to the professors on your committee, so they want
to make sure that you’re not an idiot who is going to phone this in and not
actually contribute to the literature.
People might end up citing your dissertation, after all. I cited those of others.
For the proposal, it’s most
important to have a firm knowledge of what others are doing and what you can
offer. You’ll have a lot of discussion
on that literature (that you can later port to your dissertation’s literature review,
hooray!) and what’s missing from it.
You’ll then want to talk about what the theory for dissertation might
look like, some sample hypotheses that you’ll use to test that theory and
conclude with how your chapters might look and a timeline. Your timeline will be too short.
In your writing, you’ll likely
have it reviewed by your advisor and they’ll offer corrections and parts where
you need to be more specific. HOLD ONTO
EVERY WORD THEY SAY LIKE IT IS GOLD AND DO EVERYTHING THEY ASK. They have likely seen students writing these
things dozens of times before, you have not.
Do what they tell you and you’ll be better off for it.
Once you do the corrections your
advisor tells you to do, you’ll contact your committee to set up a meeting for
you to present your proposal and for them to tear it to shreds. Not really, they’re there to help it get
better, but if you’ve got undiagnosed anxiety and depression it sure might feel
like that. You’ll choose a date, send
them the proposal document, and you’ll make a powerpoint or something to
present your ideas.
How good is your proposal going
to be? Not good. Likely closer to shit. And that’s perfectly fine, this is the first
step in the process, you are throwing an idea at the wall and seeing what
actual scholars think about it. It’s
likely you actually have no idea what you’re talking about, and you might be
barely on the edge of comprehensibility.
Take this slide from my dissertation proposal, for instance.
I don’t even know what I’m
talking about here. “Bargaining
approaches” is a phrase I used that actually doesn’t mean anything because any
approach to IR that isn’t war is bargaining.
I thought it just meant negotiating and talking, not literally
everything. Bargaining ended up being
the focus of my dissertation and I didn’t know what any of it meant at the
time.
And let’s compare that to the
same slide from my dissertation defense:
Just a tad different. But despite me clearly not knowing what I was
talking about in the first slide, the DNA is still present in the second. My hypotheses too had a lot of links despite
changing substantially. Trust in
yourself and your advisor. You’ve done
3+ years of coursework, you know what you’re doing and what you’re interested
in.
So you’ve done your proposal
presentation, and success! You can
continue on your path of writing. Oh
wait, did I say writing? Oops, I meant
reading again. Another 50-100
articles! These numbers aren’t jokes, by
the way. My dissertation literature
folder has over 200 files in it, and some of those are folders with more files
inside. Are you going to end up citing
all of these? No, but it’s important to be sure you’re familiar with what
everyone important is saying in regards to the field you’re studying. This reading is going to be stuff to refine
your theory and argument. What exactly
are you arguing? What does the
literature say about that? Where are the
actual holes that you can write in? You
may have read a lot of this stuff in the past, but now you’re reading it with a
new focus: how do you apply this to your dissertation?
There’s a few more things that
you should read before starting this, and that’s formatting and style
guides. Because, you see, academics are
pretentious assholes. And what pretentious
assholes love to do is gatekeep people who don’t subscribe to the strict
standards that they set. So you need to
make sure that what you’re writing is precisely up to code. Your field might have some other ones, but
the ones that I recommend for social sciences are Turabian’s A Manual for
Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Strunk’s Elements
of Style, and good ol’ KKV, Designing Social Inquiry. Read em, make sure your writing aligns to
what they say, and the corrections you’ll have to do will be much fewer in
number later down the road.
Typically you’ll do this reading
in the month or two after your presentation, and then you’ll start writing for
real this time. You’ll start off with
your literature review since it’s A: the easiest, and B: what your advisor is
going to tell you to do, so that they can make sure you are going over the
appropriate literature and using it to fine-tune your arguments. This will end up being your 2nd
chapter, and be about 20 pages long.
You’re going to run into the
question of length when writing, but I’d advise you not worry about it. Your dissertation will be as long as it needs
to, and you won’t lack for stuff to write about. However, do keep in mind people have to read
it at the end, so do try and keep it below about 200 pages. That’s not my rule, that’s Schelling’s, and
he was really smart. Mine ended up being
about 130 of actual text and then 20 more of tables, front matter, and works
cited. Your milage may vary.
Back to the writing! You might have a meeting with your advisor
over the lit review, you might not.
Eventually they’ll read it, but you might have to write another chapter
first which they’ll read and review together.
This will be your chapter 3, which will include your theory and
hypotheses. This is what you are
arguing, so make sure that it’s what you want to argue. Or what your advisor wants you to argue.
*Aside*
I had a weird start to how my
dissertation went. I did the reading as
discussed above, but didn’t read the right stuff or get the right information
out of said stuff at first. My first
meeting post-proposal was pretty disastrous, I had prepared a powerpoint with
all sorts of info from the articles I had read and... that wasn’t at all what
my advisor wanted. Whoops.
Additionally, it was at around
this point that what I was writing my dissertation on wasn’t what I had started
out wanting to write about and was much more focused in a direction my advisor
was pointing. I’m not sure if this is a
good or bad thing, but it was something that happened, and it worked out in the
end, so, yay? That’s something that
you’ll probably have to deal with though, so make sure you know that either
it’s happening and you’re ok with that, or that you’re able to argue why you
should be doing things your way.
*End Aside*
These first two sections are both
the easiest and the hardest. Easiest,
because all this information is stuff you know know. You’ve been doing this research and thinking
about your topic for at least 6 months now, so it’s all in your mind and you
know what you need to put on the page to adequately explain what your field
looks like and why you’re doing this.
Hardest, because you’ve never written a dissertation before. You might know other people who have done
this, or have been to presentations on how the writing process goes, but until
you’re actually writing there’s a lot you are going to be unsure of. But again, you have written literature
reviews before, you know what your theory is, you’ll do fine.
After this writing, which will
take about two months, you’ll send these chapters to your advisor. They’ll go over them and do a bunch of
suggestions for corrections and edits.
They’ll typically take two weeks to do this, so during this time, you
should take a little bit of a rest. Do
no writing. By this time, you’ll likely
be hitting 6+ months of work, so if you need to do something to feel productive
work on your datasets or case studies or something, but don’t do any
writing. You need breaks and you’re not
sure what exactly your advisor is going to say you need to fix, so don’t worry
yourself too much about more writing at this point.
Once your advisor finishes the
reading, you’ll likely meet and you’ll have the corrections to go over, and
will move on to the next section, your data and studies. What sort of study you’re doing is going to
be wildly different depending on your research, so the only advice I’ll give
here is make sure that you have the data you need. Do NOT try and make your own dataset at this
point. You can’t do it. Don’t try.
At the absolute most, you can edit existing datasets to fit what you
need.
This part will be tricky. My recommendation is to shoot for a defense
date in the end of Summer, since you won’t have to pay anything more and will
have more time, but if everything is going super smoothly, you might be able to
finish by the end of Spring.
Alternatively, you might have to postpone for the following Fall
semester. It is really going to depend
on how much additional work you need to do on your first two chapters and how
much work your data and analysis is going to need. For me, I was doing mixed methods, so while I
tried to get everything done by the end of May, I needed a lot of work and my
advisor and I agreed that we should do that.
Also, if you go super hard, you
are going to be burnt the fuck out. It
is going to be bad. Which makes sense,
you’ve been grinding at this, maybe another job, your actual TA job, and
whatever else is happening in your life for a while now. Find time for whatever coping mechanisms and
therapy you need, because if you don’t, your body and mind will find the time
for you. And that’s not a good
look. If you’ve got insurance, get
whatever anti-anxiety and antidepressant meds you can, since that shit will
mess you up. This is going to happen at
some point in the process. You need to
make sure you’ve got a plan for keeping it at bay or making sure you can deal
with it when it happens. Healthy or not,
permanent or temporary, whatever works.
It’s your life, do what you need.
So every thing is gone over, you
finished it all up, you’ve gone over shit with your advisor. You’ll have one last round of corrections and
then it’ll just be finishing up: your intro and conclusion. Your intro will need to detail the why of your
interest in this topic, what questions you asked, and how you’re answering
them. This can all be lies. You might be like me and think, “damn nukes
are cool I wanna write about those” and make up some research questions at the
end. Or you might be a nerd with actual
questions, that’s your deal. Regardless,
that goes in the intro, then you go over all your chapters and discuss what’s
gonna happen in them. The in your
conclusion you’ll do the same thing, but shorter, and then discuss what future research
you or others should do. This will be
the easiest chapter to write. Intro,
slightly harder. You’ll send these in,
do the last corrections, and that’ll be it.
That’s right, you’ll have written
a dissertation.
At this point, you’ll have to set
up your defense date, but that’ll get sorted out relatively easily. My advisor told me some great advice: ask
when people AREN’T available during a specific period, then work from them.
Your defense itself will seem more
stressful than it is. If you can, do it virtually
since that will make your life significantly easier. Also, those of your committee too, they
probably like their house/office as much as you like yours. The defense itself will be a big powerpoint
presentation on your entire dissertation. I assume you know how to do that. If you can do it virtually, write a
script. For the entire thing. Look, you’ve got your computer, use it. If you can’t do it virtually, uh, good
luck. Go to someone else’s and do whatever
they did. My advice is nil here. But you’ll do your presentation, if there’s
an audience they’ll ask softballs about your data, your committee will ask hardballs
about your methods and why you chose the theory you did, you’re the expert so
these can all be answered. They’ll talk
in a separate room, call you back in, and give the verdict.
And that’s it. If you did everything written here, you’re a doctor
now. Congrats. You earned it.
Hopefully this helped get you
through the last 2ish years of your PhD.
If you are reading this and wondering if you should get a PhD, my
advice: no. If this is a question you
have to ask the answer is no. If you’re
truly obsessed, you’ll ignore me telling you no and do it anyway. But if you have doubts, get a job, do
something else. You need to be obsessed
to do this. It is not a path for people
who are normal.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed
reading this. If you didn’t, uh, ok
thanks for reading anyway I guess?
Fin
