Planning Toward "Completing" Ph.D. ... Special Emphasis on Dissertation

Introduction

It’s a marathon… not a sprint                                                  — Unknown

I am writing this because frankly I feel I owe it to those who came after me to pass along the knowledge.  I'm sure someone told me most of this but I failed to listen and heed the advice.  I originally wrote this for Salve Regina's Ph.D. students but I felt it was time to share elsewhere.  I assume that it may apply to a greater or lesser degree depending on the nuance of your particular situation....

If you are still reading I'm hopeful that you are starting your journey down the path toward your Ph.D, if you are the casual observer hopefully it gives some context. I am writing this to share some of my experiences and recommendations so you can plan with the long view in mind and successful defense of your dissertation and graduation.

To start, the course work during the academic phase leading to the comprehensive exam will be extremely challenging in both academic rigor and time expended. Even here you can plan toward your dissertation, in part by understanding what the dissertation end product will look like.   Specifically writing your papers in the same format (e.g. font, paragraph spacing, margins, footnoting protocol, etc...).  This in particular will help if you ever develop one of them into your dissertation topic or a component of it.  This brings me back to one of the first experiences at Salve Regina, the tour of the library and its archives. Of particular note there was a special dissertation archive held within. It is important that you really take this opportunity to become familiar with the breadth and depth of research that is available there.  Understanding the structure and flow of successful examples may help you build the framework to meet the same end state. 

Why Turabian is your best friend!!!

Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden,
not a benefit.              
— William Pollard          

If your school uses Turabian (Chicago Manual) then this section is very applicable but I would argue there is sage advice for your studies if not.  The reason I am writing this is that I want you to learn from my mistake… I wish I had read Turabian more closely in the first term. There is so much more in that handbook than just how to format footnotes or write the bibliography.  Turabian is an incredible tool if you take time to review it. To paraphrase the Borg from Star Trek “You Will be Assimilated. Resistance is Futile.” Eventually you need to understand it extraordinarily well.  The earlier part of the book is critical to ensuring proper format of not only your papers but especially dissertation itself. If you work toward creating properly formatted papers during the academic phase then you will be able to focus on the dissertation and not have to completely retool the dissertation (like I did) later. I will say that my copy is very well used and covered with 3M flags, and lots of highlighting and notes in the margin.  

***Dissertation note*** I found that one particularly important aspect of learning and using Turabian early was to ensure that quotes you used in your dissertation were properly formatted before you even used them (…or not).  In my case I found myself reading Turabian on the MetroNorth on my way to and from work to unlearn bad habits. People would literally look at me with that sorry look when they saw what I was reading. Don’t be that guy.

Data Collection for your Research

The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.  
— Marcus Aurelius 

One quote from my Navy career is particularly applicable… “Different ship… different long splice…” In essence you have do it your own way. However, this is my “splice.” I started by creating an MS Word file called "Master_Quote_Log.doc" .   The file was literally hundreds of pages of the best quotes I found on my research project, properly formatted, and organized by topical area. When I went to build out my outline it was a simple case of copy and pasting the individual quotes.  By properly formatting them in one document, as a process, it minimized editing and problems with the dissertation itself, or more importantly forgetting where a quote came from.  This file also was the repository of the bibliography.

In essence this master log file was also scratch pad for my notes. I would open the review pane on MS Word, to type in comments around key thoughts related to individual quotes to keep a running tally.   This file became increasingly important as it swelled with notes and quotes. In essence I would never forget my ideas if I followed this model.  

Another reason for this one gigantic file is that it was easier to use the find function (Ctrl+F... Cmd F for you Mac users) where you could type in obscure terms and have all of the hits show on the read pane. Therefore even if you didn’t have them organized specifically you would not miss a key point or a key word.  Further it helped with making sure that you spelled the same word the same way, barring direct quotes.

While a significant part of your research may be online you will have to leverage the library. I cannot take any credit for this idea but what was particularly useful was photocopying the copyright page on a book along with individual pages you were quoting, then saving as a pdf labeled by book name into individual folders named after the book (e.g. The Somali People 1953.pdf).   This cut down the book into a limited number of pages, plus minimizing the risk I would make a mistake on a footnote or bibliographic entry.  There is nothing worse than finding an incredible quote only to find that you can’t attribute it correctly.

Comprehensives… The Write for Life…

“I love it when a plan comes together"                    — John “Hannibal” Smith

Comprehensives is not only the start of the clock but it is the culmination of all of your academic classes. I recognize every institution does this a bit differently but I felt was truly the highwater mark of my academic phase and I actually look back on the experience with pride as not everyone passes. Like every battle there is some pre-planning you can do for this particular inevitability. In the case of Salve Regina the basic format was that you must answer four questions, one is mandatory, of the nine that are proposed from the various courses. In essence each course you took will feed into the test bank of questions. I found it was easiest to start by “de-selecting” courses to focus on the ones I had a better command of. Simply put I planned on focusing on four classes that I had the highest sense of what the questions may be.   There were nine questions in my comprehensive exam.

In order to prepare it is worth looking back to each historical discussion group if you are fortunate enough to have a historical record in an online educational portal to glean the best of ideas from the discussion groups. This allowed for creating of a very comprehensive (no pun intended) data base to pull from quickly before you were issued the questions.   The University switched the online education portal a semester or so after I took comprehensives. If there is a possibility of this occurring you should consider looking at the historical record early to mitigate against loss of access.  The bureaucratic decision to change systems may undo your best efforts. 

Once you have a basic plan of action you can get together the books and other hard copy material that you may need to complete questions that you are anticipating. Having them ready to go will at least give you an 80% solution and save you time. In essence, anything you can do to minimize the time required to answer will only help you in the quest.

The Committee

The way a team plays as a whole determines its success.
You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world,  but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime.
— Babe Ruth  

It is important that you form the committee with the end goal in mind. It is critical that this process of forming the committee be made toward that end. In my opinion it is of the utmost importance that the members of your committee are people that you can work with and can take critiques from. They are going to be helping you through the process and will also be the ones who sign off on your work in the end game.  At a minimum if you think a particular individual will be a problem to work with move on or keep them as a backup. If you feel that dealing with a member of your committee is like working with Mephistopheles, or other “manner of lesser imps and demons,” then you have a serious problem. Having said that a few thoughts come to mind.

First, be sure to have some contingency planning in place if one of your committee falls out. This is especially so if there are members that have personal connections to each other that may undermine your chances of keeping team together. In my case my mentor died halfway through my dissertation, but I was fortunate enough to have another professor step in quickly. Life happens to both you and your committee.

Second, make sure you have a good handle on how to get ahold of your committee members they can disappear and be very hard to contact when you are in crisis. Make sure you collect, their multiple emails, cell phones, addresses, and even people who know how to get their attention. Frankly LinkedIn is an incredible tool for this sort of tracking.  In my case this was a painful lesson learned as one of my members retired from one institution and I didn’t know it. I had to get them to contact him. It is very scary when you are at the end game and you’re looking for someone. Check in on them routinely even if it is just to see if they are still around and talking to you. Take your time and pick the right committee rather than an expedient one or to paraphrase the Grail Knight from The Last Crusade “choose wisely.”

The Dissertation

“A good dissertation is a completed one.”
            — A Successful Doctoral Student

As mentioned before, it is worth your time to look at multiple dissertations in your university's archives or at Proquest. At a minimum it is worthwhile to scan them for structure of the chapters and which ones may act as a framework for yours. The earlier you do this the better.   There are two reasons for this, first you will realize that there are many different formats not a single prescribed method, second is that you can plan toward one style you like. This may be the eighty percent solution but it will set the stage for success and allow you to frame how to proceed in your mind’s eye.

My original mentor had a particularly cunning plan as he planned for his  dissertation, beginning with the coursework. He was able to make each paper in the individual courses dovetail into the chapter organization he selected early on. Needless to say he earned his dissertation very quickly after comprehensives.  Or so the sea story goes. However that was not my experience, although I adopted his basic chapter organization as an entering argument that was later modified with the change in committee.

In my case I found that one of the papers I worked on in one of the courses really resonated with me. What started as a “B+” paper became the nascent argument for my dissertation. I found that by continuing to build the paper into a better product I was able to submit versions of it at two separate conferences; further honing its usefulness and increasing my understanding of the topic. It was only when I was getting close to oral boards did I select this paper to be the genesis of my dissertation.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to keep organized with your dissertation management. In particular revision control, cloud basing the files, and routine saving.  To start, the best place to save the files is on the cloud.   I used Google Drive as it seemed to work seamlessly everywhere I needed it. This also prevented possible catastrophe with a failed, lost, or damaged laptop or PC. This also allowed me to work on the dissertation remotely from the office when I had a few minutes or wanted to write down an epiphany.  Additionally, you can share folders with external audiences if needed.  In my friend Laura's case this might have been a better idea given she had like 1,000 pages in her dissertation.

Everyone has heard, or been the central character, of the stories of forgetting to save a file and wasting a few hours. While I had learned this lesson on previous papers I found that making a habit of clicking Save, or typing “Ctrl+S”. on a routine basis prevented disasters of more than a few minutes. The auto-save function is only really useful if MS Word crashes, if you mistakenly close the file and forget to say “Yes” to save now you will be very disappointed at best.  Along those lines, never just create a “New” file without saving with a file name.   If you use “Document1” and forget to save it you will lose everything.

When creating your initial chapters I found it best to create an outline first. This allowed for identification of key points rather than keeping them swirling around in your brain. This also permitted seeing how the basic flow would go in the chapters. Each chapter outline was eventually used to paste in the quotes from the aforementioned master quote log in the correct order. This did two things, first it allowed for me to make the connections between quotes and second was that the formatting of the end notes was common making final revisions easier later.

With respect to revision control I labeled each file by chapter number, date, and that discrete day revision.   For example: UIC_Chapter_Two_15May2014_RevA.doc .

This was incredibly helpful if I took any length of time off from the dissertation or an individual chapter. I knew exactly the last time I worked on an element.  

Within the drive itself I “originally” organized by chapter number using numerals. By placing a number (e.g. 0, 1, etc…) at the root folder they always remained in order. This allowed for placing revised content in the right folder with all of the documentation laid out.  The example would be:

      0_Front_Matter
      1_Introduction
      2_Literature_Review
      3_Historical_Attempts_Somali_State
      4_XYZ...

While this worked well for the early drafts and to keep organized with sending information to your committee members you will eventually need to make one master document. The final semester is when I made this leap.   When you are importing each of the draft chapters into a master document do them in numbered order Front Matter --> Individual Chapters --> Annexes -->  Endnotes.   This will make it much simpler of a process.   I literally took hours to accomplish this correctly and to make sure that the imported files seamlessly flowed together in an MS Word manner.  Watch your page numbering.

Once the master version is created you can start to ensure that the true flow of the chapters is maintained throughout. It was at this point that it was more obvious where chapters didn’t necessarily work well together or you were redundant in what point you were making. In my case the dissertation went from an initial 300 pages to around 232 in the final published format.

Every day you should be working on your dissertation a little bit. Each step forward really helped in the aggregate and prevented stagnation.   If I had writers block then I would focus on finding formatting errors, if I could write I would leave the editing or later. One particularly useful technique I used was to print hard copy pages or chapters to review on public transportation. The 30 minutes each way on the MetroNorth allowed for critical content review on otherwise idle time.

Know your own speed of writing. I found that I could average one solid well thought out page per hour that had been reviewed for grammar, spelling, and content. You will have your own speed but it will help you govern your forward progress and planning for your writing time.

Finally, remember you are writing a dissertation not a book. Get to the end game then change the dissertation into a book if that is your dream. The goal is to “advance the body of knowledge” not to create a whole new discipline. Don’t let me stop you from doing that of course… if you can.

The Year You Plan on Graduating

                                       “…planning is everything…”
                     — General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower U.S. Army

This section is about timing your defense with an eye toward graduating.  The best advice I can give on the year you graduate is to print out a hard copy calendar and reverse engineer the entire academic year from commencement through today. Physically walking through this prevented any mis-understanding of when you need to meet milestones, especially with respect to delivering paperwork. It is critical that you manage this extremely well and are aware of when due dates are happening and how other events impact your assumptions on dates.  These milestones were important to identify because of a number of issues.  

First, the college is a bureaucracy and much of the paperwork has to be submitted by dates that don't necessarily coincide with an academic calendar.  For example a milestone to turn something in 60 days in advance of defense, but that date is on Christmas Eve.  Further, there may be dates that require delivery of early drafts of a dissertation etc... that fall on odd times of the year for the university.  

At Salve a major challenge was that we only could defend at specific times on specific days of the year.  For example, Fall Semester "Friday afternoons in November (excluding Thanksgiving break) Between 1 pm and 6 pm…" or "Spring Semester Friday afternoons between March 1 and April 15 (excluding Easter break) Between 1 pm and 6 pm."   However, while this may seem that you have an eight week window in each semester it doesn’t work in practice. I found that beyond the standard normal Federal holidays there were other items that affected the true number of dates you could defend. Three issues in particular played a role, first the university calendar itself, second competing organization's schedule (e.g. Business School events or campus wide academic conference), and of course your Committee’s individual schedules (e.g academic classes, leave of absences, book tours, etc..).   In my case the former two calendars cut the nominal eight dates down to four, and the latter down to only two acceptable dates. Of course you may be competing for those select spots with other candidates.   Plan ahead this is a Lord of the Flies world.  

Following a successful defense there is still paperwork to be done. In my case I was geographically at a disadvantage to hand walk the final signature page to the PhD Program Director and the Provost. I relied heavily on the staff at SRU to help me out, as well as overnight mailing with the USPS.   

Final Thoughts

“Good Night and Good Luck.”

-- Edward R. Murrow

I really wish you all the luck in your journey toward the goal you have set. Everyone has their own way of doing business as the challenge to become a Ph.D. is individual. In closing, I offer that you can contact me as well and I will do what I can or pass along free advice.