Dissertation Books:How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation (Sternberg, 1981) - A

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This article contains a powerpoint presentation prepared by Timnah Card about a Thesis preparation book:

  • Sternberg, D. (1981). How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation. New York: St. Martin's Griffin.

Contents

[edit] Presentation

How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation
by David Sternberg
St. Martin’s Press, 1981

PowerPoint presentation prepared by Timnah Card, Spring 2005

A Finnish proverb goes, strong sisu (guts) will help get a person even through a gray rock. Now I chant “Sis-u, sis-u,” inside my head as I lug myself up those weary hills toward the end of a long run.
—Richard Rogin, in The Runner Magazine

[edit] How to Use This Book

“The chapters constitute a dual-track, psychological-emotional and practical ‘guidebook,’ with the writer traveling shoulder-to-shoulder with the candidate along all the sequential stations of the dissertation course.”
—p. 23

[edit] Table of Contents

  • The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer
  • The Great Decision: Reordering Priorities and Choosing a (Viable) Topic
  • Building a Dissertation File: Philosophy and Construction Code
  • The Dissertation Proposal
  • The Unfolding Dissertation: Researching It and Writing It
  • The Unfolding Dissertation: Diplomatic Relations with Your Committee
  • Down in the Dissertation Dumps: How to Get Out
  • The Dissertation Defense
  • Beyond the Dissertation: Surviving It and Professionally Exploiting It

[edit] Chapter 1: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer

“The status of ABD . . . is the critical one in American graduate education. Since the 1960s its poignancy, sometimes permanency, has been growing. We all seem to know someone—a friend, relative, spouse, colleague—who is either filled with apprehension confronting the task fresh after completed course work or bogged down for years in stop-again, start-again efforts to finish. . . .
“No such prolonged crisis confronts the doctoral candidate in hard/life sciences or ‘professional degree’ programs, where a full dissertation . . . is not required. It is in the social sciences, education, humanities and letters disciplines that people have their lives disrupted . . . by a dissertation-writing experience.”
—p. 1

[edit] What is a full dissertation?

A thesis which requires:

  • Exhaustive library review/study of related literature
  • Construction of a researchable problem, and related hypotheses, which makes some original contribution to the field
  • Experimental work and/or fieldwork with subjects and/or groups
  • An elaborate methodology for analyzing the data collected
  • A lengthy, literary write-up, analysis and discussion of the results of such experimental work or fieldwork
  • A formal, oral defense of the dissertation before a committee.

[edit] A Long-Standing and Poorly Understood Problem

  • The ABD has developed a level of status within the profession which enables the obtaining of some teaching jobs
  • 50,000+ ABDs face the dissertation each year
  • About 20,000 earned doctorates are awarded each year
  • If numbers are consistent year to year, at any given time there are 30,000 ABDs nationwide, many of whom will never finish
“Not to finish is practically to guarantee a years-long, if not lifelong, mood of a flawed or somehow incompleted life, where the ABD is constantly explaining/rationalizing to others (e.g., university employers, colleagues, friends, spouses, lovers, family) and to himself just why he didn’t finish. The emotional energy expended in often decades-long apologizing and soul-searching is incalculably debilitating and humiliating.”
—p. 4
“American society is not aware, excepting personal acquaintance of particular ABDs, of the almost larger-than-life trials, fortitude, despair, courage and even heroics experienced in writing a doctoral dissertation.”
—p. 2

[edit] The Dissertation Writer Adrift

  • Fear
  • Agony
  • Torture
  • Guilt
  • No end in sight
  • Indefinitely postponed gratification
  • “Ruining my life”
  • “I’m drowning in it”
  • Anxiety
  • Boredom
  • Hate
  • Despair
  • Depression
  • Humiliation
  • Powerlessness

[edit] “The truth of the matter

. . . is that, although the American educational system is characterized at almost all levels by ‘support systems’—remedial programs, tutors, counselors, pass/fail options—for students unparalleled in the world, virtually the entire support structure vanishes for doctoral candidates undertaking a dissertation. . . . ”
—p. 13

[edit] “Even graduate students at the top of their classes

. . . and feeling confident and quite highly motivated right through completion of course work [often] describe their realization that the dissertation does not necessarily follow smoothly as ‘a hell of a shock,’ or ‘the sky falling in,’ or ‘a whole new ball game.’”
—p. 15

[edit] Specific Features of the ABD Problem

  • Dissertation anomie
  • Faculty unreliability
  • Lack of graduate student community
  • Candidates’ unpreparedness

[edit] Dissertation Anomie

(Etymology: French anomie, from Middle French, from Greek anomia lawlessness, from anomos lawless, from a- + nomos law, from nemein to distribute) :

social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values; also : personal unrest, alienation, and uncertainty that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals

—www.merriam-webster.com

[edit] Faculty Unreliability

  • Faculty are rewarded for their own publications, not for shepherding graduate students through their dissertations.
  • Many graduate students don’t successfully complete the dissertation. Will you be one of them? Will faculty time and interest invested in your project pay off?

[edit] Lack of graduate student community

Four principal factors determine how much or how little student community, solidarity and support a given doctoral program will exhibit:

[edit] Candidates’ unpreparedness

  • Course requirements and the courses themselves often don’t turn out fully trained researchers
  • Students have never before attempted a major research/writing project and do not understand what that entails
  • Students don’t know what to do to prepare themselves

[edit] Chapter Two: The Great Decision—Reordering Priorities and Choosing a (Viable) Topic

  • Cost Accounting the Dissertation
  • Some Wrong Reasons for Writing the Dissertation
  • The Right Reason for Undertaking the Dissertation
  • Getting into the Driver’s Seat of Your Dissertation
  • Making the Dissertation a Top Priority in Your Life
  • Friends and Lovers During the Dissertation: Differential Association
  • Plotting Your Differential Dissertation Associations
  • Of Work and the Dissertation
  • Setting Up a Dissertation Office
  • Dissertation Office Hours
  • Choosing a Dissertation Topic

[edit] Some Wrong Reasons for Writing the Dissertation

Reasons which generally won’t sustain a candidate through the project:

  • “I’ve got an exciting topic.”
  • “If I don’t write the dissertation, I’ll have wasted years of study and money.”
  • “Everybody’s expecting me to write it and get my doctorate.”
  • “I’m not quitting this one too.”

[edit] The Right Reason For Writing the Dissertation

“The candidate is deeply interested in his [or her] specific discipline and has every intention of pursuing a career within the field immediately upon (or at least soon after) completion of the thesis.”
—p. 34

[edit] Plotting Differential Associations

  • “List your key statuses, and with whom you deal within them on a regular basis.
  • “Evaluate each personal, family, student and work association (a) in terms of whether it helps, hurts, or is neutral to dissertation progress, and (b) in what specific ways.
  • “For each association map out a strategy for maximizing or minimizing your contacts (not merely on a numerical dimension, but in terms of emotional investment) during the dissertation writing. . . .” —p. 39
“ . . . Make the exercise an ongoing one; every couple of months reevaluate both the nature of the associations and how well you have managed to deal with them in the interests of moving ahead with your dissertation.” —p. 39

[edit] Setting Up a Dissertation Office

The office should be:

  • In a separate room or place
  • Devoted to dissertation matters

Office hours should consist of at least two hours daily, five days a week.

[edit] Choosing a Dissertation Topic

“Contrary to a good deal of faculty and student mythology, the dissertation topic per se is at best a secondary factor both in determining whether a candidate finishes and the troubles he experiences at different stages of research and writing. . . .
. . . No matter how ‘exotic’ the topic, . . . all dissertations run into a predictable, common set of both ‘internal’ problems, from hypothesis construction to sample issues, methodological difficulties, analytic contradictions and ‘external’ difficulties connected with getting several faculty members to agree upon not only the topic itself, but from what perspective and in what degree of emphasis and detail it should be pursued.”
—pp. 47-48

[edit] Evaluating a Dissertation Topic

  • Is it researchable?
  • Does it make a contribution to the field?
  • Is it original?
  • Will it blow up in your face? Will it come back to haunt you?
  • Fate and the Dissertation Topic
  • Other avenues to choosing a topic

[edit] Is it researchable?

  • Are necessary data sources available? Will they continue to be available throughout the course of the project?

[Timnah suggests corresponding questions: “Am I able to obtain the training necessary to complete this project in a professional and timely manner? Would this project be more doable after I have won my doctorate?”]

[edit] Does it make a contribution?

  • This is not a “quickie” paper to be knocked off in a few months.
  • This is the first large work in a candidate’s career.
  • This is not the candidate’s tour de force or magnum opus. (Those come twenty or thirty years later.)
  • While there are no exact rules, guidelines can be established through review of recent successful dissertations in your program.

[edit] Is it original?

“After perusal and study of related literature, and appraisal of the scope and ambition of other recent theses in the field, do I find a hole, a gap, a missing link that my topic can contribute to plugging, bridging or forging?”
—p. 49

[edit] Will it blow up in your face?

“A topic can qualify as researchable, contributory, and sufficiently original and still be rejected . . . as potentially dangerous to your career, even, upon occasion, to your personal safety.”
—p. 50
“The dissertation, and doctorate it confers, is simply too pivotal and difficult a career step to make it any more problematic by introducing gratuitous elements of risk and anxiety. If one is thick-skinned, it is fine to pursue controversial research after obtaining at least some corona of protection and status which the doctorate confers.”
—p. 51

[edit] Fate and the Dissertation Topic

  • José Moreno was both prepared and lucky to identify the topic of his dissertation-turned-book, Barrios in Arms: Revolution in Santo Domingo.
  • In October 1964 Moreno arrived in Santo Domingo with the intention of writing his dissertation on structural anomie in formal Dominican organizations.
  • With the revolution the next spring, all those organizations were in disorder, so he studied the revolution instead!
“This highly unlikely turn of dissertation events only serves to underscore the point that particular topics are much less crucial to the thesis decision and writing process than a general competence grounded in the theory and methods of one’s discipline.”
—p. 51

[edit] Other avenues to choosing a topic

  • Expand your master’s thesis.
  • Read other recent successful proposals and dissertations in your department to determine acceptable standards of contribution, originality, competence, and literary worth.
  • With permission, take a spinoff from a professor’s mainline grant data pool.

[edit] Discuss program dissertations that appeal to you with their authors

“What you will get from the successful recent candidate in your program is an insider’s story of everything from the mechanics of the thesis, to the operation of the stages of the dissertation course, to (depending on your relationship with the new finisher) personality profiles on various committee members.”
—p. 53

[edit] Chapter Three: Building the Dissertation File

  • Dissertation Log
  • Choosing a Dissertation Topic
  • Timetable for Proposal, Experiment, Fieldwork, Statistical Workup of Data, Write-up, Defense
  • Relations with Proposal-and-Dissertation Committee Members
  • Comparative Proposals and Dissertations from Other Successful (Recent) Candidates in the Program
  • The Dissertation Proposal
  • Contacts and Arrangements for Subjects and/or Groups in your Experiment or Fieldwork
  • Troubleshooter File
  • Serendipity/Inspiration File
  • Devil’s Advocate File
  • “Ventilation” File
  • “How’m I Doing?”
  • Dissertation Group File
  • Successive Drafts of Dissertation Chapters
  • Master Review/Progress File
  • Index File
  • The File and a Tape Recorder

[edit] Chapter Four: The Proposal

  • Getting into the Proposal Without Delay
  • Why Is the Proposal So Important?
  • The Proposal as Topic-Decision Process
  • The Proposal as Contract
  • Toward a Contract Model of the Dissertation Proposal
  • The Proposal as “Mini-Dissertation”
  • An Accepted Proposal as Over the Top
  • What to Do about an Inviable or Failed Proposal?
  • The Proposal as Establisher of “Diplomatic Relations” with Thesis-Supervising Faculty
  • Choosing a Dissertation Adviser: Minimum Qualifications
  • The Dissertation Incest Taboo
  • The Size of the Adviser Pool
  • Choosing an Adviser: Additional Desirable Qualities
  • Choosing the Rest of the Proposal/Dissertation Committee
  • What Should a Dissertation Proposal Look Like?
  • Writing Style
  • Review of the Literature
  • Rationale for, Significance, and Implications of the Study
  • Statement of the Problem and Hypotheses
  • Methodological and Statistical Design

[edit] Chapter Five: Researching and Writing the Dissertation

  • Collection of Data
  • How Much Data to Collect?
  • Analysis and Interpretation of Findings from the Data
  • Statistical Significance
  • Descriptive Versus Analytic (Power) Statistics
  • The Bogy of Disconfirming Evidence
  • “My Own Data’s Coming Out Wrong”
  • The Computer: To Use or Not to Use?
  • Writing the Dissertation Chapters
  • What Chapters Should the Dissertation Contain?
  • Outlining the Chapters
  • When to Show Chapters to Faculty?
  • In What Order Should the Chapters Be Written?
  • Writing Versus Submission Order
  • Finding and Keeping a Suitable Typist

[edit] Chapter Six: Diplomatic Relations

  • Issues with the Committee as a Whole
  • Keeping in Touch Down at the Department
  • Being Pulled in Different Directions
  • Resolution Through Role-Set Analysis
  • Faculty Demands for Unanticipated Revisions
  • Issues with Individual Committee Members
  • The “Young Turk” Professor
  • The “Career ABD” Professor
  • The Sadistic Professor
  • The Sexist Professor
  • The “Hamlet-Complex” Professor
  • The “Passive-Aggressive” Professor
  • The Jealous or Envious Professor
  • Problem Professors, Candidates’ Problems and the Psychoanalytic Subculture

[edit] The “Panzer Division” Analogy of an Unfolding Dissertation

“The dissertation army is composed on one’s various major files. The goal of the struggle and campaign is to reach completion and defense. . . . [Some] divisions move ahead of or straggle behind others.” —p. 153
DC = Data collection T = Theoretical elaboration SA = Statistical analysis CM = Contact with committee members
“As ‘general’ of all the ‘divisions’ of the file, the candidate must keep deploying and repositioning divisions and maintaining supply lines (i.e., here input into various files), so as to end up with the following alignment of the dissertation army: . . .” —p. 154

[edit] Chapter Seven: The Dissertation Dumps and How to Get Out

  • The Dissertation Wave
  • Dissertation Dumps? Normal or Pathological?
  • A Classification of Dissertation Anxieties and Depressions
  • Doubts about the Dissertation Itself
  • Bewildered and Negative Feelings about Oneself
  • Negatively Affecting Relationships with Others
  • Reification, Alienation and the Dissertation-as-Enemy
  • Whom Can I Turn to?
  • Technicians: Methodologists, Statisticians, Computer Programmers
  • Sympathetic Professors
  • Sympathetic and Supportive Students
  • Self-Help Techniques
  • Psychiatrists and Other Types of Psychotherapists
  • Dissertation Therapists
  • Fellow Doctoral Students in the Same Boat
  • Guidelines for Forming and Sustaining a Dissertation-Support Group
  • Specific Considerations
  • Being Your Own Best Dissertation Friend

[edit] Chapter Eight: The Defense

  • The Defense: Formality or Serious Last Stage?
  • Sternberg’s Own Defense Ordeal
  • Preparation
  • Readiness on Substantive Issues
  • Packing the Dissertation for the Defense
  • The Defense State of Mind
  • Defense Committees’ Options and the All-or-Nothing Myth
  • Defense Dynamics and Alignments
  • During the Defense: What to Expect and How to Cope
  • Aftermath
  • A Failed Dissertation

[edit] Chapter Nine: Beyond the Dissertation—Surviving It and Exploiting It

  • Dissertation Damage
  • Survival Kit: Dissertation Myths vs. Realities
  • Getting Professional Mileage Out of Your Dissertation

[edit] Dissertation Damage

The ordeal of the dissertation course threatens postcompletion damage to the candidate in one or more of three different ways:

  • Loss of self-esteem, self-respect, and self-confidence; discussed in Chapter Seven
  • Postdissertation paralysis; countered through “getting back on the horse” as soon as possible
  • Disrupted and sometimes irrevocably ruptured intimate relationships with spouses, lovers, and close friends; discussed in Chapters Two and Seven.

[edit] Survival Kit: Dissertation Myths vs. Realities

“Most severe ongoing and postdissertation disturbances develop because the ABD loses perspective about his problem/project and overreacts in desperation. . . . One effective survival technique is neutralization of candidate- and dissertation-destructive myths.”
—pp. 215-216

[edit] Major Recurring Myths

  • “I’ve picked the wrong topic.”
  • “I picked a dull topic.”
  • “X had an easier dissertation than mine.”
  • “Everybody’s finished but me.”
  • “Y over at Berkeley scooped me.”
  • “The faculty is out to get me.”
  • “I’m ruined. The data aren’t panning out.”
  • “I’m all alone with an unshareable problem.”
  • “I’m selling my soul to the committee.”
  • “It won’t come in any good, anyway. Ph.D.s are driving taxis.”
  • “When it ends, my career troubles will be over.”
  • “Once it’s done, I’ll never look at the damn thing again.”

[edit] Getting Professional Mileage Out of Your Dissertation

  • Publishing It as a Book
  • Writing Articles or Book Chapters from the Dissertation
  • The Dissertation as an Important Credential for Teaching or Research Appointments
  • As an Entrée into the Speciality Area of the Thesis
  • The Dissertation/Doctorate as Essential for Eligibility for Tenure-Track Professorships
  • As a Model for Further Large Scholarly Projects in One’s Career
  • As a Source for Lectures for Years to Come
  • The Dissertation as Support and Validation of Self
  • The Dissertation as Changing One’s Life
  • Carrying On the Intellectual Tradition



[edit] Related Pages

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