Category Archives: Thesis

With a little help from my friends

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While I was writing my dissertation, I procrastinated in many ways. One of the most productive in hindsight was reading about the dissertation process. I got many books and read many articles. Not all of them were useful, at least not for my way of doing things (or avoiding doing them …). I read about the staggering number of students that never finish their thesis. I was shocked to realize that the thesis is the only academic endeavor in which you are suddenly thrown out of the support system students receive to succeed. Children have tutors. While you are working through your classes you have other students that support you in studying sessions and labs. You have deadlines for your term papers and exams. And then nothing. You are left with your advisor and a key to the library.

The issue is that the role of the advisor is to ensure that what you write is good. You must impress them. They can be very supportive, of course, and many of us are lucky enough to have very patient and sympathetic advisors, but even then, the psychology of the process is tricky. The proof is that the incidence of depression in dissertation scholars is very high. I will look for the statistics but believe me, it is high. And no wonder. If you are lucky enough to not have to work at the same time, you still have very little contact with other students and your social life is supposed to go to hell because you are, after all, writing a dissertation. You have no intermediate steps or strong deadlines, no team, no positive incentives. You must finish because after that you will have a life, you are promised, but all you can count on to support you in doing it is your level of commitment, your perseverance and the patience and more than a little help from your family and friends.

I think this is also why I never considered an academic life. I heard about the intense pressure to publish to get tenure, the lack of camaraderie among professors, the loneliness of it all. I wonder if it was always like that or if it must be like that. I also wonder what else could be done to help more students finish, even if they may never put a foot in a university for the rest of their lives. Coaches? Dissertation anonymous? Mandatory dissertation workshops? A dissertation whisperer? Guidelines that dispel the myths and sincerely address the potential hurdles? Or will the proverbial St Peter always have to admit PhDs in heaven because it counts as time served in hell?

Is it all about grit?

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Yesterday was the last day of my interdisciplinary dissertation workshop. We exchanged hugs and best wishes and promised to keep in touch. I think we will. After all, we were there for each other in a critical point of our dissertation processes. Something like that is not easy to forget. 

For me, it was the moment in which I went from writing in numberless ways the introduction to my second paper, to developing the main ideas and braving the gods by calling it a partial draft. For others it has been realizing that they don’t need to develop all their outline headings into full chapters. A particular aspect may be fascinating but at some point it is crucial to let it go and focus on what can get done within a reasonable period of time.

A friend once told me that “the best thesis is a finished thesis”. It may be as simple as that, but it is still a titanic effort.

Sometimes I wonder what writing a PhD thesis is really about. Formally, the final document will be there for posterity to show that the student became an “expert” on something and was able to add something new, no matter how tiny, to the academic literature. That in itself is a monumental task.

Yet, I have a growing conviction that the process in itself aims to achieve much more than that. It is a test of strength, obstinacy and perseverance. It ultimately provides grit. That at least has been my experience and I have a feeling that it is not only because I work full time and have a family.

Not everybody goes through the same painstaking learning process, of course. For some, writing is relatively easy and confidence issues are not overbearing. For others, writing a dissertation is a matter of methodical application of the tools associated with their discipline.

For the rest of us, there is always grit.