PhD Coaching Blog — Dissertation
End Dawdling and Graduate Sooner: Join my upcoming workshop series.
Coaching Dissertation Doctorate Good Enough PhD Thesis
Expecting to be dawdling over your thesis in 2024? To help you avoid that, I invite to join me for a four-week series of tutorials on how to write a “Good Enough” thesis, starting January 25th. Why? Well, did you know that the average thesis takes eight years to complete? I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks that PhD programs are excessively long and that doctoral students take too much time. In spite of the best of intentions, too many find themselves failing to reach the end of their studies, and there are probably several...
Your Opinion Doesn't Matter in Your PhD Thesis
Let me share that shocking news again. Your opinion doesn’t matter if you’re writing a thesis. Many doctoral candidates want to use their thesis as a platform for airing an opinion, to try to persuade everyone to agree with them. A thesis is all about providing evidence. It’s about reviewing the literature, conducting research, reporting the findings, and drawing conclusions. That’s conclusions based on the findings, not on your own biased opinions. When I break the news to candidates that they have to hold off presenting their own unsupported ideas, they often say: “But how do I present...
Endurance?
Coaching Dissertation Doctorate Mindset PhD Thesis Writing
Few things test endurance more than working on a doctoral thesis. This is a “self-portrait” that one of my clients sent to me to share with anyone who’s in the same boat as she is. Do you recognize yourself? This client has been working on her research topic for a long time. In fact, she’s written a book, and is a practitioner in her area of expertise as well. But it’s taking a long time to get the thesis written, and from time to time she gets weary, as you can tell. We often talk about the need to...
What's a PhD?? Here's one answer...
Matt Might has diagrammed the PhD this way in his brilliant Illustrated Guide to the PhD. I love it because he cleverly shows that doctoral research pushes beyond the edges of what is known, to discover new knowledge outside the boundaries of the human record. This is what examiners are looking for. In fact, they can't award the PhD unless you've demonstrated that you have made an original contribution to what is already known. You have to poke at the edge of human understanding and find your own Eureka! moment. And that's hard. You're in unchartered territory. You find yourself the world's...